A Gentle Answer: Our 'Secret Weapon' in an Age of Us Against Them

by Scott Sauls

To the degree that we have renounced pushiness and embraced gentleness, we are making the real Jesus visible in our world today—which is success, no matter what else might happen to us.

Therefore, gentleness isn’t a strategy he resorts to now and then. It isn’t one card he can lay down on the table. Gentleness is just who he is at the most profound level of his being.

While true faith is filled with holy fire, it is a fire that is meant for refining and healing, as opposed to dividing and destroying. If our faith ignites hurt rather than healing upon the bodies, hearts, and souls of other people—even those who treat us unkindly—then something has gone terribly wrong with our faith.

In our current cultural moment, outrage has become more expected than surprising, more normative than odd, more encouraged than discouraged, more rewarded than rejected. Outrage undergirds each day’s breaking news. It is part of the air that we breathe—a native language, a sick helping of emotional food and drink to satisfy our hunger for taking offense, shaming, and punishing.

Because Jesus has covered all of our offenses, we can be among the least offensive and least offended people in the world. This is the way of the gentle answer.

A Gentle Answer is not a step-by-step how-to guide for becoming gentle. Instead, it attempts to answer the question, “What must happen in and around us so that we become the kind of people who offer a gentle answer?”

every single Christian is a hypocrite—is the whole basis for our Christian faith.

Christianity doesn’t have much to say to people, whether religious or secular, who build their lives and identities upon the idea of being good and virtuous.

While it is fair to call out Christians for hypocrisy, the hypocrisy in no way negates Christianity, but rather establishes it.

We are told Jesus looks at the rich man, loves him, and says to him that if he really wants to live, if he wants to be rich in the truest and most enduring sense of the word, he should sell all he has, give it to the poor, and then follow Jesus. Jesus does not offer this prescription to the young man because he has too much money, but because his money has too much of him.

Perhaps greater works are the works done in our own lives through Jesus’ strength, such as loving one person for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, as long as we both shall live. Perhaps greater works include saying no to a doctor’s recommendation to abort a child with special needs and yes to raising and loving that child. Perhaps greater works include pursuing understanding, reconciliation, justice, peace, and friendship with people from another race, culture, political persuasion, economic group, or generation whom you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get along with outside of Christ. Perhaps greater works include staying at the same church for years or even decades, even during seasons of difficulty or decline. Or perhaps greater works include responding to injurious treatment with a gentle answer that turns away wrath.

“In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said (John 16:33 NIV). “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12), and “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have,” wrote the apostle Paul (Phil. 1:29–30).

Somewhere along the way, we may have wrongly mistaken “being nice”—a popular strategy for avoiding social awkwardness or rejection—for the biblical fruit of gentleness.

When we become less tethered to this world because we have become more tethered to Jesus Christ and the world to come, we can be certain that, ultimately, we are giving up nothing and will receive everything.

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis reflected on how the future that Christ promised to us serves as our basis and resource for sharing in the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings today. “Heaven, once attained,” he says, “will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”

If I dream that a loved one has died, for example, and then wake up to realize she is in the kitchen eating breakfast and reading a magazine, I will walk up to her and hold her with a tighter, lengthier embrace than I would have otherwise. In the same way, in the new heaven and new earth, each one of us will “wake up” with relief and rejoicing to a new day—a day in which there will be no more death, mourning, crying, or pain. For the old order of things will have passed away (along with opposition, violence, and persecution), and everything made new (Rev. 21:1–8). In a mysterious way, our enjoyment of heaven will be that much sweeter to us, not in spite of the fact that we suffered, but because of the fact that we suffered. We will wake up from the nightmare into an everlasting, glorious new day.

It is because we have been treated with such kindness, such grace, such gentleness that we ought to be the most difficult people in the world to offend.

For if Christians don’t go first in offering a gentle answer to those who oppose us, can we ever expect those who oppose us to make a similar move? And if Christians don’t take the first step to humble ourselves and become less testy, less defensive, less easily offended, and less vindictive when we experience milder forms of opposition and criticism than the global norm, who will?

As someone once said, “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything onto which it is poured.”

Anne Lamott has said that nursing a grudge against someone is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

In our current culture of outrage and us-against-them, what does it mean for us to be angry and sin not? We can take a deeper look at this concept of fighting in a way that doesn’t compromise or negate the fruit of gentleness, but rather upholds it.

Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference.”

One of the most important things is how essential it is to position ourselves to regularly receive critique from those around us—especially those who know us best, such as colleagues, friends, and family members—and also to receive it humbly, with gratitude, and with resoluteness to change. Our character must matter more to us than our reputations. We must learn to love the light, even when it exposes the darkness in us, as opposed to hiding from the light and shielding ourselves from exposure.

Booker T. Washington is quoted as saying, “I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”

“As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek. 33:11).