Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD. – Leviticus 19:18

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 8, 2018): Leviticus 19

Nineteenth-century novelist Walter Scott in “The Heart of the Mid-Lothian” defined revenge as “the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.” Admittedly, hell must have a great cook. There are many offerings of the netherworld that seem irresistible to our temptable souls. If there is one thing that recent history seems to have taught us, it is that there are sins of our youth that can drastically limit or cause pain for us in our distant futures. But as teens, that reality is almost inconceivable. Then, our aspirations are almost limited to the next party or social experience. It is the next girl or guy with whom we want to be. Our souls are laid wide open to whatever it is that the cook of hell is preparing for us. And revenge is just one thing that is on the menu.

But revenge is the main course that can consume us. It can dominate our days often to the exception of anything else. We are going to get that person back for what they did for us. Our revenge never includes any understanding of the reasons why and no grace or forgiveness is ever offered. Revenge makes anything like that unthinkable. Revenge declares that only revenge must remain.

God offers this instruction to his people. Revenge is forbidden. Revenge precludes the existence of grace and forgiveness, and for this reason, revenge cannot be tolerated among the people of God. No grudges could be allowed to exist within Israel. They were to be a family that would move forward into the future together, and each would exist to protect the other.

Marcus Aurelius

Jesus would extend the image even further in his “Parable of the Good Samaritan.” Everyone is your neighbor, so everyone deserves to be treated like your neighbor. The temptation of revenge and grudges needs to be resisted, and these gourmet offerings of hell need to be rejected. If we are going to be consumed by something, that something should be the love that we have for each other and not our plans for how we will return ill-treatment and injury.

But maybe the best advice, and proof that this stand against revenge is a little more universal than we might think, comes from the Second Century Roman Emperor “Marcus Aurelius.” Marcus Aurelius was the last of the five good emperors; ones who apparently “had no need of praetorian cohorts, or of countless legions to guard them, but were defended by their own good lives, the good-will of their subjects, and the attachment of the Senate” (Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Book I). Marcus Aurelius’s advice - “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Leviticus 20