Love Is Not Provoked

The Greek word Paul reaches for here is paroxynetai — from the verb paroxynō, which means to sharpen, to incite, to stir to anger. The English word paroxysm — a sudden outburst of emotion or activity — comes from the same root. The picture Paul is drawing is of a man whose anger has been sharpened to a point so fine that the smallest touch sets him off. Love does not live in that condition. Love is not the kind of person whose temper is on a hair trigger.

A word about translation. The NASB has is not provoked. The older King James added the word easily — is not easily provoked — and put it in italics to mark it as the translator’s addition. The Greek does not say easily. But the easily is doing real work, because Paul himself was once provoked — paroxysmos, the related noun — by the idols of Athens (Acts 17:16), and that provocation was righteous. The believer can be moved by what should move him. A Christian whose blood does not stir at real wickedness has not become spiritual; he has become numb. What Paul forbids in 13:5 is not the holy anger that has a place in the believer’s life. What Paul forbids is the petty irritability of a man who flares at the small wrongs of daily life — the friend who is late, the spouse who forgot, the child who repeated the same mistake, the driver who cut him off, the brother in the church whose comment hit a sore spot the brother did not even know was there. That hair-trigger is what love has put down.

What was happening in Corinth

Paul had been writing all letter to a church that was sharpened to a point.

The Corinthians flared. They flared at one another over which teacher was the best (chapters 1–4). They flared in the courts, suing each other in front of pagan judges (chapter 6). They flared in their gatherings, with the wealthy taking the supper before the slaves arrived (chapter 11), the gifted talking over the less-gifted in worship (chapter 14). They flared at Paul, the very apostle who had founded their congregation, deciding that they had outgrown him (4:18–19). They flared at the weak among them, eating meat in front of brothers whose consciences were not yet free (chapter 8). Whatever was sharp about the Corinthians, it stayed sharp because they were unwilling to lay the sharpness down.

Underneath every one of those flares was the same engine we named in the last chapter — the engine of seeking-its-own. A man who is oriented toward himself will be provoked the moment his orientation is crossed. The teacher he attached to is criticized — he flares. The neighbor who owes him does not pay — he flares. The gift he was about to use is delayed because someone else’s gift takes the floor — he flares. Provocation in the believer is the alarm bell of a self that has been touched. The Corinthians’ alarms were going off every hour, because the self they had been organizing their lives around was being touched every hour by the brothers around them.

Paul never quotes 13:5 back to them inside the body of the letter, because 13:5 is the body of the letter, restated as a doctrine of love. The whole correction Paul has been writing — do not divide, do not sue, do not despise the weak, do not lord your gift, do not eat ahead of your brother — is the same correction said in eight different costumes. Stop flaring at one another. The love I am writing about does not. The Corinthians needed to be told.

The God who is rightly slow to anger and is rightly provoked at the right time

Here the theological balance is precise, and it is worth slowing down for, because a careless reading of love is not provoked can produce a Christian who has confused holy anger with petty temper and lost both.

God is described, throughout Scripture, as slow to anger. We met the phrase already in the chapter on patience — erek apayim, long of nose, the long fuse. That long-tempered God is the same God who, again and again in the Old Testament, was provoked — the word used is the same paroxynō family in the Greek translations of the Hebrew — by the idolatry of His people:

…how often they rebelled against Him in the wilderness and grieved Him in the desert! Again and again they tempted God, and pained the Holy One of Israel.

Psalm 78:40–41 (NASB)

The Hebrew there does not use the same word as 1 Corinthians 13:5 — Hebrew has its own vocabulary for divine anger — but the idea travels. God’s anger is real. His patience is not the absence of anger; His patience is the slowness of His real anger, and the slowness is for our sake, making room for sinners to turn (2 Peter 3:9). When the slowness has been pressed too far and the rebellion is not repented of, the anger arrives, and the anger is just. God’s anger is not the hair-trigger temper of a small-souled man. God’s anger is the right response of perfect holiness to actual wickedness, held back for as long as His patience can hold it, and finally released only when the holiness can wait no longer.

Christ embodied the same combination in His earthly life. He was moved — paroxynō’s cousin verb is used of His indignation at the disciples for keeping children away from Him (Mark 10:14, NASB renders it He was indignant). He was indignant in the temple when the house of prayer had been turned into a marketplace, and He drove the money-changers out with a whip of cords (John 2:13–17). He turned on Peter and said get behind Me, Satan when Peter, well-meaning, tried to talk Him out of the cross (Matthew 16:23). Christ was capable of holy anger. He used it. He used it at the right times, against the right things, for the right reasons. He was not numb.

