to please: to make oneself or one's action acceptable and agreeable to someone
This one verb is morally two-faced. The very same word can name the highest good or the deepest betrayal, and what decides the difference is not the word itself but three things: who is being pleased, for whose benefit, and by what means. Paul, who uses it in fourteen of its seventeen New Testament appearances, plays on that ambiguity on purpose, so the same verb marks Christian love in one verse and disloyalty to Christ a few chapters later.
Three directions of pleasing run through Paul's letters:
- Pleasing God is the aim of a faithful life, the goal a person walks toward.
- Pleasing one's neighbor for their good and building-up is love in action, patterned on Christ, who "did not please himself."
- Pleasing people in order to win their approval or dodge their disapproval is flattery, and it cannot be squared with belonging wholly to Christ.
Paul knows how thin the line is, so he adds careful guardrails, "for the good, to build up" and "not seeking my own advantage," that keep God-centered pleasing from sliding into crowd-pleasing. The stronger compound εὐαρεστέω becomes the specialized word for pleasing God, and the coined insult ἀνθρωπάρεσκος, the "people-pleaser," names the vice as a fixed character type.
Outside these charged ethical uses the verb also does plain, everyday work: a dance that delights a corrupt king, a proposal that wins an assembly's approval, a soldier whose whole aim is to satisfy his commander, and spouses whose care is turned toward each other.