Right this moment, being a lifelong Seattle Seahawks fan is obnoxious—but no one’s going to sympathize when we just won the Super Bowl in February. Thing is, we remember how things went the first time Seattle won the Super Bowl. They reached it again the next year, but lost in agonizing fashion. That team was built of loud, combustible, chip-on-their-shoulder personalities. It worked as long as things were going well, but that game-losing interception was a hammer blow that fractured the whole relational structure of the team. The fractures proved irreparable, and the team came apart.
In retrospect, the demise of a potential dynasty began not with that loss but with a personnel decision made shortly after the win: Seattle cut defensive end Red Bryant to save money. Big Red, who was a steadier personality than the likes of Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Michael Bennett, had been the emotional leader of the defense for years, and he was the one who had given the team as a whole its rallying cry the season before: “We all we got—we all we need.”
That’s the attitude that builds a cohesive team out of a bunch of very different people. “We all we got,” so we have to depend on one another. “We all we got,” so we need to build one another up, not tear each other down. Any harm we do to another, we do to all of us, including ourselves. “We all we got,” so it’s up to us to take care of each other and be there to support one another. If we take this approach and treat each other this way, then truly, “we all we need.” When Big Red left, not only the rallying cry but the spirit behind it left with him, and the seeds of self-destruction were sown.
Peter would have appreciated Red Bryant, I think. Big Red’s rallying cry to his team captured the spirit of Peter’s message in our passage this morning. As he’s expanding his scope back out to include all believers, his focus turns inward again to their life together as a community; but just as it was for Red Bryant, Peter’s inward focus is for an outward-directed purpose.
He lays out five key things that should characterize us as followers of Jesus Christ. Number one, the ESV translates as “unity of mind.” The thought here is the same one Paul expresses in Romans 12:16 and Philippians 2:2, though the wording is different in each of these three passages. We need to be clear what this doesn’t mean: Peter isn’t saying we should all have the same opinions. The word literally means “same-thinking,” but not primarily at the level of content. First, then, this is not a requirement for uniformity of doctrine. Too many communities over the years have said, “If you don’t agree with everything we teach, you’re not really a Christian.” That’s not Peter’s point—it’s a perversion of everything he’s doing. Even more than that, second, this is not a demand for uniformity of political or cultural positions; there’s no support here for tying our identity in Christ to a political party or cultural movement.
The point, rather, is that as believers we should all have the same mindset. The word here is bigger than the content of our thought, it includes our attitude and intent. Peter’s telling us we need to have a common frame for all our thinking (and acting); we should all share one common purpose and one common goal. That purpose and goal is to be the gospel of Jesus Christ. As individuals and as a community, we should be gospel-centered and gospel-driven. Everything we think and say and do should flow out of the gospel and be intended to express the gospel to one another and the world around us.
As I noted, Peter’s focus here is the same as Paul’s in Philippians 2:2; Paul elaborates on it a few verses later in one of the most famous passages in all his letters: “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in his essential nature God, did not count equality with God a thing to clench in his grip; rather, he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. Being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
This list of five virtues is five Greek words. You might not think a five-word list can be carefully-structured—but this one is. For one thing, these first two stand in parallel with each other. The second word Peter uses is sumpathēs, from which we get the English word “sympathy”; no surprise then that the ESV translates it that way, but this can be more or less helpful depending on how we understand the English word. The root word here is the Greek paskho, which means “to suffer”—and if that rings any bells for you, yeah, it’s all over this letter. This word literally means “to suffer with,” but there’s another word in this family which means the same thing. The way things worked out, that word tended to be used more specifically, while sumpathēs was used more generally to mean “feeling with,” sharing a wider range of another person’s emotions.
This stands in parallel with the first word because at this point Peter’s calling us to the emotional equivalent of “unity of mind.” We aren’t only supposed to be one in purpose. We aren’t only supposed to agree on our core beliefs or share a common goal. These are important but not sufficient. We should also be united emotionally, by a common concern for and commitment to one another—the nature of that commitment will be highlighted next. Along with a common mindset, we should share a common heartset, rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep. As the science-fiction writer Spider Robinson put it, “Shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased.”
