Sixth Sunday After Trinity

‘You don’t have to be nice, but do try to be kind.’ This was advice given to me at my first week at theological college, in the opening address by the chaplain. He addressed the new students and told us, ‘you don’t need to be nice, but do try to be kind.’ Those words have stayed with my ever since, and I think they may be quite profound. It’s not an easy distinction to make, between niceness and kindness. We don’t, after all, come across very many monuments that say, ‘Ethel Johnson: she wasn’t very nice, but she was kind.’ And yet we realise that they are not exactly the same thing. So that might be an exercise for us to ponder. Our reading from Wisdom has given us the idea of kindness, and reflecting on those words of a chaplain at Westcott some 18 or so years ago, we could ask ourselves what is the difference between niceness and kindness, being nice and being kind, and why is one more important than the other? Perhaps part of the answer is that niceness can be cloying, that it can be a kind of compliance and rubbing along; that niceness can be rather undemanding, whereas kindness has to show itself in action. Niceness, perhaps, might be unjust, or at least be able to ignore injustice. Whereas kindness would not be unjust. But I suggest that you think it through for yourself: what’s the difference between kindness and niceness, and why is one more important than the other? 

Another significant angle is that kindness is a distinctly biblical virtue. In 1 Corinthians 13, love is described as kind. And in the list of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians we find kindness. But niceness is not a biblical virtue. And here in Wisdom, and elsewhere, God is described as kind, but God is not described as nice. A great deal of theology, and experience of the spiritual life, rests on that distinction. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing, apart from the shock of God being described as kind in our passage from the book of Wisdom, is the association between God’s kindness and God’s power and authority. I think that tells us something actually very profound about power and authority, just as much as it tells us about kindness. That those who have power and authority, or the ways in which power and authority can be exercised, fall into two groups. There are those for whom power and authority are naturally the basis, the occasion, for kindness. And there are those (just look at some current world leaders) who could not imagine that kindness belongs alongside power and authority. I think it gets rather close to the heart of what the good exercise of power and authority might look like to ask that question: are they being exercised with kindness? It’s a sort of litmus test. And that is exactly what the author of the book of Wisdom tells us about God’s power: 

Although you are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness,
and with great forbearance you govern us;
for you have power to act whenever you choose.

Through such works you have taught your people
that the righteous must be kind,
and you have filled your children with good hope, 
because you give repentance for sins. 

I’ll make a theological point about that: we’re used to hearing that in Jesus, in the incarnation, God laid power and authority and majesty aside, and was constricted, emptied. I think that is, in fact, wrong. Jesus is not God curtailed. Jesus is how God is. Theologians, I think, sometimes imagine they’re making a very radical point when they talk about the incarnation as an emptying or stripping away of who God is. But I say that there is a yet more radical point: that there was, and always is, for instance, humility in God. Or, as our passage has it, kindness. Far from the incarnation being an abridgement of God, it shows us the marvellous truth of God’s eternal nature: that God is always kind. That the divine majesty and power and authority are not like those of a tyrant, not absolute in a way that has to be set aside for Jesus to be who Jesus is. But rather, everything that we see in Jesus, and here, especially including his kindness, is a revelation of exactly what God is like. 

If you want to read more about kindness I recommend the essay on the kindness of God in the book of that name by Cambridge’s own Janet Soskice - a teacher to me, and to the vicar, and to untold many others, and a huge inspiration to us all. She points out the etymological entanglement, the story about the origins of words, that kindness is bound up with a sense of belonging together, being of the same kind - humankind - and of being the same family: the word kind and kin being of the same root, and entangled. But I will leave that to Professor Soskice’s excellent chapter. 

The Gospel passage about the wheat and the tares, or the wheat and the weeds, relates to kindness: the Gospel reading and the other readings typically go together. And I think the main story of kindness here is that the farmer, who we’re told stands for God in the parable, is kind to the wheat in not letting the wheat suffer by pulling up the weeds too soon. Some point the idea in interpreting this parable that we’re all a mixed bag: we’re all a mixture of wheat and weeds, and that God will show kindness to all by making us whole and healthy and holy and plucking out the weeds from our own hearts. Well, it seems to me that this is not the primary message of the parable, but we can, from other scriptural sources, say that the kindness of God does lead to God tending us as a gardener, and the slow process of weeding and turning us from evil and making us whole. 

So I think I need to say something about the Gospel passage and the idea that the principal kindness there is  in sparing the wheat, but we can also talk about the kindness of God in being a gardener to every person. But I want to put the stress, and I want to end, with this perennial call to kindness thrown up by the reading from Wisdom. And to say that kindness is no minor virtue. And we see that indeed inasmuch as kindness is characteristic of love itself, and since kindness is characteristic of God. I wonder what it would be like to revise some of the ways in which we talked, and actually put kindness close to the heart of what it means to be a Christian, and to be a human being. 

I’ve talked also about the kindness of God being shown in Jesus, and this being no curtailment in the incarnation, but actually the true revelation of who and how God is. And I want to end by suggesting that so much of what we want to talk about of moral and spiritual progress could be summed up very productively under the heading of kindness. And especially that whatever positions or opportunities of power or authority or influence come our way, however large or small, a great test for how we inhabit those positions and opportunities is whether we use them as opportunities for kindness. 

Through such works you have taught your people
that the righteous must be kind,
and you have filled your children with good hope, 

because you give repentance for sins. 

Although you are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness,
and with great forbearance you govern us. 

Thanks be to God.