"Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God." [1 Peter 3:16b-18]
The followers of Jesus practice a unique form of resistance to the rottenness of the world: we reflect what we have learned from Jesus himself by refusing to return evil for evil. We break the cycle by not reacting to other people's hostility or hatred with more hostility or hatred of our own. And in so doing, we become breathing sermons of the way God in Christ has responded to human sin and rottenness at the cross.
Many of us heard second part of this passage in worship this past Sunday, but without the opening sentence, we can miss the connection that First Peter is making here between our actions and Christ's. And for First Peter, the cross of Jesus is both a picture of God's action to bring us close and also a model for our action toward others--even when others have treated us as enemies. Both are true at the same time: at the cross, "Christ suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous," and simultaneously, the cross gives us a template for how we respond to the crookedness and cruelty of the world in which we find ourselves--we respond to evil with good; we respond to abusive language with blessing; and we respond to hate without becoming hateful ourselves.
It's funny--once you understand that connection in a passage like this one, you start to recognize it over and over again in the New Testament. It's there in Paul's letter to the Romans, where he emphasizes that Jesus died for us "while we were still enemies" of God, only to conclude that our response in the world is "repay no one evil for evil" but rather to "bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse" so that we can "overcome evil with good" (see Romans 5 and 12). It's at the heart of Jesus' understanding of God in the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 5) where Jesus insists that God's policy is to be good to humanity even in spite of our sin and unrighteousness, and that therefore, we are called to do good to those who hate us without returning evil for evil. And from there, you can see the same theme at work throughout the choices of the early church in the book of Acts and in Paul's letters. The phrasing may be different, but the recurring train of thought is that because Jesus was willing to endure suffering--but not inflict it--in the cross, in order to bring us to God, we are also called to bear suffering but not to inflict it on others in some misguided attempt to "get even." Time and time again, the writers of the New Testament insist, "That's just not how we do things anymore."
The cross of Jesus, then, is always both a fait accompli, a completed act, and also the ongoing pattern of Jesus' followers in the world. It is true that at the cross, God in Christ drew us to God's own self, in spite of our sin, crookedness, and animosity toward God. And at the same time, in the face of the world's ongoing sin, crookedness and animosity, we are called to embody the same kind of cruciform love. As theologian Barbara Brown Taylor put it so well, "That is what love is… not a warm feeling between friends, but plain old imitation of Christ, who took all the meanness of the world and ran it through his body, repaying evil with good, blame with pardon, death with life. It worked once, and it can work again, whenever God can find someone willing to give it a try."
In a world that so often fails to see how it becomes monstrous in the act of attempting to fight its monsters, we are meant to be an alternative. We refuse to get sucked into the endless cycle of "I hit you back because you hit me first," or its even more insidious sibling that says, "I will hit you first in order to prevent you from hitting me first." Instead, we follow Jesus' lead of breaking that cycle by bearing suffering without inflicting it back on someone else. This is our act of resistance. As Walter Wink says, "Evil can be opposed without being mirrored. Oppressors can be resisted without being emulated. Enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed." Believing that is not foolish or naive; it is simply a matter of taking Jesus' cross seriously.
A big part of how the watching world will decide whether or not to take what we have to say seriously as Christians is whether we live out what we say: whether we practice what we preach. First Peter is simply reminding us that what we believe about the cross is no different: if, at the cross, Jesus responded to human hatred with love, then we are called to live in ways that echo that response, too. The world will get a glimpse, then, of what the gospel really means, because they will have seen and known that kind of cross-shaped (cruciform) love in us.
That's our defiance of the world's meanness. That's our revolution. And in Jesus, it is already underway.
Lord Jesus, shape our love of others in light of your cross.
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