Day Two
Movement I — The Word Itself
Springs
There was a man in the early church whose given name nobody uses. He was a Levite from Cyprus named Joseph. He sold a field and laid the money at the apostles’ feet, and somewhere in there they stopped calling him Joseph.
And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus. Acts 4:36, KJV
The Greek behind consolation there is paraklēsis — the same word Paul uses of God in Second Corinthians 1:3. Which means the word we translate comfort was, in the first century, something you could call a man to his face.
Not a feeling. A person you were glad to see in the doorway.
Today’s morsel
“God of all comfort.”
Say it four times, moving the weight each time — God · of all · comfort.
Wells
Take the word apart. παράκλησις is built from para, alongside, and kaleō, to call. Someone summoned to stand next to you. Everything the doctrine will ask you to believe is already in the construction.
The related noun is paraklētos, and Jesus uses it of the Spirit:
And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever. John 14:16, KJV
The word for another is allos — another of the same kind, as against heteros, another of a different kind. That single word carries an argument: the Comforter coming is the same sort of thing the disciples have had standing beside them for three years. Jesus is not sending a substitute of lesser grade. He is saying, you will not be without someone alongside.
Paul writes theos pasēs paraklēseōs — God of all comfort. Pasēs means every kind, every species. Not a great deal of comfort. Rather: there is no variety of being-called-alongside that originates anywhere else. The friend at the hospital door, the verse that surfaced at three in the morning, the neighbor who mowed your yard without asking — all of it, one supplier.
And our English word agrees. Comfort comes from the Latin confortare, to strengthen thoroughly — a word the Vulgate itself uses. Fortis is the root: strong. Not a sedative. A brace.
Aquifer
The range is wider than consolation, and that matters later. Paraklēsis also carries exhortation, appeal, and encouragement. It is the word in Romans 12:8 for the gift of exhortation and — keep this one — the word in Hebrews 12:5 that introduces the great passage on chastening. English forces us to choose between comfort and exhortation; Greek did not. Day 18 is built entirely on that fact.
On paraklētos in the courtroom. Outside the New Testament the noun is used of an advocate, one called to a person’s side to speak for them in a legal setting. The translations reflect the difficulty: Comforter (KJV), Helper, Advocate, Counselor, and in some, simply Paraclete. No single English word holds it, which is itself the argument for learning the Greek one.
Worth checking yourself. Read 1 John 2:1, where paraklētos is used of Jesus — “we have an advocate with the Father.” Set it beside John 14:16 and the force of allos becomes plain in English without any Greek at all.