to call someone to one's side: to appeal to, urge, comfort, or invite a person, depending on why they are called near
The picture inside this word is of calling another person to your side. Everything it can mean flows from that one act, and the situation decides which shade it takes. You call someone close:
- to plead with them
- to press a course of action on them
- to put heart back into them when they are low
- simply to invite them to come
That is why one Greek verb covers scenes that feel very different in English.
- A leper on his knees and a demon bargaining for mercy are both calling alongside in the sense of begging.
- Paul opening a long stretch of practical instruction with "I appeal to you" is calling his readers near to urge a way of living on them.
- A mother who "would not be comforted" and a church told to "comfort one another" are being called close to be consoled.
- And a household that "invited" the apostles in is calling them to come.
These are not separate words that happen to look alike; they are one word seen from different angles. The begging and the urging are the same gesture aimed at getting someone to act, the one from below in need, the other from alongside in appeal. The comforting is the same drawing-near turned toward a person in grief. Read the scene, and especially who is calling whom and why, and the right shade is usually plain.
The heaviest concentration of the comforting sense sits in Paul's letters, above all in 2 Corinthians, where the same word names both the trouble God brings his people through and the relief he sends to carry them. Its close noun (παράκλησις) is the help itself, and the related title for the Spirit, the one called alongside (παράκλητος), grows out of this very picture.
Nuances
Whether Paul's appeal formula in Romans 12:1 (and the parallel appeals elsewhere in his letters) carries near-imperatival apostolic authority in softened form, or is a distinct fraternal speech-act deliberately set over against issuing a command.
- contestedA formalized brotherly petition, a request among equals modeled on the courteous letters of request of the day, distinct from a command.; C. J. Bjerkelund, Parakalô: Form, Funktion und Sinn der parakalô-Sätze in den paulinischen Briefen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1967), 188; R. Jewett, Romans, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 725-26
- contestedApostolic exhortation carrying near-imperatival force: real authority exercised through a courteous verb of urging.; E. Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980); D. J. Moo, The Letter to the Romans, NICNT, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018)