[sunday meditations]

1 PETER 1.22-23

…since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding Word of God; for ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.’ And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

Why are Christians to love one another?  The over-arching Christian manner-of-living is love; and this love is informed by the cross and founded upon what God has done in us and for us through Messiah. In 1.21 St. Peter commands Christians to love one another deeply from the heart; and now he gives (at least) one reason why: because Christians have been “born again.”

Here again we find that phrase which we picked up earlier in the letter, brought back into focus. All Christians are “born again,” regenerate human beings. God acts within the believer, inaugurating new creation. The Christian is no longer identified as a sultry, wicked, dirty sinner, no longer catalogued as a fallen human being. Such a miraculous and divinely-wrought change has been brought to bear that the Christian’s true identity is one marked by innocence, holiness, purity, and genuine human status.

Yes, this is our true identity.

Yes, we are called to live it out in every way.

No, we don’t do it all the time.

Yes, we fail time and again.

Nevertheless, despite our own stupidity and downright rebellion at times, we ARE God’s children. In his abounding grace and mercy, he has remade us in the image of his Son, in the image of genuine humanity. This point can’t be stressed enough, especially since Peter finds it integral to Christian living: Christians are to love one another because they are new human beings, and the way-of-living associated with genuine human beings, as revealed by Christ throughout his life and supremely on the cross, is one marked by love.

What St. Peter does in this text is akin to him telling a slave sold into a gladiatorial school to fight in the arena. The slave’s identity is now locked into him being a gladiator. His former social identities are gone, replaced by the new. He’s to live as a gladiator, train as a gladiator, fight as a gladiator, and (quite likely) die in the arena not as a slave but precisely as a gladiator. Christians have new identities, and because we have these new identities, we’re to live in rhythm with who we really are.

Peter isn’t content to leave it at a simple command: “You’re born again, so please, for the love of God, act like it.” He launches into a wide-birthed exploration of the scope of regeneration, doing so by echoing an Old Testament text, Isaiah 40.6 & 8. This ancient text is about God’s salvation in redeeming his people through “the living and abiding Word of God.”

Understanding what “word of God” means is integral to understanding what Peter’s saying here; before getting to that, however, let’s clear the air regarding what the “word of God” here isn’t, despite what some might think. It’s popular to believe that the “word of God” which Peter speaks of is either (a) the New Testament or even the scriptures as a whole, or (b) Jesus Christ himself. While we refer to the Bible in its entirety, including both the Old and New Testaments, as God’s word, and while we do find in the Bible, such as in John 1, Jesus referred to as “the word of God”, that’s not what Peter means here, and we know this because the text he’s echoing has a different understanding of “the word of God”: that is, the “word of God” not as a collection of ancient texts nor as an identification of Jesus but as the message of God’s salvation.

This message of salvation is the gospel, the Good News. The word “gospel” today draws forth ideas like justification by faith, Jesus dying for our sins, so on and so forth. Many presentations of “the gospel” read like a diagram or step-by-step program regarding how we can find eternal life, as if the gospel were nothing more than a guidebook on how not to burn in hell. When we find “gospel” in the Old Testament, however, it’s not referring to any of this but to the message of God’s salvation: God returning to his people following captivity, the inauguration of a “2^nd Exodus” similar to the one from Egypt but greater in scope and grandeur. Flip forward to the days of the New Testament, and “gospel” comes again, but this time there’s added meaning. In the ancient Roman culture, the Greek word for “gospel” is used to announce military victories or the enthronements of new kings or emperors. Scholars have often asked, “Which meaning does the New Testament embrace? The Hebrew meaning (because of Christianity’s Jewish roots) or the secular meaning (because the New Testament was written in Greek during the heyday of the Roman Empire)?”

The answer, I think, is “Yes.” These two meanings blend together into a violent and intoxicating cocktail, the gospel proclamation that was truly good news and glad tidings, the declaration of the end of captivity, the return of God to his people, the inauguration of the 2^nd Exodus, the beginning of the New World. It was both an announcement of peace and an announcement of war: Messiah, the Prince of Peace, has taken the throne following his cosmic victory at Calvary, and in the process he’s dethroned all the other “powers that be” and they’re not too happy about it (to be quite frank, they’re actually pretty pissed off).

The point Peter’s making is this: that which Isaiah 40 spoke to (among countless other prophecies) has been fulfilled in Messiah. Through Jesus Christ, God’s salvation has gone out to the Jews and, in accordance with his promises to Abraham, is spreading throughout the rest of the world.

The message of salvation endures 2000+ years later. The gospel remains powerful, despite oppressive opposition. The future victory of God remains certain, despite heavy losses at times. Those who have responded to the gospel in faith in repentance, those who have experienced for themselves the victory of Messiah, those who have been made new in God’s salvation, such people will endure. Unlike the grass, they will not wither and decay. Resurrection remains a vital and certain promise.

There’s that word again: resurrection. Not simply the resurrection of Christ, but the resurrection of all those who have participated in Christ’s death and resurrection in baptism and who will participate fully in that resurrection in the future. This is the main note Peter’s striking as he contrasts perishable seed with eternal life by imperishable seed (the word of God). It’s a contrast between natural birth (into a pagan community destined for judgment) and spiritual birth (being “born again” into the community of God’s people whose future isn’t negative judgment but vindication). Those who have been born again, the regenerate children of God, are to love one another deeply from the heart, since they are God’s renewed humanity and share together in the promise of eternal life and resurrection.