The Higher Way

Sunday’s Epistle is 1 Peter 3:13-22. When 1 Peter was written toward the end of the first century, bad things were happening to good people. Today’s reading, like the whole of the letter, confronts the reality that Christians will experience pain and suffering at the hands of others, that just people will be treated unjustly. In my most cynical moments, when I see bad things happening to good people, I like to quote a saying I picked up somewhere years ago: “No good deed goes unpunished.” It’s not true, of course, but in those moments, it seems to have a ring of truth to it.

The first readers of this letter were good people, Christians, who because of their conversion to the faith, had separated themselves from the rest of society. To be a Christian in those days would mean you wouldn’t be making sacrifices to a variety of gods and you wouldn’t celebrate the pagan festivals with your neighbors. You would stand out in the community. And that’s usually not such a good thing. What was true then and seems always to be true in life is, if you are different from the rest of us, you’re dangerous. And, it seems to follow, if you’re dangerous, you’ve got to be punished in some way. So bad things were happening to Christians.

The bad things I’m referring to are not the organized persecutions we’ve all heard so much about. That largely lay in the future. From the tone of the letter, the bad things were happening at a much more personal level. A neighbor who won’t talk with you because you don’t believe as she does. A seller in the marketplace who won’t sell to you because you don’t follow the gods he follows. A teenager from down the street who hits you in the back with a dirt clod because he’s been told you’re not to be trusted. These are the kinds of things that were going on for those who were followers of the Way.

The most natural thing in the world when faced with behaviors such as these is to give as good as you get. What couples in therapy often describe as “a taste of his/her own medicine.” It is in response to that natural tendency that Peter’s words for today are written. Like Jesus before him, he calls his brothers and sisters in Christ to a different standard.

Peter sets out to define what behaviors ought to be normal in a Christian’s interactions with each other in the community and with their non-Christian neighbors. Be compassionate. Love one another, he says. Be tenderhearted. Be humble, in the sense of be disciplined in following higher principles. Don’t repay evil and meanness with more evil and more meanness; instead, as Jesus before him had said, repay evil with good.

Well, sure. While these injunctions or imperatives may have been news to Peter’s readers, they aren’t news to us. We know this is exactly how we are to act. But one of my most difficult tasks is how to live up to this standard. I know from experience, I’m not alone in this. So, for me, the question of the day is, how can we follow Jesus and Peter and the other saints in this higher way, when the going gets painful and rough?

Peace

Jerry+