EPISODE ELEVEN: BLESSING OTHERS NO MATTER WHAT
…you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.
Over the last couple of episodes, we have looked at what Peter writes about curbing our freedom as followers of Jesus to advance the mission we are called to and to avoid bringing disrepute to the name of the One we follow. Peter ties up these “ends” with the famous word “Finally…” in 1 Peter 3:8. This is his recap of what believers, even those who are persecuted, scattered, and living as foreigners and pilgrims, should know and practise.
“Finally, all of you, be like-minded and sympathetic, love as brothers, be tenderhearted and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For,
‘Whoever would love life
and see good days
must keep his tongue from evil
and his lips from deceitful speech.
He must turn from evil and do good;
he must seek peace and pursue it.
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous,
and His ears are inclined to their prayer.
But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.’
Who can harm you if you are zealous for what is good?”
These are persecuted believers Peter is writing to, and they already know many others would be happy to harm them for being zealous in doing the good their Lord commands. They will need to be prepared for that persecution to continue.
I just bought the translation of Marguerite Porete’s book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. Marguerite was one of the French Beguines, a mystic who was burned at the stake in 1310 after being charged with heresy, tried, and condemned for refusing to recant or remove her book from circulation, despite having received approval for it from some of the high ecclesiastical authorities of the day. I’ll let you know how “heretical” the book is!
Marguerite was among many women who were writers and leaders during the Middle Ages. Despite the challenges, she and others, both men and women, exemplify what Peter is asking of these earlier believers. Marguerite would be persecuted, imprisoned, and eventually killed, but her attitude was as expressed here:
“…kindness toward others obeys no created thing but Love. Kindness toward others possesses nothing of her own, and if she does possess something, she never says it belongs to her. Kindness toward others skips her own needs to help a neighbor…kindness toward others gives her neighbors all she has that’s worth anything. She keeps nothing for herself. Her amazing generosity often make her promise what she doesn’t have because she knows the more she gives, the more she receives in her soul. Kindness toward others is such a wise businesswomen that she earns profits everywhere when others go out of business.” (Laura Swan, The Wisdom of the Beguines, Goldens Bridge, New York, BlueBridge, 2014, p 83).
The Beguines used metaphor and imagery frequently in their language about God. Marguerite, for example, frequently refers to God as “Love.” The church of the day wasn’t sure quite what to do with these women. This was the era of indulgences (the church-sponsored sale of means by which one could earn one’s way to heaven). The Beguines reacted against this by teaching that people should not serve others in hopes of getting into heaven, because God couldn’t be bought! So though the Beguines were technically Catholic, much of what they believed, taught, and wrote about was in direct opposition to the church authorities.
Porete got herself into trouble through her teaching on the Trinity—only because the church considered it impossible for a woman to teach anything of value on such a deep subject. It was her insistence that the church and the sacraments were not necessary for salvation, which defied the church's authority, that led to her condemnation to death.
Peter’s instructions in this passage are straightforward. As someone has said, these letters are not written to us but for us. This means we need to remember that Peter is writing specific instructions for the people of his generation and culture, who are living in circumstances he knew well and in a world with which he and they are familiar. We are about two thousand years away from that generation, culture, those circumstances, and that world. Our lives, our world, and our circumstances are different from theirs in so many ways. However, while the specifics of any situation described might not apply to us, the principles given to them apply to us even when the specific circumstances might not.
That is a consideration we must keep in mind when we read a passage like this one and think, “Oh, that’s easy enough!” Truth to tell, it’s not. But when we consider the believers to whom Peter is writing, we realize that the apostle is addressing people who have fled their homes, businesses, and families, are adjusting to a new community of believers who may not think like them, are looking over their shoulders, wondering who might be “gunning” for them, and are trying to keep a low profile while still honouring the Lord they follow.
“…to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light” is their calling, a calling to which Peter again refers in this passage; specifically, they are called not to return evil for evil received or insult for insult received. Whether with other believers they met and associated with along the way, or with the strangers among whom they would settle during their travels across the world of their day, they were to stay on mission, be like Jesus, and live as people of the Way should, seeking to make Jesus attractive to everyone they met. This could get them into trouble and lead to more persecution. But they were not to run from the mission God had called them to, no matter where they went.
These are principles that transcend generations, genders, cultures, and circumstances.
The first thing Peter mentions here is like-mindedness. This is an “ouch” topic because we often associate it with the idea that everyone must think the same way about everything. Dictionaries often reinforce this idea. For example, the basic dictionary on my computer defines like-minded as “having similar tastes or opinions.” But that’s not it at all.
As I mentioned before, Peter and Paul are working hard to bring together diverse cultures, generations, and genders under the banner of Jesus to present the gospel to a lost world. Greeks, Romans, Jews, and others were mixed, stirred, shaken, and poured out into a new community. The only thing they had in common was Jesus.
When the apostles spoke of being like-minded, they meant being like-minded in Jesus. They were to share a common focus on Jesus, the principles He taught, and the mission they were all called to, rather than agreeing on identical opinions about things like what kind of meat was permissible to eat or whether Mrs. Jones should be wearing her pearls to the local assembly of believers.
Here is an interesting explanation of like-mindedness from Jeff Englund. The post speaks to the issue of submission we have been examining in previous episodes, addresses Peter’s emphasis on the importance of love, and reminds us of a problem we still wrestle with today: the “I” problem.
I love Peter’s expression here: that we are to respond to others with “blessing.” Our words, our actions, our attitudes are all covered in these verses:
Like-minded (Jesus, His teachings, and His mission)
Sympathetic
Loving
Tenderhearted
Humble
Not repaying evil with evil
Watching our language
Doing good
Seeking peace wholeheartedly
There may be many things that you and I disagree about. But even focusing on these nine items I have just listed, we will be on the same “page” (a very biblical one)—as believers and followers of Jesus should be.
In other words, Peter is asking these believers to practice hesed, a biblical term described this way,
“…hesed is a strong Hebrew word that sums up the ideal lifestyle for God’s people. It’s the way God intended for human beings to live together from the beginning—the ‘love-your-neighbor-as yourself’ brand of living, an active, selfless, sacrificial caring for one another that goes against the grain of our fallen natures…Hesed is driven, not by duty or legal obligation, but by a bone-deep commitment—a loyal, selfless love that motivates a person to do voluntarily what no one has a right to expect or ask of them. They have the freedom to act or to walk away without the slightest injury to their reputation. Yet they willingly pour themselves out for the good of someone else. It’s actually the kind of love we find most fully expressed in Jesus. In a nutshell, hesed is the gospel lived out.”
—Carolyn Custis James, The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules
That’s blessing others, regardless of the cost.
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