[sunday meditations]

1 PETER 1.3-5

Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

The Christian Hope. What is the Christian hope? The obvious answer would seem to be “heaven,” but St. Peter draws it out quite further (as does, in all honesty, the rest of the New Testament). I’ll never forget teaching a Sunday School class many years ago when I asked the high school students to identify that which Christians are to hope for. The answers were invariably the same: “Heaven.” I asked the students to draw out on a white piece of computer paper what they imagined Heaven to be like. Sure enough, ten minutes later, nearly all the pictures were identical: Heaven, in modern evangelical thought, is a super-spiritual, non-material place where we will be in a non-material Temple singing hymns for all eternity.  

I then asked the students, “How many of you actually hope for this?”

Of course, everyone raised their hand.

So I reworded the question: “How many of you genuinely want this?”

Slowly but surely, hands went down—the confident first, followed by those who were sheepishly ashamed of the fact that they didn’t look forward to Heaven.

One even confessed, “I fear Heaven. I don’t want to miss out on anything here: the friendships, my dreams, marriage and a family. Heaven hangs over me like a cloud. I don’t want it. I dread it. I don’t want to miss out on life.”

When we read the New Testament, and when we read about the Christian hope, we wonder just why the Christians hoped for this, oftentimes without realizing that what the early Christians hoped for is markedly different from what modern evangelicalism portrays as the classic Christian hope. This portrayal of Heaven is a mere parody of Heaven, and even (dare I say it) a mockery of Heaven. So the question is begged: “What is the ultimate Christian hope?” 1 Peter 1.3-21 gives us the Christian hope, step-by-step, and in it we can discover for ourselves not only the content of the Christian hope but the irrevocable joy wrought in its expectation.

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Born Again to a Living Hope. St. Peter writes that according to God’s great mercy, God has caused us to be born again to a living hope. Let’s look at these terms, beginning with the first:

Born Again. This term carries us back to one of our former terms, Sanctification. Remember that sanctification speaks to the twin aspects of being made holy: both the changing of our status (regeneration) and our progressive living-out of this status (progressive sanctification). The status changed is that of going from sub-human, dehumanized creatures to restored Human Beings. The moment at which Christians are sanctified is called regeneration, a term which speaks of something being renewed, refreshed, or—to come closer to a literal understanding of the word—to be recreated. Human beings are recreated precisely as Human beings; and a less-technical word that refers to this, and which reaches to the heart of regeneration, is the phrase “born again.”

We find this phrase elsewhere in the New Testament, the most obvious place being in Jesus’ dialogue with a pharisee named Nicodemus. Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3.3, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” A few verses later, he rephrases the statement: “[Unless] one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (v. 5) Jesus is talking about regeneration, and the language he uses is telling.

When a person is born “of the flesh” (v. 6), that person is born as a degenerate human being. The person is born into a certain life, into a certain status, into a certain position before God, with a certain (dreadful) future; ultimately, born into a certain identity. When a person is born of both “water” and “Spirit” (referring to the point of regeneration, i.e. baptism; and the cause of regeneration, i.e. the Spirit), the person is born into a different life, with a different status, with a different position before God and a wildly different future; ultimately, born into a different identity. Being born again isn’t just about being renewed or refreshed: at its heart it’s about recreation. The image is that of birth, a painful and gruesome thing but one which brings forth life. The Christian, born again, comes out different; he has been renewed and refreshed, remade and recreated, precisely as a human being. He’s gone from sub-human identity to Human identity.

The hope that Christians have isn’t due to anything they’ve done but to what God has done in us and for us. He is the agent of regeneration, and he causes us to be born again through Christ’s resurrection. The resurrection isn’t some sort of “proof” that Jesus really is God or Messiah; rather, at least from one angle, it’s a testament to the reality that the greatest enemy, evil and its co-conspirator death, has been defeated, and that God’s new age has broken forth in the present. We don’t have to wait until until the final resurrection of the dead to experience God’s kingdom: it’s a present reality, because resurrection has already happened in Jesus Christ, in the middle of time.

