When I was in college and working for Youth For Christ, I lived in a house with four people, one of which was a woman from Mississippi, named Laura. Laura loved being from the south, and loved to tell us that the biggest problem in California is that people didn’t know how to speak “southern.”
Her favorite hobby was telling us all the southern phrases and words that were superior to our west coast, Yankee influenced expressions. Like “fetch” for instance. Fetch is a great word, she’d say. Where else do you have a word that says three things at once: “go, get and bring back.”
She also like to say “fixin’.” As in “I’m fixin’ to go to work.” A great phrase that told people that even while you are sitting on a couch drinking Diet Coke and eating Cheetos, you are still doing something. It may not be obvious what the action is, but fixin tell us of the potentiality of a person. One of our roommates who never had a job loved that word. He was always “fixin” to do something while he was doing nothing at all.
But by far her favorite word was “y’all”. She would say, “When your momma leaves the house and says, 'I want you to clean the house before I get back,' you and your brothers and sisters all start arguing over just who is 'you.' But when my momma left the house and said, “Y’all need to clean this house before I get home”, we all knew that the you was us. That’s the problem with you Californians, y’all think that 'you' is someone else.”
If that wasn’t enough, Laura was convinced that God was from Mississippi but that most translators of the Bible were too prejudiced against southern folks to recognize it. A Wheaton College graduate, Laura had taken enough Greek to know that the biggest misunderstanding in the English language Bibles is that every one reads “You” as singular. However, as I have said before, but never with as much directness as I am today, in the New Testament, in the vast majority of cases, the “yous” are plural.
In fact, 1 Cor 3:16 we have a great passage and a most important footnote that we dare not miss. Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. (NRSV)
I don’t remember the last time I wrote about a footnote, but here goes. If you look at 1 Corinthians 3:16 in the New Revised Standard Bible you will notice that right after the end of v. 16 there is a tiny letter, o. That o refers to a footnote at the bottom of the page that reads, “In verses 16-17 the Greek word for you is plural.”
In other words it would better be translated as the New Living Translation renders it “Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God". Or as Laura would say, “y’all”.
Now, I seriously doubt that God is from Mississippi (after hearing her describe the mosquitoes, I am not even sure he made Mississippi), but we west coasters and Yankees probably need some help from our southern friends if we are going understand the power of this passage and what I have called the most important thing I learned in Seminary. In fact, this one fact changed the whole way I read the NT: In the vast majority of cases the "yous" are plural. My friends, when you read the NT, try to overcome the bias that every verse is for you alone, when in actually it is for you and me and all of us together.
Tomorrow, I’ll give you two points that I hope will help understand how the “yous” of the New Testament and the spiritual discipline of “Staying Put” come together.
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