Christians are called to show good kindness, modelled on God’s kindness. It is a compassion which doesn’t pay things forward, which isn’t interested in personal outcome, which isn’t predicated on the worthiness of the recipient, or their intellectual affinity with us. It is a love which tramples boundaries, which upends expectations, which hands a tunic to a coat-demanding-enemy, which turns the cheek, which shows favour to the evil and the good, just like the sunshine of God’s love, and the rainfall of his care.

Redefinition is definitely on-trend in our culture. Words, phrases, and concepts are generally fluid, and are often the tools of a non-democratic process which draws new lines between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ at will. Other linguistic changes seem to simply happen, usage and over-usage leading to their decommissioning and devaluation. One of those words is ‘kindness’, and the shift which has taken place here is symptomatic of wider changes in society and community. In this post I want to probe kindness a little bit, suggesting some subtle ways in which our expectations around this word have altered.

Random acts and covenant kindness

Over the past decade or so our culture and, to a certain extent, the church have bought in to the idea of kindness as an isolated act, as a randomised impulse that ought to be acted on. Paying forward a coffee, passing someone a handwritten note of appreciation, calling someone out of the blue and asking how they are, have become popular ways of showing affection and concern. For many people this is how kindness is now universally coined – it is a brief burst of benevolence, a momentary debit on our energies, resources, or social awkwardness, a credit to our sense of altruism and engagement.

Whatever benefit such acts accrue, they fall far short of how the Bible frames kindness, with its family likeness to ‘grace’. In Scriptural terms, kindness is inherently relational and essentially covenantal, it bespeaks commitment and a long-haul mindset.

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