Be wise (phrónimos) as serpents and pure (akéraios) as doves: Part I. Phrónimos: Operating with a purified mind/heart/soul/ spirit/nous such that we live “according to Christ” and “by the Spirit”
Numbers 21: Nehushtan
[Reading Time: 9 minutes]
Behold, therefore, I send you out (apostéllō) as sheep among wolves.
Be wise (phrónimos) as serpents and pure (akéraios) as doves (Mt 10:16).
The Context: Matthew 10
This statement occurs within the context of Christ’s calling of the twelve disciples (Mt 10:1a, 2-4) with His equipping of them in that call (“He gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease”, 10:1b). And what exactly is Jesus sending them forth to do?
To “preach” and “heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils” (10:5-8)
In this divine calling, Christ offers very particular directions to that end (10:9-15). And after empowering His disciples to do exactly what He commands them, Jesus next warns of the great resistance that will, undoubtedly, meet them in this pathway.
Jesus explains (with four times the number of verses) what, in fact, they will encounter as they go forth: scourges, beatings, false accusation, betrayal by family, and hatred “by all” on account of His name (10:16-22). Then, He closes this body of teaching with how they should respond to these occurrences when they come against every iteration of them (10:23-42).
Two commands; Two questions
It is in the midst of these directives that Jesus gives the summary commands that will be the focus of this word study:
Behold, therefore, I send you out (apostéllō) as sheep among wolves.
Be wise (phrónimos) as serpents and pure (akéraios) as doves (Mt 10:16).
Given the striking difficulty of the mixed metaphors (“sheep” and “wolves”; “serpents” and “doves”), the two questions that immediately come to mind are:
If we are sheep, how can we truly act “wise (phrónimos) as serpents”?
And if we, then, function “as serpents,” how can we then be “pure (akéraios) doves?
We will look at each of these questions in turn, beginning with an examination into phrónimos and concluding with a word on akéraios in our next post. (And given the fact that we are dealing with two somewhat complex words, our goal in both of these will be more of a synthesis than an in-depth analysis.)
Two word studies: phrónimos and akéraios
phrónimos (φρόνιμος)
Etymology and Dictionary Definition
phrónimos is the adjectival form of the verb, phroneó, which itself is derived further from the noun, phrḗn (φρήν), the midriff or diaphragm.
Given this derivation, one may say that just as the diaphragm regulates our breathing, phrónimos describes how we regulate the operations of our mind/heart/soul/spirit/nous. That is to say, how we see, hear, believe, feel and understand in relation to Reality; how we operate every dimension of our lives; or even more simply, our “mindset.”
Summary Synthesis
In the NT, what becomes very clear very early is that our mindset, the regulation of our nous, can follow only one of two paths: We operate in the present moment either according to the self-consumed desires of This Now Age with no reference to God or Eternity (Mt 16:23, i.e. The mindset of Peter when he rebukes Jesus for revealing His Messianic call to suffer and die) ; or we live, very simply put, “according to Christ” (katá Christón, Rom 15:5), with His life, death and resurrection governing the most minute details of our thoughts and behaviors. In other NT passages this will be described as living “by the Spirit”…regardless of where He leads us… (Mt 4:1-> Rom 12:1-3)
The Summary Synthesis of our prior word study on phroneó was as follows:
It begins with the mindset of this Fallen Age, which actively resists the Way of the Cross (Mt. 16:23; Mk. 8:33). Then it points to those seeking a way out of this fallen world into the Kingdom of God (Acts 28:22). And finally in Romans the fallen mind is redeemed through the Incarnation, Life and Death of Jesus Christ (Rom 8), such that it can operate in a new dimension (sōphronéō, From sózó+ phrḗn: Lit. a ‘phren’ that has been ‘saved’ (sózó) such that it lives “by the Spirit,” regardless of where He leads us (Mt 4:1-> Rom 12:1-3) and, ultimately, according to Christ Jesus (katá Christón, Rom 15:5).
