Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Jesus walked out of a tomb and nothing have been the same since…Down and down and then up and up is the shape of the Bible’s story and of many of its stories. It’s the shape of our lives, repeated deaths and resurrections until the Lord returns to raise the faithful dead.

David Foster Wallace starts his famous speech This is Water by describing two young fish.
They’re happily swimming along and meet an older fish coming the other way, who nods in greeting and says:
‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’
By which Foster-Wallace wanted to simply point out that the largest, most obvious realities are the hardest to see and talk about. Culture is like this. We’re all inculcated in a way of doing and a way of thinking that it’s particularly hard to spot because we’ve never known anything else.
We’re formed by that culture—that water—in a myriad of ways. I’ve written before about the work of James K. A. Smith on cultural liturgies, that our cultures act like a liturgy in forming us, and the work of Charles Taylor on social imaginaries, that our setting influences what we can plausibly imagine to be true. I’ve spun both together to suggest that the stories we live shape the pattern of our thoughts. They shape what is and isn’t plausible.
When identifying some of the more negative aspects of our culture I’ve suggested that we need to engage in counter-formation, or engage in ‘reliturgy’ to push back on the dominant narratives in which we live and breathe and have our being (Acts 17).
I know that isn’t what Acts is saying at all—but that’s sort of the point.
To reliturgise or engage in counter-formation is a task of reframing our stories. We are all made of stories. We need to tell stories and then inhabit and live stories that will earn richer fruit than what grows on the cultural coral reef. We need stories of good loam, well fertilised, carefully tilled and expertly farmed by pastor-storytellers.
The best way to do this is with the stories the Bible gives us. This works because these stories are true. If I have one, this is my theological project. Read the cultures’ stories well, retell the Bible’s better.
The Bible has a set of overarching stories—more than I’m about to list—that when lived deliberately reshape our lives. Here are some examples that you’ll notice overlap with all of my common themes.
Table
Why do I think the answer to so many of our modern problems is to get around the table and share a meal?
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Parents can only instruct their children “by the way” (Deut 6) if parents and children are in the same place at the same time, a lot of the time. This proximity is what our society is so eager to dissolve and what we easily surrender. Yet it is not just time at home that matters. “Children obey your parents in the Lord” is not a lone imperative. Paul gives that instruction in tandem with instructions to husbands and wives.

O, the Shame
Staying out of paid work to raise children is one of the great immoralities of our time. I’ve been one of those questionable, anachronistic women for almost twenty years. It would have been fewer years if I had fewer children. If I had lived my adulthood differently, I could be deep in postgraduate degrees, leadership positions and assets, with a reasonable superannuation portfolio accumulating. I have none of these, apart from assets which have come through my husband’s work. On paper, I am completely dependent and decidedly behind. Unlike my husband’s, my life, limbs and labour are very cheap to insure. While staying home to raise children is costly for my family (and myself), the relative costs of this choice are greater for families initiating that choice now.
For recent holiday reading, I opened the 2024-25 Women’s Budget Statement. My anomalous existence was confirmed. By the measures of that document, women like me are to be pitied, scolded and reformed. If you want a summary of what our representative government thinks of men, women and families, that document is instructive. It summarises the idea of marriage and family that our young women and men are steered toward. This is what’s said about the Stay-at-Home Mother:
Staying out of paid work to raise children is a compound betrayal. This mother sacrifices the advancement she might have gained had she continued in her career. She sacrifices her financial independence, both present and future, diminishing her lifetime earning potential. She sacrifices the security that attends financial independence.
The mother at home betrays not only herself, but the cause of all women. She subjects herself to the inequality which others have fought hard to undo. She’s consenting to and propagating harmful gender stereotypes. She lives within the confines of outdated norms, validating what is despicable.
The mum at home betrays the national economic good, removing her contribution to the formal economy. She betrays her infants, who are disadvantaged, out of the reach of infant peers, early childhood experts and their stimulating, simulated environments. She is choosing to model the opposite of what we want our children to be: she is mediocre, unambitious, invisible, small. Hers is a shameful, weak choice, the path one might stumble into if not competent enough to do something better. A pitiful waste.
To stay home is a betrayal of family prosperity. It means limited real estate options, a cheaper home. And modest holidays, measured spending, learning skills instead of paying experts. Going without. Waiting longer. Having less of what we’re conditioned to want.
For those who are conformed to thinking like the 2024-25 Women’s Budget Statement, staying home is an unconscionable choice. When the Apostle Paul writes for older women to “teach what is good,and so train the young women to love their husbands and children,to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled,“ (Titus 2:3-5), he forces us to deal with some embarrassment about the Word of God. Surely, if Paul knew how far we’d come, he wouldn’t place this expensive, treacherous choice at the heart of discipleship for women! The contrast forces us to ask if we’re more at home with the Women’s Budget Statement or the Bible.
A mother’s choice to stay out of paid work is a choice to be slower and simpler, to resist the mechanization of persons. The choice to raise children at home requires a home to be more: more than storage and shelter; more interesting, more nourishing than a daycare centre. If a mother and her children are to survive a home-based existence, she must learn to bring vitality where others only see boredom, to replace consumption with cultivation. She forms a cultural centre, a locus of relationships and community. A vitalized home brings life that spills out beyond its own members. If we risk the cost, we might find that Paul, along with the rest of Scripture, has a richer view of “working at home” than the Women’s Budget Statement does.
In most cases, a woman can only be free to be busy at home, actively raising her children, if she is married to a man who believes in the unseen value of her unseen work. This choice is the fruit of a marriage that believes in oneness, in being yoked together–in every way, even financially–to get something done in the world that neither of them could do alone, something that transcends them both. Such a marriage is one of mutual sacrifice, of mutual trust, of mutual respect – a marriage where two people are spending themselves in a common direction, while contributing in different ways. A marriage where neither is keeping a tally of who does what and how much. A husband and wife will only choose to limit their income in order to raise their children if they both believe that the value of life and work might not translate into budget data.
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We live in a world with its own set of one-anothers: one-another brokenness, one-another enmity, one-another manipulation, one-another selfishness. And local churches exist to show a different way of life—a different Lord of life. This Lord reconciles us not only to himself, but to each other, creating one-another love out of one-another pain.

