SOME GOOD ADVICE ABOUT NEITHER BEING OBDURATE NOR REMAINING OBDURATE
Once, when J was in the Holy City, a person who loved Christ approached me and said, "There had been a small altercation between my brother and me, and he will not be reconciled with me. You go speak to him and reason with him." I received this commission joyfully.
I called the brother and spoke to him about those things that foster love and peace. It seemed as though he was coming around to my point of view. At last, he said to me, "I cannot be reconciled with him because I swore on the cross." I responded with a smile, "Your oath was equivalent to saying, 'Oh Christ, by the honorable cross, I will not keep your commandments, but I will do the will of your enemy, the devil.' We ought not only to halt what we have set in motion, but also (and even more so) to repent and lament for what we have wrongly instigated to our own hurt.
As the divinely inspired Basil says, 'If Herod had repented and not kept his oath, he would not have committed that heinous sin of beheading John the Forerunner of Christ.' Finally, I presented the opinion of Saint Basil, which he took from the Gospel: that when Christ wanted to wash the feet of Saint Peter, although the apostle obstinately refused at first, he afterwards changed his mind. Some manuscripts add that when he heard this, he was reconciled with his brother.