Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
1 Peter 1:3
In 1 Peter faith is spoken of as hope, a living hope – not dead, futile, empty hope without reality and validity, a hope that makes alive. Let’s talk about hope (indebted to R. Feldmeier, 65-70).
“We are full of hope throughout our whole life,” says Plato. Having hope is one of the defining characteristics of being human. Human beings anticipate their future. They are ahead of their time.
On the one hand, hope is our strength. Our ability not to go from stimulus to immediate response makes for human development and culture. We can imagine different scenarios of the future and make long-term plans.
On the other hand, as the Latin proverb has it, Hope often deceives (Spes saepe fallit). There is therefore an ambivalence to hope which seems to be expressed in narrative form in the myth involving Pandora’s box (jug). Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.) related that opening the container released misery and evil upon humanity. When Pandora hastened to close the container, only one thing was left behind. What is left when everything goes wrong is…‘hope’. But is it this a comfort that alleviates some of the suffering or, in the form of “deceptive expectation” one more evil?
The hope of believers in the Bible is very different. It is not portrayed as ambivalent. It is ‘a hope [that] is not founded upon the unstable foundation of human expectation and fears but on the certainty of the trustworthiness of God; it bases itself not on something that one wishes to obtain or avoid but on God, the basis and content of hope. Right in the prayers of the Old Testament, the Psalms, one continually comes across confessions such as “the Lord is my hope” or something similar…’ Hope is not anticipating what we desire but a synonym for the relationship with God of trusting faith.
The NT builds on this: ‘The Christian hope is … based upon God’s act in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, through which he has defined himself as creator out of nothing and thereby as the death-conquering life force, who thus through the cross has saved from sin, death, and decay. The future is already decided in Christ and, with reference to the gospel, believers are then also certain of their future’
Having or not having such hope is the characteristic difference between Christians and non-Christians (cf. 1 Thess 4:13; Eph 2:12). We have an anchor laid in the future (E. Schweizer). There is a renewed reality (a new heaven and a new earth) which we get hold of by our trust in God. This trusting anticipation of the future is ‘virtually the life principle of the regenerate Christian humanity.’
Do you know the new birth? Are
you born again?
The question is not or should not one about American culture politics. The question is: Do you accept that Jesus rose from the dead, that in the resurrection of Christ God has shown himself to be the God who makes alive? If you are alive with this hope, you have been born again.
To find out whether you have been born, you don’t try to dig out a birth certificate. You live, therefore you must have been sired.
But to find out whether you are a child of God, you don’t even directly examine your heart to see whether there is a sufficient level of joy and confidence. No, you look to the cross and you look to the empty tomb.
If at the cross you see blood that was shed to cleanse you from your sins and if you accept that the tomb is empty because God raised Christ from the dead, then you have been given the new birth. You are a child of God. You have a fabulous inheritance waiting for you. You have a living hope.
May God grant us to love Jesus Christ whom we have not seen, to believe in him whom we do not see now, and so to receive the outcome of our faith, the salvation of our souls, when Jesus Christ is finally revealed. Amen.