At the center of this list—we’ll come back to the significance of that in a minute—is the word philadelphos, meaning love for brothers and sisters. The New Testament, of course, takes this word beyond the most basic meaning as it calls us brothers and sisters in Christ. Peter is referring back to Jesus’ command in John 13:34, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” That’s daunting when we stop and think about the way Jesus loved us, because it’s Philippians 2 again: “he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Some of us find it easy to receive the humility of others, claiming it as our due, but refuse to humble ourselves in return. Others are willing to humble ourselves but not to receive others when they humble themselves; this is the pride of Simon who told Jesus, “You will never wash my feet.” Both are necessary for us to love one another as Jesus loved us, and that is to be the center and root of our life together in Christ. It is also to be, as Jesus says in John 13:35, our identification credential to the rest of the world as his followers.
The fourth word in Peter’s list of virtues, the ESV translates as “a tender heart”; “compassion” is another common translation. The Greek is eusplankhnos; eu- is the prefix meaning “good” (as in “euphoria”), while splankhna is the word for the bowels. You may remember, the Greeks thought the bowels were the seat of the emotions;, we do too in a way when we talk about gut feelings and visceral reactions. I think the Greek idea is an earthier and deeper idea of emotions; just compare the feelings that make your heart race, or flutter, with the ones that make your gut clench and your stomach churn. There may be an implicit parallel to the next word, though the Greeks wouldn’t have seen it, in that there’s an earthiness and a low physicality to both. In any case, the point is clear: we’re called to a deep-seated emotional commitment to one another.
This word also stands in parallel to the second word, “sympathy”; there’s an inward/outward distinction between the two which helps drive our understanding. Eusplankhnos has more of an internal focus, it’s more about the emotion we feel toward each other. Sumpathēs puts more emphasis on the action which flows out of that emotion. Both aspects are necessary for us to be the community Jesus is creating us to be.
The last word is “humble-minded.” This is an outlier in the list, because Greco-Roman culture saw humility not as a virtue but as something to be despised. I think it fair to say that the idea of humility as a virtue is rooted entirely in Scripture. The single biggest thing that has ever distinguished the people of God from the nations is humility. The Catholic priest and philosopher Ernest Fortin called it
the Christian virtue par excellence . . . humility first of all of a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many. But humility as well for the believer—to understand that all is grace; that we have no right to claim anything as our own—not our life, not our gifts, not even our faith. We are at every moment God’s creation.
This is, again, Philippians 2 language; this is part of loving each other as Jesus loved us. The scriptural call to humility was completely countercultural in the Roman world, and it’s heading back that way in ours. Humility in thinking is increasingly alien to our society, and our social media algorithms are doing their best to drive that increase. We have to swim against the tide here, humbling ourselves before another.
We have another inward/outward distinction between “humble-minded” and “unity of mind.” The call to humility in our thinking draws us to look inward, to consider and evaluate our attitude toward our own mindset, understanding, and beliefs. Are we invested in being right, or are we humble enough to learn where we might be wrong? If we all insist on being right, we will never find any sort of unity. If we’re humble in our thinking, then the outward reality of unity of mind, of a common mindset, becomes possible.
To offer one quick further note on these five words, I believe they’re structured as a ring composition. The first and last words are parallel, addressing how we think. Moving toward the middle, the second and fourth are also parallel, focusing on how we feel. At the center, which is the climax, the point of greatest emphasis, the heart of the structure, is what should result from the other four virtues: love for our fellow believers.
As I noted earlier, Peter’s inward focus here is for an outward purpose. Rooted in Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Peter says, “Don’t repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse.” To be sure, this isn’t only concerned with the unbelieving world. Theoretically, there should be no evil or abuse in the church, but we know that’s not so. There are wolves in sheep’s clothing, in the worst case. There are people who are quick to take offense and return fire, refusing to consider they might not be justified. There are those who are not humble-minded but have a spirit of entitlement. And then there are those who are wounded and hurting and react out of their pain. We have to be clear-eyed about that reality. All the same, Peter’s primary concern is that we respond to the world’s hostility with an answer it can’t even comprehend. That answer is the one Jesus gave us in Matthew 5: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Bless those who hurt you. Forgive them and ask God to do good to them.
