Everywhere You Look – Rewind
Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to his edification. Romans 15:2 NASB 1977
Please – The wonderful thing about paradigms is that they help you make sense of the world. In fact, if you start discovering anomalies in your world—things that just don’t add up–paradigms offer useful solutions. You can claim that given more data the anomaly will be resolved. Or you can claim that the “facts” behind the anomaly are not really facts at all. They are mistakes. Or you can point out that all paradigms suffer from a case of internal myopia (the world is what the paradigm says it is) and so it really doesn’t matter which one you choose. All of these solutions have been offered in order to explain Paul’s “contradictory” teachings. But the problem isn’t a theoretical one. The problem is very practical. What gets under your skin doesn’t go away just because you think differently. Sometimes you have to scratch the itch.
Paradigms are supposed to make sense of the world. A paradigm that suggests Paul converted to a religious view that no longer upheld the expectation of Torah runs into great difficulty when it confronts Paul’s own claims about his life. Of course, it is possible to ignore these claims or to rewrite them so that they don’t appear Jewish, but it’s a problem. These sorts of problems vanish when we look at Paul through a different paradigm. If Paul is a Jewish rabbi living the life of a Jewish Pharisee as a follower of Yeshua HaMashiach, the Jewish Messiah, then his claims about his own conduct make perfect sense. But then we have to read his other statements differently.
“Let each of us please his neighbor” must be read in the context of rabbinic Jewish thought of the first century tempered by the teaching of the Messiah. “Please” doesn’t mean “Do what they want.” The Greek verb aréskō implies creating a positive relationship. It means, “make peace,” “reconcile.” Interestingly, it is rarely used in relation to one’s self. We are not to please ourselves. We are to deny ourselves in order to please others. Given Paul’s rabbinic background, what would it mean to please someone else? We don’t really have to guess. Paul tells us. Look that the next two verses. First we follow the example of Yeshua by denying our own desires in order to fulfill the will of the Father. Then we realize that “whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction.” And what might that be? For Paul that can only be the Tanakh, the final authority on making peace and reconciliation. “Whatever was written” means that we are to follow the instructions set down by the prophets. We have a guidebook to follow. But the point of following this guidebook is not our spiritual superiority. The point is to make peace and reconcile with our neighbors. By the way, that is precisely what Yeshua did. He followed the book in order to please us. The Tanakh makes no provision for tolerance, but it provides ample instruction for peace. The world wants a free pass. The Book calls for return and reconciliation. Everywhere you look, the New Testament proclaims the same message as the Tanakh. You just have to get into the right paradigm.
Topical Index: please, aréskō, peace, reconcile, paradigm, Romans 15:2
