[sunday meditations]

1 PETER 1.8-9

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

We, like the Christians in Asia Minor, haven’t seen Jesus. We weren’t there to see him teaching the crowds, or performing miracles, or hanging from the cross. Our eyes haven’t yet beheld him; and though we haven’t seen him, we, like the Christians in Asia Minor, love him. We have devoted ourselves to him, surrendered ourselves to him, and we have made him the Master of our lives. The Christians in Asia Minor turned to Christ after hearing the gospel proclamation, the declaration that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, crucified and resurrected, the King of the World, who reigns from heaven and who will one day return, and who demands everyone’s loyalty and allegiance. Having heard the preaching of the gospel, the Christians put their loyalty in Jesus, repenting of their sins and being baptized into God’s family. We in the 21^st Century who walk the same path don’t see him; but we believe in him and, with the Christian hope before us, and let come what may, we can rejoice with a joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of our faith: the salvation of our souls.

Having written so much about the living Christian hope that belongs to those born again, a hope centered upon our coming inheritance, which is kept in heaven for us, and which will be delivered at the apocalypse of Jesus, when Jesus appears and does what only God can do (consummating the kingdom), Peter now shows us where knowledge of our hope should lead: to an inexpressible, glorious joy which causes us to shout from the rooftops. Such rejoicing (even such joy!) is often unheard of in a world consumed with pain, suffering, and hardship.

“St. Peter is too much of an optimist,” we might say; “Is he blind to the way the world really is?”

Let’s not forget from where Peter writes: Rome, where Christians are being hunted down like feral cats, slain in the arenas and lit as torches to light Nero’s palace parties. Any thought that Peter is blind to the hardships of the world falls broken in the sand; and any thought that St. Peter was immune to all of this (as if he were locked in some grandiose tower contemplating theology day-and-night) likewise breaks apart: not long after the writing of this letter, St. Peter died an agonizing death hanging upside-down on a Roman cross. It isn’t that Peter is ignorant of the way the world works; it’s that he isn’t focused on the present evil age; rather, his focus is on the future, on the Christian hope, and in the darkest and most difficult times, this hope, sustained in community and through the scriptures and prayer, draws forth within God’s people, including St. Peter, abounding joy.

This isn’t the Joy of Ignorance but the Joy of Recognition: recognizing the world as it is, with all its darkness, corruption, and decay, and recognizing, likewise, the world for what it shall, one day, be: a world filled again with beauty, justice, peace, prosperity, and life; a world where God is all and in all.

Some have mocked the Christian hope, comparing it to the outlook of an ostrich, which, according to fabled legend, sticks its head in the sand and ignores the world all around it. The New Testament, however, paints a stark portrait of the current world, confessing to the reality of pain and suffering. And while the New Testament acknowledges that the present evil age continues, with its classic trademarks of death, decay, and suffering seeming to flourish, the New Testament also looks beyond this current reality to the consummation. It is in both the recognition of the present and the recognition of the future that true joy and hope is found.

The lack of joy among Christians finds its source in many different streams, but at the top of the list is both ignorance (failing to understand that for which we hope) and nearsightedness: some Christians, rather than putting their hope in their inheritance, put their hope in the passing world which is present with us now.

The old saying goes, “Don’t put your eggs all in one basket.” Yet we often fail to perceive this wisdom and put all our hopes in the current present age. Those things many Christians hope for—the acquiring of our greatest dreams, the accumulation of wealth, filling our lives with all sorts of material and experiential goodies, trying to become popular and well-liked—are indistinguishable from what many non-Christians hope for. And just as non-Christians find themselves, in the midst of these pursuits and hopes, consumed with uncertainties, fears, anxieties, restlessness, and depression, so Christians, too, find the same.

This is because the current state-of-affairs in our world isn’t kind to such hopes. Focusing on the current world, and placing all our hopes within it, is a ridiculous thing to do: it’s akin (if I can be so bold) to a Jew hoping for fame and fortune while riding a cattle car into Auschwitz. While this comparison may offend some, the point can’t be missed: focusing our hope in this life is futile, because reality as it is now doesn’t allow many of these hopes to come to pass; and if we are one of the lucky few who actually attain these selfish pursuits, we’ll find not eudaimonia but a greater hunger, a greater deprivation, a greater emptiness, so long as our hope remains centered in this present evil age.

A glorious and inexpressible joy comes only by an acknowledgment of both the current state of affairs and the future state of affairs, and within this acknowledgement, putting our hope where hope is due: in God and what he’ll accomplish at the consummation. And as we do this, St. Peter says, we are in the process of obtaining the salvation of our souls. But before tackling that beast, a word should be said about joy.

* * *

A Word on Joy. This word carries all sorts of baggage, and what we mean by joy should be laid out in some detail. If we don’t know what joy is, how will we know we have it? Or is it something we just know we have, even if we can’t pinpoint how we know we have it? And is its lack always fixated on the two reasons above (ignorance & near-sightedness)?

