"Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again."--1 Peter, ii. 23.
What a common dictate of the fallen and regenerate heart to resent and
recriminate! How alien to natural feeling to answer cutting taunts, and
meet unmerited wrong with the Divine method the Gospel
prescribes--"Overcome evil with good!" It was in the closing scenes of
the Saviour's humiliation, when, silent and unresenting, He stood "dumb
before His shearers," that this beautiful feature in His character was
most wondrously manifested; but it beams forth, also, for our imitation
in the ordinary and less prominent incidents of His pilgrimage.
When He met Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, He found him clinging to an
unreasonable prejudice--"Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" The
severe remark is allowed to pass unnoticed. Overlooking the unkind
insinuation, the Saviour fixes on the favorable feature of his
character, "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" After His
resurrection, He appears to His disciples. They were cowering in shame,
half afraid to confront the glance of injured goodness. He breathes on
them, and says, "Peace be unto you!" Peter was the one of all the rest
who had most reason to dread estranged looks and upbraiding words; but a
special message is sent to reassure that trembling spirit that there was
no alienation in the unresentful Heart he had so deeply wounded; "Go and
tell the disciples ... and _Peter_!" Even when Judas first revealed
himself to his Lord as the betrayer, we believe it was not in bitter
irony or rebuke, but in the fullness of pitying tenderness, that Jesus
addressed him, "Friend, wherefore art thou come?" Tears and prayers
were His only revenge on the city and scene of His murder. "Beginning at
Jerusalem," was the closing illustration of a spirit "not of this
world"--a significant parting testimony that in the bosom that uttered
it retaliation had no place.
More than one of the disciples seem to have imbibed much of this "mind"
of their Lord. "We owe St. Paul," says Augustine, "to the death of
Stephen;" "they stoned Stephen ... and he kneeled down and cried with a
loud voice, Lord! lay not this sin to their charge."
Take another example: The great Apostle of the Gentiles felt himself
under a painful necessity faithfully to rebuke Peter in presence of the
whole Church. He had _recorded_ that rebuke, too, in one of his
epistles. It was thus to be handed down to every age as a permanent and
humiliating evidence of the wavering inconstancy of his fellow-laborer.
Peter, doubtless, must have felt acutely the severity of the
chastisement. Does he resent it? He, too, puts on record, long after, in
one of his own epistles a sentence regarding his Rebuker, but it is
this--"Our _beloved brother_ Paul!"
Reader! when tempted to utter the harsh word, or give the cutting or
hasty answer, seek to check yourself with the question, "Is this the
reply my Saviour would have given?" If your fellow-men should prove
unkind, inconsiderate, ungrateful, be it yours to refer the cause to
God. Speak of the faults of others only in prayer; manifesting more
sorrow for the sin of the censorious and unkind, than for the evil
inflicted on yourselves. _Retaliate!_ No such word should have a place
in the Christian's vocabulary. _Retaliate!_ If I cherish such a spirit
towards my brother, how can I meet that brother in heaven?--"But ye have
not so learned in Christ."
"ARM YOURSELVES LIKEWISE WITH THE SAME MIND."
Twenty-first Day.