And in the moments when He had every right to flare at petty offense — when the soldiers spat in His face, when the high priest had Him struck on the cheek for answering plainly, when the crowd that had just shouted Hosanna now shouted crucify Him, when Pilate handed Him over to be beaten — He did not flare. He stood. He answered when answering served the truth, and He kept silent when silence served the truth, and the paroxynō that any other man would have shown He did not show, because the love that does not seek its own is also the love that does not flash with temper at what touches it. Peter watching Him learned the lesson and later wrote it down:

…and while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously.

1 Peter 2:23 (NASB)

Did not revile in return. That is the standard. Not silence in the face of evil — Christ spoke clearly when speaking clearly served the Father. But no return of reviling. No matching the heat of the room. No giving the abuser the satisfaction of the flare he was hoping for. The Lord whose patience is the longest in the universe was also the Lord whose hair-trigger temper never existed, because there was no self in Him for the trigger to defend.

From the orientation, the flare

The last chapter named the silent self-orientation that has been running underneath the believer’s whole life. This chapter takes up the predictable outcome of that orientation. A man who is oriented toward himself will be provoked the moment the orientation is touched. Take away the self-seeking, and the provocations begin to lose their power. Leave the self-seeking in place, and no amount of self-control can keep the flares from happening.

That is why the cure for petty irritability is not, in the end, more anger management. Anger management treats the symptom. The disease is what the anger is defending. The Christian who has spent years trying not to flare and is still flaring is a Christian whose self has not yet been laid down. The provocations are touching something, and the something is still alive in him. The remedy is not to muzzle the temper. The remedy is to let the Lord do, in him, the deeper work of unseating the self the temper has been guarding. When the self has come down off its throne, the temper has nothing to guard, and the flare-ups quietly stop on their own. Not seeking its own and not provoked are not coincidentally adjacent in Paul’s list. The first is the cause; the second is the effect.

What it looks like

Freedom from being provoked looks like a teenage girl whose friend has just canceled plans for the third weekend in a row, and who, instead of firing off the resentful text she had drafted in her head, sends back all good, love you, we’ll catch up soon, and means it. The text was for her. The reply was for her friend.

It looks like a high-school boy in a basketball game who gets fouled hard by a player who has been talking trash all evening, and who gets up, hands the ball to the referee, and walks to the line to shoot his free throws as if the trash talk had not happened. The walking on is the form. The next conversation he will have with that player, at the end of the game, will be a calm one.

It looks like a teenager whose parent has just said something embarrassing in front of his friends, and whose first move is not to roll his eyes, not to snap back, not to walk away in a huff. He laughs, he answers the question, he carries on. The friends will respect him for the laugh more than they would have respected him for the eye-roll.

It looks like a high-school student whose teacher has just accused her, unfairly, of something she did not do, and whose response is the calm sentence — that was not me, but I can see why it looked that way; I am happy to help you find out who it was. The teacher does not get the satisfaction of the explosion she was bracing for. The injustice gets corrected without anyone losing their temper.

It looks like a young person who reads, on her social media, a comment from someone she does not even know, criticizing something she posted, and who deletes the impulse to respond, leaves the comment alone, and goes back to her homework. The comment was the trigger. The not-pulling was the discipline.

It looks like a teenage boy whose dating relationship has just hit the first hard conversation, and whose girlfriend has said something that hurt, and whose first move is not to defend himself, not to fire back, not to win the argument. His first move is the silent breath, the slowing down, the question what is she actually asking me? The fight that another boy would have started, he has not started. The relationship is being built on what he has refused to do.

It looks like a teenage girl whose younger brother has, for the fifth time, broken something of hers, and who, instead of the explosion her brother is bracing for, says quietly it is okay, it was just a thing, we can fix it. The brother has been bracing for a flare he has experienced often enough to count on. The not-flare is a small, daily gospel.

It looks like a Christian in the congregation who, when a brother says something theologically clumsy in Bible class — something that, on a different day, would have set him off — sits with it, asks a clarifying question, and does not need to be the one who corrects it loudly in front of the whole class. The correction can come later, in private, in a tone that builds rather than burns.