It’s cliché to go to the Dictionary and look up the meaning of a word to define it, and sometimes such a route isn’t the best to take (such as now). Webster’s dictionary makes joy synonymous with happiness, gladness, cheerfulness. Turn to a Thesaurus, and we find that its brothers-in-vocabulary include exultation, pleasure, and contentment. Harking back to Webster’s, we find it defined as “a very glad feeling; happiness; great want, and all its pleasure; delight.” In a world caught up on an emotional bandwagon, it’s easy to pigeonhole joy into such categories. Obviously joy is something we want, and synonyms and definitions make us crave it more.

But nailing down joy to an existential experience is to do an injustice to what joy, as we find it in the New Testament, really means. Are the emotional elements lost? Not at all, though they may be misleading. When we imagine having joy, perhaps we imagine wading through life’s trials with an overwhelming sense of happiness. Actually going through life’s trials renders such an amateur understanding invalid. Here’s something we often miss:

The New Testament commands Christians to have joy.

The New Testament commands believers to rejoice.

Joy is almost always wedged within the murky morass of our world, in the trials and troubles that assault us; in these times, the New Testament tells us, joy is to be ours. As we shed tears and even blood, joy is to be in our hearts, and this joy is to manifest itself in rejoicing.

But how does this work? It involves the reorientation of our minds, the twisting and contorting of our worldviews, a manipulation of the way we see the world in light of the cross and resurrection. Joy isn’t something that just comes, something that God just gives us the moment when we become Christians, a gift that can never be reclaimed. Does God grant his people joy? Absolutely. In my darkest moments, in my prayers and tears, there have been divinely-wrought episodes of nauseating joy, moments when my tears of sorrow become tears of gratitude and thankfulness, moments when the troubles of the world seem to fade under the growing light of God’s love and his determination to make things right. But this isn’t always the case.

Joy remains something that must be fought for at times, especially in this present evil age, and it’s characterized, I think, not so much by a feeling but a mindset: “I will be joyful, I will rejoice.” And as this happens, we begin experiencing joy. As we reorient our minds around what God has done in Jesus, we find that while the troubles of the world don’t necessarily “grow weak”, we have new sustenance, new energy, and a new determination to see this thing through no matter the cost. It isn’t that trials become easier, it’s that we become stronger; and this is God at work in us. Rejoicing is rejoicing regardless of whether it comes from a heart bursting at the seams with good feelings or from a heart weighed down under the trials of our world.

Ignorance and nearsightedness definitely play a role in why many Christians fail to experience joy. Think about it: joy, producing rejoicing and characterized by gratitude and thankfulness, is something in the mind. This works on two levels: (I) Joy is intimately connected to the way we perceive the world. We’ve been riding this horse for quite some time, but a reminder never hurts (if only to cement it in the gray and sloppy folds of our brains): the way we perceive the world influences not only how we behave and how we make decisions, but also how we feel. We can try to force ourselves to have joy as much as we want, but the reality is that so long as our minds aren’t renewed by the Spirit, aren’t molded around the stark and bloodied cross and the empty tomb, joy will be something remaining eerily distant. Close, as if it could be touched, but just out of reach. Perhaps our fingertips brush it from time-to-time, but that is all. Joy finds its source in the mind. (II) “But we’re called to have joy in our hearts,” you might say, “and not in our minds.” True, true. But what does it mean to have joy in our hearts? Neurologists have known for a long time that all the feelings we have, the good and the bad (joy included), stem not from some super-spiritual realm but from physiological chemical reactions in the brain. There are some people who seem to have an overwhelming sense of joy, and oftentimes we look to these people with envy, and we try to figure out what they’ve got figured out that we’re still missing. It came as a shock to many that there is such a thing as a physiological disorder affecting the brain’s chemical and their interactions, producing overly joyful people. It works the opposite way, too: some folks, having no joy, will question their beliefs or faith, without realizing that the root cause of their lack of joy may stem from a brain failing to operate correctly. This is, of course, a result of the curse, of entropy and decay, the Fall making its home in our own physiological brains.

All this to say, having a lack of joy doesn’t necessarily reflect negatively on us as Christians: some people simply have the privilege (if we can call it that) of living with brain chemicals that act more like drunkards in a rustic bar rather than flocks of geese flying in unison. While some people seem to have the “gift of joy”, a joy that comes easily and without much effort, the vast majority of us must work for it. Not that its acquisition is bound entirely in what we do or don’t do: true joy finds its source not in our human efforts but in God, who works in our hearts and minds.

* * *

The outcome of our faith is salvation: the complete rescue and renewal of our whole selves, our restoration to genuine Human being status and living. God saves human beings precisely as human beings; we will do well not to forget this. Our future salvation is intricately tied to the Christian doctrine of glorification—being made, fully and finally, completely Human—and it is within glorification that our future resurrection (when we will receive new, incorruptible, physical bodies) finds its home. That is the goal. How, then, can Peter say that we are currently obtaining it (as the Greek implies), when it remains a future reality to be experienced by the Spirit at Jesus’ appearing?

