Gutsy Love

"If anyone has the life of the world and observes his brother having need and shuts off his guts from him—how can the love of God reside in him?"—1 John 3:17

This unrefined translation allows us to understand more accurately and literally the phrases "the life of the world" and "shuts off his guts."

The Greek word used for life in "the life of the world" is bios, from which we get our prefix for words like biology, biography, biochemistry, and biosphere. Of the two words used for life in the New Testament this is by far the rarer. It means not only life but also the means for life, as we call one's income a living or livelihood. The widow who gave her last coin gave her whole bios, her savings. The prodigal son squandered his bios, his inheritance. The woman with a twelve-year flow of blood had spent her entire bios, her income, on physicians. Some have translated this phrase in 1 John as riches, but this is misleading, if not incorrect. The idea here is means of support or income, no matter how meager, as long as one has something to give. The New English Bible says it well: "enough to live on."

Bios is modified by "of the world." The world in John's writings means the fallen world system, which is hostile to God: "Stop loving the world and the things in the world! Whoever loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (bios), is not of the Father but is of the world" (1 John 2:18-11). If the Christian owns the goods of the world, which he [or she] is not to love, he or she must share them with a needy sister or brother, whom he is to love; otherwise, he "shuts off his guts from him."

Compassion
The word here translated as "guts" is one of the most crudely descriptive and interesting words in the New Testament. It means the inward parts, bowels or viscera, especially the liver, heart, and lungs, as in Acts 1:18 when Judas’ bowels gushed out at his death. It can also be used figuratively for impulsive passion or strong compassion for someone. It is used for God’s mercies (Luke 1:78), for the compassion of the people of God (Colossians 3:12; 2 Corinthians 7:15; Philemon 7), for Paul’s love for the Philippian Christians, "I long for you in the bowels of Christ Jesus" (Philemon 1:8). Paul also uses the word for Onesimus, a runaway slave, calling him "my guts," probably with the Hebrew idea of viscera as womb (rehem), i.e., Onesimus is Paul’s spiritual offspring. (An ancient Syriac translation rendered guts as "child.")

Before we sneer at this expression as a fatuous notion of the pre-scientific, we should examine our own speech more carefully. It is used like our word "heart," but it is more intense. To the people of the New Testament era, the viscera or bowels was the seat of emotions, the total personality at the deepest level. It referred to the change in body chemistry and the sensations that often accompany extreme emotion, as when one reacts to frustration in love. "I feel empty inside without her," or to revulsion, "He makes me sick to my stomach," or to excitement, "I have butterflies in my stomach." In classical Greek it was used for courage, exactly like our colloquialism, "he has guts." To say that someone "reacted on a gut level" is to use the same image that John employs here.

But, unlike English, Greek has a verb from this same root meaning to have bowels for someone, to have compassion or strong feelings for someone.

This verb appears only in the synoptic gospels, and it is never used for anyone but Jesus, except in the parables of the merciful lord who had compassion for his servant (Matthew 18:27), of the father who had compassion for his wayward son (Luke 15:20), and of the good Samaritan who had compassion for the wounded traveler (Luke10:33). This compassion always resulted in action: The merciful lord forgave his servant and cancelled his debt; the father of the prodigal celebrated the son's return and gave him gifts; the good Samaritan dressed the wounds of the robbed Jew and paid for his lodging until he was well.

In the remaining seven instances when the verb is used (and twice in parallels), its subject is Jesus. He is said to have had compassion or guts for a leper (Mark 1:41), two blind men (Matthew 20:34), a demoniac (Mark 9:23), a widow whose only son had just died (Luke 7:13), and three times for the crowds who followed him (Matthew 9:36, parallel Mark 6:34; Matthew 14:14; Matthew 15:32, parallel Mark 8:2). Again, this compassion always resulted in concrete action: The leper was cleansed, the blind men were healed, the demoniac was exorcised, the widow's son was raised from the dead. When Jesus had compassion for the crowd, he healed some of them, he fed 4,000 of them, and he prayed that they would be evangelized, for they were "as sheep without a shepherd."

Therefore, shutting one's guts off from someone means both restricting one's emotions, one's compassion for a needy sister or brother, and doing nothing about that need (see James 2:15 ff). It is similar to the expression in Deuteronomy 18:74: "You shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand from your peer brother, but you shall open your hand wide to him." Gutsy love demands compassion and action.

