"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."
"Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again."—1 Peter
2:23.
What a common dictate of the fallen and unregenerate 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
Savior's humiliation, when silent, and unresenting, He stood "silent 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 Savior 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 secretly 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, why have you
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 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 Savior 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 inflicting 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 you have not so learned Christ."
"Arm yourselves likewise with the same mind."