We should pause here to say this does not mean asking God to bless the evil they’re doing. Asking him to do good to them is not asking him to do things that will feel good to them. We know from our own lives the work God is doing in us for our good is frequently not for our fun. His good work in us includes pruning and purging; his blessings may be painful, and repentance is often the most painful of all. Asking God to bless those who abuse us doesn’t mean asking him to reward them for it. It means asking him to do something which may prove even harder for us: to redeem them and make them our brothers and sisters in Christ whom we’re called to love as he loved us.
Peter goes on, “This is how you were called to live, that you may obtain a blessing.” He isn’t saying we have to earn our salvation by blessing those who hurt us, but there’s disagreement about what he is saying. I think it helps if we look back at verse 7, where he tells husbands, “Live with your wives in an understanding way . . . so your prayers will not be hindered.” As Karen Jobes puts it, “Peter teaches that men whose authority runs roughshod over their women, even with society’s full approval, will not be heard by God.” That’s not “you won’t be saved,” that’s “if you live and behave in a way contrary to the goodness of God, you cut yourself off from present experience of the goodness of God.”
I think the point is the same in verse 9. If others do you wrong and you respond by returning fire, that’s contrary to God’s blessing. To experience his blessing, we must share it even with those who abuse us and do us harm. If we hold grudges, nurture anger and bitterness in our hearts, cling to our right to judge and punish those who hurt us—even those outside the church—no, that doesn’t mean we lose our salvation. It does mean, however, we cut ourselves off from experiencing God’s blessing here and now.
So then, when we’re treated unjustly, we need to have this mind in us which is ours in Christ Jesus, to trust in God’s justice and not return fire, and to be more concerned for the good of others than for our own pain. To make the single most obvious statement I’ve made all morning, that’s hard. It’s too hard for us to do on our own. We need the support of other believers. We need the church, and we need it to be functioning as the church. We all we got, and we need to treat each other accordingly. We’re vulnerable even if we are supporting each other and building one another up; if we aren’t, we’re really in trouble. The American church has ignored that reality for a long time because we’ve had the support and protection of the powers that be, but that’s going away. We’re being reminded we aren’t a powerful nation on this earth in our own right: we’re a colony of heaven, dependent on the power of God.
That’s where Philippians 3 comes in. Philippi was a Roman colony. It was a military colony which had been established to help secure Roman power in that region. That meant all the freedmen of the city had Roman citizenship, and they took great pride in that fact. When Paul said, “Our citizenship is in heaven,” he was calling them to radically rethink their whole identity—to see themselves not as a colony of an earthly power, but as a colony of the power of heaven among the powers of this world. Peter here is calling his hearers to the same understanding.
Like Philippi, we’re a colony with a purpose beyond money. We’re the physical representation of the kingdom of heaven on earth, here to carry forward Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation, calling people to be reconciled to God through him. We’re a diplomatic colony to bear witness to the gospel: there is salvation in Jesus Christ by grace alone, and no matter what you’ve done, Jesus loves you enough he died to save you.
We can’t carry out this mission if we don’t show each other the love and the grace of Christ. We’re a colony. We’re an outpost. We can’t appeal to the powers of this world to protect us or do our job for us. Not any more. We all we got in this world. To borrow from Ben Franklin, we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. But God provides and the Spirit is with us, and in his Spirit, we all we need, just as we are.
More than that, we can only carry out our mission if we live with each other in love and grace—to frame it positively—because how we live with each other is how we earn credibility to preach love and grace to those around us. Why should anyone believe in the sacrificial love of Jesus if they can’t see us laying down our lives in love for one another? Why should anyone believe our God is a God of grace if we aren’t a people of grace? We can only teach people Jesus lives if they see him living among us. The only way we earn any credibility to tell them Jesus saves is if we live together as people who have been saved. May we ever be so, to the glory of God.
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