The resurrection is intimately tied to our regeneration/being born again because, by virtue of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, one of the promises of God’s kingdom—the rescue and renewal of human beings—is already taking place. The kingdom of God promises new creation, an idea which involves the entire cosmos, including human beings; and the fact that St. Paul (in 2 Corinthians 5.17) calls Christians “new creations” is a testament to the reality that while new creation hasn’t been completed, it’s been inaugurated (via Jesus’ resurrection). Human beings, being born again, partake in the present in that which will be completed in the future: namely, their complete and total restoration as human beings. And just as being born again is intricately tied to God’s mercy, so this living hope, which Christians have, is likewise ours with all credit due to God’s great mercy. The living hope of the Christian is focused upon an inheritance; but first, a word on hope.

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A Word on Hope. Everyone hopes for something. Hope sustains us in the most difficult of times. A wise man once said, “Hope is the antidote to suicide.” Once hope is lost, suicide is the only answer. Those who have tasted great darkness, those who have walked in the valley of the shadow of death, those people can attest: it is hope which gives sustenance to life when all other sustenance has evaporated.

Hope, however, can either be “living” or “dead,” in the sense that it can be “full” or “empty.” There is a hope that is an illusion, an escapist technique used to deal with the pains and troubles of the present life, and this hope is an illusion precisely because that which is hoped for is uncertain, not guaranteed, and more often than not, doesn’t come to pass. We can hope for the perfect marriage, the perfect financial situation, the perfect children, the perfect life, but reality, as we are living in the present evil age between Easter and Consummation, is not kind to such hopes. These hopes deny the reality of the present evil age, a reality that shows us that oftentimes what we want, we can’t have; what we have, we can’t keep; and that which we love will, eventually, be taken from us. Such hopes are “dead,” destined to never be fulfilled, in the sense that they never truly grant a fully-flourishing human life, which is what we all, in our hearts, long for.

Ancient philosophers spoke of the ever-elusive eudaimonia, which lies (and continues to lie) at the heart of human pursuits. This Greek word literally refers to fully-flourishing human life; and when we in the modern, western world talk about pursuing happiness, we are really talking about pursuing eudaimonia (even if we don’t know it). Those things which we pursue so ambitiously, and with such misplaced devotion—be they honorable or dishonorable—are pursued because we think, in our hearts, that they’ll deliver eudaimonia. And while we may get what we’ve always wanted, the testimonies of history’s most successful, wealthy, and sensual people will tell us what we don’t want to acknowledge: that even in the acquisition of our dreams, eudaimonia isn’t attained. A fully-flourishing life continues to remain elusive. These dead hopes are centered on the quest for eudaimonia, and each and every one fails because none of them truly deliver that which is hoped for. None of them provide a fully-flourishing human life.

There is, however, a “living hope”: a hope that delivers where all else fails, a hope centered upon eudaimonia, the living-out of authentic human life, the discovery of fully-flourishing human existence. This hope promises eudaimonia, and it is “living” in the sense that (a) it will deliver eudaimonia, and (b) its coming is certain: no matter come what may, this hope remains grounded and sure. It’s a hope which will not disappoint, a hope that won’t fail to come to pass, a hope that is centered on God’s faithfulness conjoined with his promise that this hope will be fulfilled. God doesn’t back down from his promises, even when it means he has to get his hands dirty in the muck-and-mire of the world, even when it costs him a cross. The Christian hope—this “living hope”—is centered upon an inheritance.

