Peter, Hester, and Doing Good

Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. (1 Peter 3:8-9)

This is simple, but it is hard. A person is cruel to you, a person cuts you off in traffic, steals from you, insults you--it is difficult to repay these things with blessings.

I don't for a minute think that the blessing Peter says you will inherit is an earthly or immediate one, but he does pose this rhetorical question: "Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?" (v. 13) Some will try to harm you, of course, but how many will long be the agent of evil against a man who does good? Is there any man so brazen that he would willfully have harmed Mother Theresa? Perhaps, but that man is rare, I think. A commitment to do good is a shield, perhaps, a protection of sorts, if for no other reason than because it changes the attitudes of those who might otherwise do us harm.

Describing the changing attitudes of Puritan society toward Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes,

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new imitation of the original feeling of hostility. (110)

True, it takes seven years, but the hearts of these people are softened toward Hester. They begin by wanting even to kill her--"This woman has brought shame upon us all," one Boston resident remarks," and ought to die" (36)--but these feelings of hatred are transformed, becoming complete acceptance, even veneration:

It is our Hester,--the town's own Hester,--who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!" (111)

As Peter asks, "Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?" Some, perhaps, but Hester's desire to do good softens, gradually and quietly, the hatred of her townspeople, turns their hatred into love.