And the Synthesis from our study on the nous was:
The Gospels: The nous first occurs in Christ’s appearances to the disciples after His Crucifixion, where He progressively reveals to them how the cosmos has been recreated through His death and resurrection, how Heaven and earth have been joined together, Spirit and flesh integrated and God and Man eternally united.
Romans: From the recreation of the cosmos through the Crucified and Risen Christ, we are freed from the slavery to the darkness and passions of This Fallen Age, as our nous is renewed by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel of our LORD.
In seeking to tie all of this together, we may say that phrónimos, then, describes how the nous operates in us, leading us more and more into the life of God and His Kingdom (Mt 7:14), progressively healing our passions so that we are conformed unto the image of Christ. In the Reformed Protestant understanding this is spoken of as the long, winding pathway of sanctification. The Orthodox world speaks of this as our passage from purification of the passions to progressive perfecting in Christ such that we begin to “partake” in His divination (which Peters describes as theosis (II Pet 1:4). Or, it may be described as a pathway from the practical applications of the Gospel by the Spirit into the daily realities of our lives (praxis) to our illumination by the Spirt (theōríā) and finally to our life in God (divination, again I Pet 1:2-9).
In the words of Gregory Nazianzus (329-390),
Only those who have passed from praxis to theōríā, from purification to illumination, can speak about God. And when is this? It is when we are free from all external defilement or disturbance, and when that which rules within us is not confused with vexations or erring images.
i.e. We are no longer “double-minded” and “two-spirited” (dípsychos) and, as such, no longer “unstable in all our ways.” Rather, we are single-minded with the Holy Spirit Himself drawing our lives in conformation to our crucified and risen Savior.
For more an in-depth examination of these concepts see, for example, the first chapter of Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Hiertheos’ monumental work, Orthodox Psychotherapy (called by Fr. Geroge Dragas on our Research Advisory Board as the “greatest living practioner of spiritual medicine”), entitled, “Orthodoxy as a Therapeutic Science.” It is not insignificant that the derivation of “psychotherapy” (regardless of its modern appropriations), comes from two Greek words, therapeia + psyché, literally meaning the ‘healing’ (therapeia) of our ‘soul’ and emotional life (psyché).
In the words of Hiertheos,
So in the Church we are divided into the sick, those undergoing therapeutic treatment, and those—saints—who have already been healed. The Fathers do not categorize people as moral and immoral or good and bad on the basis of moral laws.
This division is superficial.
At depth, humanity is differentiated into the sick in soul, those being healed and those healed. All who are not in a state of illumination are sick in soul.
Phrónimos in relation to Mt 10:16
To relate all of these dimensions back to the original verse that fueled this word study, the first command of Christ to the disciples whom He is sending out into “ministry” is to be “phrónimos as serpents.”
Christ is calling us to seek the true “wisdom from above,” which, as our brief study of the nous and its operations in phroneó demonstrated, only comes down to us as we become progressively purified from the passions of This Now Age and more deeply illumined by the inner operations of the Holy Spirit in our mind/heart/soul/spirit/nous such that we, in Peter’s words, finally become “partakers of the divine nature.”
Ministry that flows out of this…can you imagine?
And this may be precisely why Jesus uses this language when He calls His disciples then empowers them to “preach” and “heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils” (Mt 10:5-8). The Kingdom of God in this way begins to break into the fallen power structures of time.
Then to relate this back to the OT, is this possibly why the Pentateuch says that when God’s people operate in this power, it does not take many of them to push back the enemies of darkness:
You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you.
Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight;
your enemies shall fall by the sword before you (Lev 26:7-8).
Or is this why Robert Murray McCheyne, thousands of years later, can then declare that
A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.
A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.
This, as we will see in our next study, naturally leads us into his subsequent command to become “pure (akéraios, literally “unmixed”) as doves” with that purity being our separation from the inner workings of the deceptions, sins and passions of This Fallen Age so that our lives and labors operate in the unity of mind and purpose brought by the blessed Holy Spirit.
Amen!
And may it be!