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Called So That You....

          Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. (I Peter 3:8-9)

Let’s pretend that you answered the door yesterday and found officials from some lottery. They told you that you had just won 8.28 trillion tax-free dollars.[1] They handed you the check, you deposited it, and the bank has verified that the check is good. It’s yours. I’m not going to ask you what you would do with it. Instead, I will ask what it would do with/to you. Perhaps an even better question is what you want it to do with/to you.

Would it matter more, or less, when someone disagreed with you or called you something offensive? Perhaps an even better question is what you would want it to do you? Perhaps it would be even clearer if your neighbor won it instead of you. How long would it be before you thought, “He has all the money in the world, and he gets upset over that? Really?”

Even if the money were held for six months before we could actually spend any of it, wouldn’t it – shouldn’t it change our perspective about the world? I’ll grant that some would be crushed by the money. They would turn into Gollum, always going on about their precious and prickling about everything. But how many would want to turn into such a being?  Instead, the person who is “wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice” (with thanks to Samuel Johnson or Edwin Moore for the phrase) is expected to not be bothered by petty things. Even if they are upset about something they should be upset about, we’re likely to think that with all that money, they could do something about the situation beyond whining and complaining.

And in today’s passage, we read (again) that we were called so we may inherit a blessing. That blessing is God Himself. In other words, we’ve not been given all the money in the world. We’ve been given something that makes all the money in the world look like less than a quark. As fallen human beings, we’re likely to be upset by attacks made by others, but I think we need to keep asking ourselves, “Is the attack true?” and “Given my inheritance, is that attack really worth getting upset over?” If the answer to either is “Yes,” then we might need to consider what to do, but otherwise, perhaps we should remind ourselves that “It’s really not that big a deal.”

 


[1] One estimate online of the value of all the money in the world.

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