It looks like Christ. The One who, when Peter cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant in the garden, picked up the ear and put it back, and turned and rebuked Peter, and went to the cross (Luke 22:50–51; John 18:10–11). The One who, when Judas walked into the garden with a kiss and a band of soldiers, did not turn on him with the wrath any other man would have shown, but called him friend (Matthew 26:50). The One who, hanging on the cross between two criminals, looked at the soldiers gambling for His clothes and prayed Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing (Luke 23:34). Every provocation that ever touched Him was real. None of them flared in Him into the paroxynō the world would have considered understandable. He stood. He kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously. And the salvation of every soul who has ever been saved came through a Savior who did not let Himself be sharpened.

The world’s quickness, and ours

The world has been speeding up for a long time. The pace of daily life has accelerated, the pace of conversation has accelerated, the pace of reaction has accelerated. The phone is the most efficient delivery system for provocation the world has ever invented. The angry comment, the cruel reply, the misread tone, the misunderstood photograph — all of it arrives every hour, and the cultural air of this generation is the air of people who have been trained to react fast and react hot.

The Christian is called out of all of it. The believer is called to be the slow one in the room — slow to speak, slow to type, slow to assume, slow to take offense, slow to flare. James, who knew his Lord on this point, wrote it as a standing rule for the church:

But everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger; for the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God.

James 1:19–20 (NASB)

The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God. That is the sentence the believer can pin to the inside of his ribs and read every morning. The flare-up that felt so satisfying in the moment did not accomplish anything God was trying to do. The text that was so cleverly worded made nothing better. The argument that was so cuttingly delivered won nothing worth winning. The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God. It achieves only the satisfaction of the self that was protesting being touched, and the satisfaction lasts only as long as it takes for the next provocation to arrive.

The way out is not to feel less, and not to be numb to wrong, and not to pretend the offense did not happen. The way out is the way Christ took. Keep entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously. The believer who is being provoked can hand the matter to the Lord who actually has the standing to judge it, and stop trying to be the judge himself. The handing-over is what creates the space for the flare to die. The man who has handed the matter over has nothing left to protect.

A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ

If you have spent your life flaring at small provocations and have started to suspect that the flaring is not making your life better, hear one thing.

The flaring is doing what your heart has been telling it to do. It is defending a self that has been on the throne of your life for as long as you have been alive. The self does not want to be touched, and it has trained your nervous system to react with heat whenever it is. The flares are not your problem. The throne is your problem. Until the right King is on the throne, the wrong king will keep flaring every time His kingdom is challenged.

The gospel is the change of throne. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). The man or woman who hears that, believes it, repents of the long reign of the self, confesses Jesus as Lord, is baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4), and remains faithful, has had the throne taken back by its rightful occupant. The flares do not stop the same day; the old habits take time to unwind. But the Spirit who has been given to you (Acts 2:38) is the same Spirit who taught Paul not to revile in return, and He is patient enough to teach you the same restraint.

Hear it. Believe it. Repent. Confess. Be baptized. And then begin the slow walk of the believer whose throne has been given back to its true King and whose flares are quietly losing their fuel.

Where this leaves us

Eight of Paul’s traits have now been named, and the believer who has walked through them honestly has had the surface of his life addressed, the interior of his heart addressed, the orientation of his life addressed, and now the reaction of his temper addressed. The work being done is going all the way through.

The next attribute Paul names follows directly from this one. The believer who has not flared at the wrong is also the believer who can refuse to record the wrong — to keep a private ledger of every offense, ready to be brought out the next time the same person crosses him. Love does not take into account a wrong suffered. That chapter has already been written and stands at its place in the book. Read it knowing that what comes before it is the work this chapter has been describing: the refusal to flare in the moment, which makes possible the refusal to keep the record afterward. A man who has not exploded at the wrong is in a position to forgive it. A man who has exploded is in a position to remember it, with interest, for years.

That is the work this attribute is calling you into. The next provocation is on its way — a sibling, a parent, a friend, a classmate, a brother in the church, a stranger online. You will feel the sharpening. You will feel the temper rise. Catch it. Hand the matter to the One who judges righteously. Take the slow breath. Speak the calm sentence, or speak no sentence at all. And do it the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that. The Lord whose own provocations were the worst any human being ever endured, and who did not revile in return, is willing to grow the same restraint in you, one provocation at a time.