This is illustrated by Jesus' death as well as by his life and teaching: Verse 16, which immediately precedes our text, says, "In this we have known love, that he gave up his life for us, and we ought to give up our lives for the brothers." Jesus' death was both an atonement for our sins and an example of how we are to love others. Here is John's argument: If Jesus Christ gave up his life to show us love, how much more ought we to be willing to give up our lives for one another? And, if we are to give our lives for others, how can we refuse to share our possessions when one of them has a need? And, if we refuse to share our goods with others, how can the love of God reside in us? Impossible! "He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1 John 4:30).

We must do more than understand the apostle's argument; we must translate it into action, and this has to do with the phrase we have not yet discussed, "and observes his brother in need." The word used here for observe is not random, fleeting glimpse, but the attentive, lingering observation; and it is carefully used with this meaning in John's writings (John 2:23; John 6:19, 68; John 7:3; John 9:8; John 10:12). As it is used here, it means the careful examination of the needy sister or brother's situation; however, the significance of the word depends less on etymology than on history.

Observing people in need was easier in John's day than today. Although the Roman Empire had a welfare program of sorts ("bread and circuses"), social institutions for the needy were unknown. The poor, old, the lame, the blind, the orphans, the deformed, the mentally ill were out in the streets begging or, if fortunate, they were cared for in private homes. Medicine was primitive, so those who were disfigured by war, work or disease were permanently handicapped and dependent. Although there were some isolated urban palaces and latifundia (great rural estates), the haves and the have-nots were more likely to have daily contact with each other than in the modern world. Rome's population was predominantly composed of slaves and relatively poor freedmen. Galilee, John's home, had similar conditions; wherever Jesus went the crippled, the demoniacs, the poor were present. Since these conditions were characteristic of the entire empire, John's readers knew what he was talking about, for they observed people in physical need daily.

Our situation is different: Many Christians intentionally live in suburbs to remove themselves and their children from contact with needy people. If they go to the cities at all, they ride in air-conditioned, sound-conditioned, smell-conditioned, touch-conditioned cars along highways far from the poorer sections. Though our social pariahs may be better cared-for than in the first century, they are hidden from our view and our love by institutions. Our culture prevents us from gutsy compassion by quarantining the needy. Philip Hater, in his book The Pursuit Of Loneliness, calls this quarantining the "toilet assumption." It is "the notion that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties, unwanted complexities and obstacles will disappear if they are removed from the immediate field of vision. We throw the aged and the mentally ill into institutional holes where they cannot be seen. Our approach to social problems is to decrease their visibility." Because of this "toilet assumption," many suppose their social responsibility ends when taxes are withheld from their paycheck.

Also, the "I-gave-at-the-office" mentality is often translated into "our-church-supports-our-denominational-charities" mentality, which allows Christians to soothe their social conscience without getting their hands dirty or their lives involved in human need. There is a difference between giving a cup of cold water in Jesus' name and donating a water fountain to the church rest home.

Even mass media, bombarding us with news of human suffering, fosters a glib attitude to suffering: It offers us no way to respond. Watching a Vietnamese child run hysterically with her clothes aflame from bombing, or reading about a baby bitten to death by rats, may move us to tears but rarely to action. We seem so removed, so helpless. Such compassionate inactivity spreads a contagion of calluses, cataracts, and constricted guts. This comfortable modern isolation from human suffering is a major obstacle to obedience of this biblical command: How can we open our guts to someone whom we have never seen? What is the modern equivalent of observing a brother or sister in need?

Implicit in the biblical idea of love is the deliberate extension of ourselves to others. The incarnation, the supreme example of love, was an intentional plunge of the Lord of glory into this globe of human suffering—at enormous cost (Philemon 2:6-11). Observing the needy and opening our guts means looking beyond the immediate social milieu, understanding the sociological and political dynamics of suffering today, and analyzing the implications of our actions. Do we want to live within view of our suffering brothers? Do we want to have low-cost housing in our neighborhoods? How do we stand on the issues of open housing? Amnesty? Economic boycotts? Welfare spending? Military spending? Do we visit pockets of need like our convalescent homes, hospitals, halfway houses, mental institutions, prisons? Do we have guts enough to expose our guts to the needy? Listen once more to John as he charges us in the very next verse: "Let us put our love not into deed and talk, but into deeds and make it real" (1 John 3:18, C.H. Dodd).

Dennis MacDonald was a frequent contributor to The Post-American, the predecessor to Sojourners, when this article appeared.