Walk

... walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received... (Ephesians 4.1)

I love walking. I would happily walk for hours every day if I had the time. Walking with a friend is especially nice if it can be arranged.

My church had a women’s breakfast the other day and our speaker chose to talk on Ephesians 4, where it tells us to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received”.¹ She noticed that this whole “worthy of the calling” thing feels a bit intimidating, but that “walking is something we do on the ground”. How lovely, and how true.

Paul is not demanding a complex mode of locomotion - we don’t need to fly or drive or even ride through life. Just walk, one foot in front of the other.²

Walking is rhythmic - left, right, left, right. Our lives have a beat too - wake, sleep, wake, sleep. Speak, listen, speak, listen. Work, rest, work, rest. For everything there is a season.

Walking is modest. You don’t get very far all at once. You don’t go very fast. It doesn’t look like much.

Walking is cumulative. Every step counts. Your lifetime of walking would already add up to a mind-boggling distance, but it felt like nothing much at the time. The internet informs me that the average steps we take in a lifetime would take each of us around the Equator about three times!³

Walking is patient. It might even be the only mode of transport where we are naturally patient - when you start walking you know it’s going to take a certain time to get to a certain place, and that’s just fine with your brain. Effortlessly fine. This isn’t true of other modes of transport - driving, for some reason, never feels fast enough, flying is an agony of waiting, and cycling is only alright until you have to stop. When you walk, the pace is just right.

Walking is purposeful. Most of your steps take you somewhere to do something.

Walking - rhythmic, modest, cumulative, patient and purposeful - is a metaphor for the Christian life. In the Hebrew Bible, which is what is in Paul’s brain as he writes, the word is הָלַךְ, which well before the New Testament era already meant not only walk but also behave or live.⁴ Halakha - the word for the Jewish law - derives from this root. The law is the way to behave, the way to live, the way to walk.⁵

Ephesians is interesting because “walk” in this Hebrew metaphorical sense is scattered all through the letter, both positively and negatively:

• … your trespasses and sins, in which you used to walk (2.1-2)

• For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (2.10)

• I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (4.1-3)

• … you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. (4.17)

• And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (5.2)

• … walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true) (5.8-9)

• Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise… (5.15)

Those great big thundering abstract nouns and adjectives - humility, gentleness, patience, unity, love, light, good, right, true, wise - are a bit hard for me to grasp all at once, let alone put into practice. The picture of walking helps. We can plod slowly but purposefully around these enormous virtues and verities, just as we tread out the equivalent of three equators in a lifetime.

To take a concrete example. I want to “walk in love” as Paul urges, but that’s a bit too much to aim for all at once. So I’m going to take a tiny piece of it. Say, for example, my conversational habits. I might notice - as I did the other day - that I interrupt a lot. So that’s the next step - practise listening until the end of my interlocutor’s sentence. Seems small, and embarrassingly basic, but that’s my next step. Over time such tiny steps can take on their own rhythm and become a habit. Years from now I may arrive somewhere, in my character and relationships, where I would never have arrived if I hadn’t taken that step. I might find that I can “walk in love”.

As we watch each other grow in our Christian lives, we not need not demand speed over quality. The pace of our lives and our pace of change will always be walking pace, and that’s the right pace. Rhythmic, modest, cumulative, patient and purposeful.

Plod, plod.

1. The NIV chooses “live” instead of “walk”, and I can give them points for good intentions, but oh dear. Why, oh why, do we no longer understand how important metaphor is?

2. The word “walk” in Greek is peripateó, from which we get a little-used English word “peripatetic” - someone is peripatetic if they move around a circuit of different workplaces, like teachers of musical instruments. Aristotle was famous for teaching peripatetically, that is, while walking with his students.

3. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/step-count-adult-lifetime-round-world-three-times-b573751.html

4. So, dear NIV translators, you’re not wrong. But you have taken away the metaphor. A metaphor is a picture, and our brains need pictures to understand stuff.

5. In case you’re wondering, no, the Septuagint doesn’t always translate הָלַךְ with peripateó. One day when I have a spare week or can afford proper Bible software I’ll work out why. However, I still think that הָלַךְ is in Paul’s mind when he uses peripateó - the concepts align so closely.