Patience

Reading these passages

Patience, in ordinary English, is mostly about other people. It is what you run out of in a queue, or with a child asking the same question for the fourth time. Almost none of the passages on this page are about that.

Read the list again and notice what is being endured. The trying of faith. Tribulation. A race. The prosperity of people who deserve less than they have. A harvest that has not come in. Only one verse here — James on being slow to wrath — concerns irritation at a person, and even that one is about speech rather than tolerance.

What the rest describe is endurance under circumstance, held over time, usually while waiting for God to do something he has not yet done. That is a different virtue from forbearance, and it explains why the vocabulary is so heavy. Nobody would call queuing a fruit of the Spirit.

Two words, and English has one

Greek distinguishes what English does not. Makrothymia is long-temperedness — patience with people, the restraint that does not retaliate. Hypomone is remaining-under: bearing up beneath a weight that is not going to be lifted soon. The first is about others; the second is about conditions.

The King James renders the first as longsuffering, which is a better word than anything available now because it admits what is involved. It appears in the fruit of the Spirit: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith.

The second is what James and Hebrews and Romans are talking about, and it is generally rendered patience, which is far too mild. When James says the trying of your faith worketh patience, the word is hypomone, and what is being produced is not a pleasant disposition. It is load-bearing capacity.

Let it finish

James makes a demand that is easy to read past because the sentence is short: But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

Patience is given a job here and told to complete it. The instruction is not to be patient; it is to let the endurance run to the end of its own process, which implies it can be interrupted — that a person can cut the thing short and end up with less than the full result.

Perfect in both places translates teleios, which does not mean flawless. It means finished, brought to its intended end, the word used of a grown animal or a completed building. James is not promising moral perfection. He is describing something arriving at full size, and saying the process that gets it there is the unpleasant one described in the verse before.

And the verse before is the one people quote at each other and then resent: My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations. The verb is count — an accounting term, to reckon or evaluate. James does not ask anyone to feel joy. He asks them to assess the situation a particular way, which is a demand on the judgement rather than on the emotions.

Waiting is the hard part

The psalm gives the most specific instruction on the page, and it is aimed at a particular kind of impatience: Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.

The problem is not delay in the abstract. It is watching somebody else get away with something, and doing well out of it, while you wait for a justice that has not arrived. That is a narrower and more recognisable complaint than patience-in-general, and the psalm returns to it for another thirty verses.

Fret not translates a verb whose root means to burn or grow hot. It is not describing anxiety so much as a slow heat — the state of being inwardly inflamed by an unfairness you can do nothing about. The psalmist knows exactly what he is asking to be set down.

Ecclesiastes states the principle as a comparison and, characteristically, declines to say how long the wait is: Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Notice the opposite of patience here is not haste — it is pride. The person who cannot wait is described as someone with an inflated sense of what he is owed and when.

A race, not a wait

Hebrews changes the picture entirely, and it is the one image on this page in which patience is strenuous: let us run with patience the race that is set before us.

The word again is hypomone, and the race is a agon — a contest, the root of the English agony. Running with endurance is not the same as waiting with composure. Nothing here is passive, and the instruction just before it is athletic housekeeping: let us lay aside every weight, which is what a runner does before a race rather than what a sufferer does during one.

Paul is closer to Hebrews than to the psalm when he sets the three together: Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer. All three are present participles in Greek — ongoing activities rather than states achieved — and the middle one concedes that the tribulation has not stopped while the other two are happening.

And Galatians supplies the timescale that makes sense of all of it: And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. A harvest cannot be hurried, and the interval between sowing and reaping is not a delay in the process. It is the process. Which is the difference between patience as these passages use it and patience as the word is now generally heard: one is waiting for something to be over, and the other is what the thing is made of.

Who is watching

The sentence about the race begins with a clause that is usually read as encouragement and is stranger than that: Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us.

The cloud is not anonymous. Hebrews has just spent a chapter listing them by name — Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rahab, and then a rush of unnamed people who were tortured, stoned, sawn asunder, and who wandered in sheepskins. The chapter says of them, twice and deliberately, that they did not receive what was promised. They died still waiting.

So the witnesses surrounding the runner are not spectators who finished the course and are now cheering from the stands. They are people whose own endurance was never rewarded in their lifetime, and the argument the writer makes from them is not that it worked out. It is that they kept going anyway.

That is a hard sort of encouragement, and it is the appropriate one for this page. Every other passage here promises an end — a harvest in due season, a thing better at its finish than its start, patience completing its work. Hebrews holds up a crowd of people for whom the end did not arrive on schedule, and asks the reader to run in front of them.

The word for witnesses is martyres, which had not yet narrowed to mean someone killed for their faith but was well on the way, and this chapter is part of how it got there. The double sense fits: they are witnesses in the sense of having testified, and witnesses in the sense of watching.

Proverbs, as usual, gets there in a line and outranks the obvious: He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. The comparison was provocative in a culture that measured men by cities taken, and it is doing the same work as Ecclesiastes — putting the patient man above the impressive one, and using the impressive one as the unit of measurement.