Visible Goodness
Day 280 – 7 October
Muzzled by Kindness
“For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.” (1 Peter 2:15, NIV)
A Complaint from the Emperor
Some of the most telling compliments ever paid to the church came from people who meant them as complaints. In the year 362 the Roman emperor Julian, a nephew of Constantine who had been raised as a Christian before he turned his back on the faith, was trying to bring the old temples back to life. He wrote to Arsacius, the pagan high priest of Galatia, and the letter that has come down to us under his name reads like a man grinding his teeth. What had done most to spread the Christian faith, he admitted, was their kindness to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the evident holiness of their lives. Then came the line that stung him most. These “impious Galileans,” as he styled them, fed their own poor and the pagan poor as well, while his own people looked on and saw no help coming from their priests.
Julian’s remedy was to copy them. He ordered hostels for strangers in every city, open to anyone in need, and he set aside thirty thousand measures of grain and sixty thousand pints of wine a year for Galatia, most of it for travellers and beggars. Some scholars have doubted that Julian wrote the letter himself, and others have defended it, yet either way it preserves something worth pausing over. An opponent of the gospel had run out of arguments against the Christians’ kindness, and the one reply left to him was to imitate it.
Peter’s Unflattering Verb
That reply was exactly the outcome Peter had in mind three centuries earlier, when he wrote to believers scattered through the same provinces, Galatia among them (1 Peter 1:1). “For it is God’s will,” he told them, “that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.” The English verb “silence” sounds polite enough, yet Peter’s Greek has teeth in it. The word is phimoun (to muzzle), from phimoō (to muzzle, to stop the mouth), the verb for strapping shut the jaws of an animal, and Ellicott hears a note of contempt in it, as though these critics had something of the beast about them. Their noise came from agnōsia (ignorance), and the people making it were aphronōn (of the foolish, those without understanding). The Pulpit Commentary takes the ignorance as self-inflicted, a blindness people keep up because it suits them.
Peter’s readers knew that noise at first hand. A few lines earlier he had acknowledged that their neighbours accused them of doing wrong (1 Peter 2:12). His remedy for the slander was a participle, agathopoiountas (by doing good, as people who keep on doing good), and its force lies in its continuance. A single kind act is soon forgotten. The muzzle is fastened by a life that goes on doing good, week after week, until the accusation has nothing left to chew on.
Where the Muzzle Had Been Before
Chewing brings the verb’s history into view, because before Peter used it the word had a working life of its own, and following it through its other appearances shows how surprising his choice was. Moses forbade anyone to muzzle an ox while it trod out the grain (Deuteronomy 25:4), and Paul twice quoted that command with this same verb (1 Corinthians 9:9; 1 Timothy 5:18). In the Gospels the word belongs to Jesus. When the Sadducees came at Him with a trick question about the resurrection, He answered them from Scripture, and Matthew records that He had “silenced the Sadducees” (Matthew 22:34). When an unclean spirit shrieked at Him in the synagogue at Capernaum, He ordered it to be muzzled and to come out (Mark 1:25). And when a furious squall came down on the lake, He rose in the boat and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” (Mark 4:39), where the second command in Greek is pephimōso (be muzzled, and stay muzzled).
Each time, the muzzling was His. Falsehood, torment and chaos fell silent at His word, and the disciples in the boat could only ask one another, “Who is this?” (Mark 4:41). Peter was among them. Decades later he took the verb he had heard on the lake and handed it to servants, wives and husbands spread across five provinces, and he told them how to fasten it: by doing good.
Why Goodness Works
Doing good silences slander for a plain reason: slander needs material, and a good life supplies none. A rumour can outlive a clever rebuttal, since every rebuttal adds more words to the quarrel, yet it struggles to outlive a neighbour who turns up with soup when your child is ill. Julian could brand the Christians impious as often as he liked; the hungry of Galatia knew who had fed them.
Peter set the whole matter under four words, “it is God’s will,” and those words leave no room for guessing what God wants. His will, stated openly in this verse, is goodness done in full view, the same goodness He has always shown towards everyone alike. Julian’s complaint contains a small phrase worth underlining. The believers fed his people’s poor too, “ours as well” in his own grudging words, and that phrase is the clearest sign they had learned their goodness from God Himself, whose kindness has never checked anyone’s creed at the door.
Peter’s hope for the critics was also larger than their silence. In the same breath as the accusations he had written that they might “see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:12). The muzzle is meant for the lie, never for the person telling it; it stops the slander and leaves the mouth free for praise. Whatever became of Julian’s own heart, his hostels stand in history as a backhanded tribute. The lie had run dry, and the goodness was being copied.
Free People, Doing Good
Copying goodness for advantage was Julian’s strategy, and Peter steered his readers away from anything like it in the very next verse, telling them to live as free people, never using their freedom as a cover for evil, and to live as God’s servants (1 Peter 2:16). Good done to manage a reputation is anxious work, forever checking who noticed. Good done by people already set free is lighter by far. Those believers had come home to God’s household by grace before they lifted a finger for anyone, and the goodness that answered their critics flowed out of that welcome. It purchased nothing from God. It was simply what a forgiven life looks like from the outside.
An Answer for Wednesday
From the outside is exactly where most of us will be judged this week. A colleague may assume the worst, a relative may repeat an old story, a stranger online may decide what you are from a single sentence. The instinct is to reach for the lengthy reply. Peter hands you another tool. Answer the misreading with the next good thing in front of you, done steadily and without fuss, and give the accusation nothing to feed on.
Then look beyond your own circle, the way those Galileans did. Somewhere near you lives a person outside your church, your family and your friendships, someone with no claim on you whatsoever. Do them good today without first asking what they believe. Goodness that crosses that line is the hardest kind to argue with, and it has been leaving critics short of words for a very long time.
Declaration
When someone gets me wrong this week, my answer will come from my hands. I leave the clever rebuttal unsent and do the next kind thing nearest me, and then the one after it. I refuse to spend my freedom polishing my image, because I was released for better work than that. I do good to people who owe me nothing, the stranger as readily as my own, and I let it stand where anyone can see it. Lies run out of breath around a life like that. Let my critics find nothing to hold on to, and let them find, one day, a reason to give thanks.
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