I sometimes think I could be very holy if, after doing my morning devotions, I just stayed in my room all day long. I find that patience, for example, comes easier by myself. Peace, too. I feel a general kindness and goodwill when I’m alone. I imagine myself ready to bear others’ burdens.
But then I leave my room and begin interacting with some of those “others” face to face. And before long, I wonder where my holiness went. Patience now feels fragile; peace goes on the retreat. My theoretical kindness finds itself unprepared for real annoyances, and my shoulders seem too weak for real burdens. People, it turns out, have an irritating way of poking the spiritual fruit on my table, only to reveal just how many of those apples and pears are plastic.
I might prefer holiness to be a more private affair, a halo that hangs over my solitary head. But “holiness,” John Stott helpfully reminds me, “is not a mystical condition experienced in relation to God but in isolation from human beings. You cannot be good in a vacuum, but only in the real world of people” (Message of Ephesians, 184). True holiness may begin between God and the soul, but it finds full expression in community with other people—other wonderful, glorious, frustrating, and sometimes offensive people.
Which explains why, again and again, the New Testament describes the authentically holy life using two simple words: “one another.”
The One-Anothers
Around fifty times in the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles tell us to feel, say, or do something to “one another.” We are to care for one another and bear with one another, honor one another and sing to one another, do good to one another and forgive one another. And then there is the grand, overarching, most-repeated one-another, the command that “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Colossians 3:14): “Love one another.”
The one-anothers do not exhaust our obligations to other Christians (many communal imperatives do not include the phrase “one another”), but together they offer a brilliant picture of life together under the lordship of Christ—and not only under the lordship of Christ, but also in the pattern of Christ. For, rightly grasped, the one-anothers are nothing less than the life of Christ at work in the people of Christ to glory of Christ.
Consider, for example, how even in a community-oriented passage like Colossians 3:12–17 (which includes three one-anothers), Paul can’t stop talking about Jesus. Our new character—compassionate, kind, humble, meek, patient (verse 12)—reflects “the image of its creator,” Christ (verse 10). We forgive “as the Lord has forgiven [us]” (verse 13). Our unity reflects “the peace of Christ” (verse 15); our words flow from “the word of Christ” (verse 16). In fact, whatever we do in community, we do “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (verse 17). For here, “Christ is all, and in all” (verse 11).
The one-anothers, then, are earthly dramas of heavenly realities; they are the love of Christ played out on ten thousand stages. So, with this pattern in mind, we might fruitfully consider the one-anothers in five categories: have his mind, offer his welcome, speak his words, show his love, and give his grace.
1. Have His Mind
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count [one another] more significant than yourselves.(Philippians 2:3)
Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another.(1 Peter 5:5)
We might easily launch into the one-anothers wondering about all we should do for our brothers and sisters in Christ—and indeed, the one-anothers call us to do much. But before we say or do anything for one another, God calls us to feel something toward one another. “Have this mind among yourselves,” he says, “which is yours in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). And this mind, or attitude, can be captured in one word: humility.
It is possible—frighteningly possible, I’ve discovered—to externally “obey” the one-anothers with a mind utterly at odds with Christ. It’s possible to greet one another with a smile that hides bitterness; and encourage one another with a grasping, flattering heart; and bear one another’s burdens with a messiah complex. In other words, it is possible to turn the one-anothers into subtle servants of Master Self.
Humility, however, clothes us with the others-oriented attitude of Christ. Humility puts a pair of eyeglasses on the soul, allowing us to see others without the blurring of selfishness. And humility, in its own miniature way, follows the same descent Christ took when he “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death” (Philippians 2:8). It goes low to lift others high—and doesn’t scheme for how it might lift self too.
In a Spirit-filled community, we all (no matter how tall) look up at each other, not down; we jostle to kneel and hold the towel; we choose the seat of the last and the least—because we remember how Jesus did the same for us.
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