In the present we obtain this by putting our destination into practice, living-out what it means to be truly Human in every aspect of our lives: in our speech and behaviors, in our thoughts and habits, in our relationships with both God and with one another. As we do this, we are bringing our future resurrection to bear on the present. Peter is ultimately writing about progressive sanctification, giving us a new angle upon which to view it: it is the process whereby we live-out, in the present, what we will be in the future (and what we already, at least in part, truly are): restored Human beings.

* * *

Joy & Hope. Leafing through the New Testament, one can’t help but see that more often than not, joy is tied to hope. In Romans 5 Paul says that through Christ “we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” In Romans 12, Paul tells the Christian in Rome to “Rejoice in hope!”

This isn’t a polite suggestion or recommendation: it’s a command.

Rejoice in hope!

1 Peter, as we’ve seen, is littered with the idea of hope, and the entire letter structures the Christian life around focusing on the Christian hope. Christians are to have joy in hope; and as they come to understand their hope, and mold their lives around it, joy comes as a byproduct.

It’s so easy to become distracted from the Christian hope, to set it on the shelf and focus on things “that really matter.” The new heavens and new earth, glorification, the consummation of God’s kingdom, all of that will be completed in the future, but we’re here, in the now, so why focus on all that?

Peter, of course, has a different approach: focus on that hope, mold your life on that hope, let that hope saturate you and fill you and spill out from your life, to the point that people take notice. Why else would he tell the Christians to be prepared “to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”? As it says in Proverbs 10, “The hope of the righteous brings joy.”

* * *

Joy & Genuine Humanness. The Bible talks a lot about having “the mind of Christ,” or “the attitude of Christ,” of conforming to “the image of Christ.” Jesus stands as the Perfect Human, the model of what God intended humans to be all along. Because of sin, our image as human beings is marred; but Christ, absent sin, stands as the image of genuine humanness. In this sense, Jesus was far more human than we give him credit; as much as the Gnostics may have tried to reduce his humanness to an illusion, the New Testament seems to say that we are the ones whose humanness is all but an illusion: we have been dehumanized, scarred by sin, but Jesus is what Human was to be all along. The focus of sanctification, becoming like Christ, isn’t about becoming like a 1^st Century Jewish fellow; it’s about being made fully and completely human.

The work of Christ does lots of things, but the point of it all is restoration: the restoration of human beings to a right relationship with God, one another, themselves, and the cosmos as well. A better word would be new creation: in Christ, God remakes us into genuine human beings, and then he tells us to start living like it (with some much-needed help from the Spirit, of course). Understanding the point of redemption to be just that—redemption!—enables us to look at the Christian life not just as a different way of living that we need to adopt but the appropriate way of living for genuine human beings. The Spirit works in us and with us to transform us from self-seeking, self-loving people into God-loving, kingdom-loving people. The point of transformation is to take us from dehumanization to full-fledged genuine human living (and we note that transformation doesn’t culminate until glorification, and that’s a complete and utter work of God: until then, we won’t be perfect, and we won’t fully radiate our true identities as redeemed human beings).

All those New Testament descriptions and lists of how we should live serve as signposts to what genuine human living looks like. The Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 is perhaps the greatest signpost, a panoramic vision of what a fully-flourishing human life looks like. Joy, being a key component of the fruit of the Spirit, is thus a facet of genuine human living. As we grow in Christ, as we come to experience him more and more, as we experience his change in our hearts and minds, we’re fitting more comfortably into the clothes of genuine human living. When we’re out-of-sync with who we are, there’s often a feeling of disconnectedness, or emptiness. But in Christ, we’re being brought back to who we truly are, who we’re meant to be. As we conform to the image of Christ, to what it means to be truly human, joy seeps through our lives.

Joy is certainly something given to us by God, but it’s more than “just another gift.” There’s a lot more to it. When we come to embrace who we really are as human beings, and live in a manner that’s appropriate for genuine human beings, joy follows. This may be what the New Testament’s hitting on when it talks about the law of liberty, or our liberty in Christ. “But how is conforming to a wholly different manner of living anything close to freedom and liberty?” Sitting on my desk right now is a half-finished model of the U.S.S. Constitution, an 18^th century Navy vessel that didn’t enjoy such things as engines. The ship had to use its sails in different patterns to use the wind to its advantage. When a ship’s sailing with the wind, it’s been said to have a certain liberty in its sails; but when it moves against the wind, it stalls or bobs around listlessly. It’s the same with Christian liberty: when we move in rhythm with how we’re supposed to live and who we’re supposed to be, we’re not stalling or bobbing around like a bobber in an empty pond. We’re moving in conjunction with the wind, filling our sails with the Spirit and genuine human living, and that brings us the truest kind of liberty, that liberty of being who we are in the first place. And as we fit into the skin God had set out for us since Day One (or, rather, Day Six, if you’re a literalist), we find joy leaking out from our hearts, since joy is a facet of genuine human living.