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The Christian Hope: An Inheritance. The word “inheritance” carried a lot of baggage to the original hearers, and we’d do well to tune in to the echoes associated with the word. An entire Jewish thought-system revolved around this one word. When God called Abraham, he promised him an inheritance: an inheritance that both involved a worldwide family from all the nations (which is being fulfilled in Jesus) and a tract of land, what we now know as Israel. This tract of land remains vital in Jewish thought to this day, and is at least one aspect of why fighting continues in the Middle East. Prior to the days of Jesus, Jewish scholars began reworking their view of the inheritance. In light of several prophecies and psalms in the Old Testament, it became clear that God didn’t intend his people to dwell in just one strip of sacred land: indeed, God intended for his people to inherit the entire world, and thus the entire world would become sacred. The whole globe—and, while we’re at it, the entire universe—would belong to God’s people, the Jews. When Jesus came along, this idea was a major part of Jewish eschatology. Christians embraced this eschatology, proclaiming that God’s people would indeed inherit the entire world—not just earth, but the universe itself; the whole cosmos!—but that this would happen in the future, at the consummation, when God would eradicate evil once and for all along with all its done to God’s good and beautiful world.

The inheritance promised to Abraham is promised to all his people, Jews and Gentiles alike, who are loyal to Jesus. This future inheritance—the entire world, rejuvenated and made new—is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading”: in other words, it is kept secure, and there’s no expiration date attached to it. It’s kept ready “in Heaven”: Heaven is a word with a checkered career, but here it refers simply to the Realm of God, the Executive Suite from where God rules over the world, with Messiah at his right hand. The language may seem to imply that our inheritance is Heaven itself; no, it is kept in Heaven. And when we get it, we won’t be going to Heaven to get it; no, Heaven will be coming to Earth, and the cosmos and Heaven will be fused together, as we see pictured in Revelation 21. When this happens, heaven and earth will be married, the cosmos will be permeated with Heaven, evil will be done away with once and for all, and God will be all and in all, saturating everything. His people will enjoy this remade universe, and we will dwell in this universe with God and with one another. This—not some immaterial, non-physical world—is the Christian’s eschatological future: dwelling in a physical world in renewed physical bodies along with God and with one another. This is markedly different from most Christian ideas of Heaven, and it’s refreshing, to say the least.

“How, though, does this relate to eudaimonia?” Enveloped within the future marriage of heaven and earth is the idea of resurrection; namely, the bodily resurrection of God’s people. We’ll look at this more in-depth later, but tied to the resurrection of God’s people is their glorification, a theological word which refers to human beings being completely sanctified, made holy. This doesn’t mean we become saints who wear white robes and sing hymns all day long: such an image is a caricature of what lies at the heart of glorification. Glorification involves human beings being made wholly and completely human beings and being enabled to live as is fitting for human beings. In other words, eudaimonia—fully-flourishing human living—will be experienced in this newly recreated physical world. All will be made well, and that includes life with all its trimmings.

However, this future is promised to those in Christ and them alone: only those who have been born again by God’s mercy and through Christ’s resurrection have this “living hope.” Those who have not been born again have nothing to look forward to except exclusion from this brave new world.

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A Salvation Revealed in the Last Time. Having sketched out the promise of the inheritance, St. Peter says that Christians are being guarded by God for their salvation to be revealed at a future time (namely, the consummation). Thus we find that salvation is both present and future. We are saved in the present in the sense that we are rescued from sin and death and revitalized by the Spirit into fully human being status, and we are called to live as is fitting for God’s image-bearers: in obedience and devotion to him. Salvation remains a future reality, however, because we are not yet rescued from the present evil age, and we are not yet delivered from the temptations and corruptions of sin and evil all around us. Our bodies remain decrepit and dying; we await the resurrection of the dead, and eudaimonia is a hope which cannot yet be fully experienced. Salvation will be fully completed when God gives us new physical bodies in which we’ll dwell in the renewed physical cosmos. Christians are saved in the present with the guaranteed hope and promise of full, complete salvation in the future. Christians thus look forward both to the inheritance of the entire cosmos and to our complete salvation: being renewed not just in our hearts and minds but also in our actual bodies, and as genuine human beings who will live satisfyingly human lives.