Choosing One's Own Way

Choosing One’s Own Way

Ephesians 4:30-32

This has long been one of my favorite Scripture passages.  My first introduction to these verses came through a church choir anthem by T. Tertius Noble.  I fell in love with the music, then with the words.

In a way, this is an enlargement of the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  It’s interesting how many of the world’s religions profess some version of this axiom. 

Paul’s list of behaviors to avoid is all about negative ways of communicating with others: bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander—attitudes we do not want people to display towards us.  I know I don’t like to hear angry words directed at me—even if I deserve them.  My first reaction is to display anger in return, and that isn’t going to make the situation better.

On the other hand, Paul’s list of positive behaviors—kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness—are ways I want people to interact with me, so that is how I must treat them.  Paul is expressing once again the Golden rule, “Show to others the positive behaviors you would like to have them show to you, and avoid those negative behaviors you do not want to have them show to you.”

Fair enough.  We can’t expect people to interact with us positively if we are not positive towards them.

People trapped in negative situations most often behave negatively, either towards those causing the negative situation, or to those caught in that situation with them.  It’s natural.  It’s what we would probably do in their place.  Dare I say it’s human nature?

I can’t imagine a more negative situation than the concentrations camps of World War II.  The atmosphere was not simply negative but inhumane.  We will never know the full extent of the atrocities committed in those camps in the name of racial purity.  Those who suffered through imprisonment there had—and have—every right to be angry about their mistreatment.  But listen to the words of Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing:  the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To choose one’s own way.  No one can make us behave positively—or negatively.  It’s our choice how we will live our lives, how we will interact with others, whether we will choose to be one who comforts or one who passes on the anger which has been displayed to us.

Jesus Christ came to show us what it means to be completely human.  We see in his life how we are supposed to live: comforting, caring, repaying evil with good, doing unto others what we would have done to us—above all, forgiving rather than passing on anger. 

This is how we must live, not only because, as Paul says, to live in the negative grieves God’s Holy Spirit—as serious an offense as that is—but because we must treat others as we ourselves would be treated.

Is it easy?  Of course not!  It’s much easier to be negative in negative situations.  That’s why, as Frankl says, there were so few comforters, so few sharers.  But to comfort, to share, to be tenderhearted and kind—to forgive!  That’s the real human nature.