Patience. I needed it badly on the occasion when I waited for over two hours to get through to the airline we were flying on because of a malfunction with their online booking system, then had to give up and accept a callback five days later. The Greek word for patience is makrothumia. Its meaning in the pagan culture was to put up something we cannot control. Patience simply reflects the blunt truth of having to put up with whatever is out there.
The Greeks believed that everything is determined by fate, and there is nothing we can do about it. I guess that includes Westjet. In the Old Testament, however, the meaning in the Hebrew equivalent word is different. Patience means to refrain from becoming angry in the face of just cause. It is defined first of all as a character attribute of God, rather than of people — of the God who repeatedly refrains from exercising his righteous wrath on disobedient men and women. God could punish us but chooses not to. That is what his patience means.
God’s patience thus reveals his grace and mercy. Patience is therefore translated as “slow to anger” in Exod. 34:6, where God reveals his own attributes to Moses: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger...”
So what does this teach us? Patience is both a choice and an attitude. It is how we respond to wrongs done to us, whether by people or by circumstances. Patience is active, not passive, and its exercise delivers us from the victim mentality I admit I was entertaining while waiting on the phone all that time.
The greatest example of patience is Jesus on the cross, choosing to forgive those who crucified him. Jesus was not the victim, but the Victor. Patience realizes that God is working out a greater purpose and, after these temporary sufferings, even if we never see justice on earth, he has an eternal inheritance for us.
In the parable of the two debtors, Jesus adds a new dimension to our understanding of God’s patience. The man owing an amount impossible to repay nevertheless appeals to the patience of the king. Though he will never be able to repay, the king’s patience results in the debt being forgiven. Jesus understands the depth of the grace of God which overcomes a debt impossible to pay. Yet even here Jesus gives us a warning. If we, who have received the benefit of God’s patience, are not prepared to exercise that same patience toward others, we will find ourselves in prison.
This is at the heart of what patience means as a fruit of the Spirit. God requires us to be slow to anger, to overlook the faults of others, to forgive debts impossible to repay, in short, to show the same mercy he showed toward us. This patience requires the enduring of the wrongs and imperfections of others. It does not endorse their sins, but sees the bigger picture and is willing to forgive. Patience is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. It is the power which accompanies love, for the very first thing said about love in 1 Cor. 13:4 is that “love is patient.” With the same patience God has treated us, we treat others. I guess I’ll have to remember that when I take that callback next week.
