[AI translation] A great, joyful, thankful prayer is here lifted up from the soul of the apostle Peter. It gushes out of him like hot water from the fountain on Margaret Island, and he can hardly stop the great thanksgiving! But he has reason to, for everything he writes comes from personal experience. It is precisely the secret of the strength of this letter that it does not contain theoretical speculations, but reflects the personal experience of the writer himself, a rich testimony of what has happened in him through divine grace. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has begotten us anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." (verse 3) So living hope is the content of this prayer of thanksgiving. It was also the force that fundamentally changed the apostle's whole life. What is this living hope?It would be good to know its true essence if only because we all know its opposite, dead hope. Dead hope we know very well. We all had ideas about our own lives, we all had plans, desires, dreams. We worked for them, we hoped they would come true, and then came disappointments, failures, defeats: the knight of dreams did not come for the girl; the widowed mother was left alone, her children scattered in the world, although she had hoped to have happy grandchildren playing around her; the end of manhood came and oh, what happened to all those plans for beautiful creations? Life slowly flies by and still has not brought the happiness he had hoped for. No man has not hoped for something - in vain. The lost, broken, withered hopes in life are piling up. The more one lives, the more one understands what is the "heavenly fairy playing with earthly things", what is the "deceptive, blind hope that seems divine!"
The Apostle Peter also knows this condition. There was a time in his life when all his hopes were shattered and dashed. But he had great hope in Jesus, in the coming of the kingdom of God! With all the passion of his temperament he threw himself into this hope. And then came that sad day, Good Friday. But it was terrible to see the three crosses that stood there in the ruins of Jerusalem, staring up to heaven! And on the cross in the middle hung the hope of his whole life. It was as if his life had collapsed ! Now it is all over ! What is the point of living any longer?
And what a tremendous change must have taken place in this man's life, that after burying all his hope, he can now write: "Blessed be God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has begotten us anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Yes: something great has happened. After Good Friday, Easter Day has dawned! Jesus Christ, who was the hope of his life, with whom his hope died on the cross: he rose again! What there seemed to be a collapse, a death, was in fact a new beginning, the divine beginning of a new hope, the beginning of a living hope! Behold, here is the foundation of all true hope, living hope, hope that can never be dead! Behold, in the faith, in the fact that Jesus Christ is risen! Here is the blazing fire that can always rekindle our hope, can always set it aflame. All hope that is not kindled by this fire of the vitality of Jesus is dying hope, or even dead hope!
The living hope of which the apostle speaks means that a new dimension is brought into one's life: the dimension of the possibility of God. To hope is to count on the possibility of God! This hope, then, does not mean a general, indefinable improvement, a change for the better of circumstances, of fate, but the expectation of the divine person who has already proved himself once in history to be credible and capable. The very definite expectation that God, who raised Jesus from the dead, is still near, reigning, acting. This living hope is that God will continue and complete the great good that he began with the death and resurrection of Jesus - redemption - and bring it to its ultimate triumph in the whole world. The Christian man sees this world under hope, in a way like the man who ploughs the field in winter sees the snow-covered ground, already sprouting the promise of the future harvest. He can hope - and he always can! - who sees the invisible, the ultimate reality behind the fate of his life, above suffering and sin, above the present and the future of his people, above the tension of the world, above the negotiations of the great powers: the almighty God! His final victory!
This living hope makes you see the vision in the face of people and events just when life seems darkest. If there was ever a moment when Jesus could have been darkly visionary, it was when he stood before the great council. He was punched in the face, blindfolded, spit on, but He stood steadfast in the midst of it all and said, "From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the mighty right hand of God..." (Mt 26,64) What a victory in that desperate situation! Both His hands bound, and He speaks of sitting at the right hand of the highest power. With swollen lips and a bloody face He says, "I have the ultimate power! And so it is! Centuries have confirmed it! But the wonderful thing is that He claimed it when He was at the mercy of brutal violence. "From now on". That is the essential element of hope. He did not say you will see it some day, but "from now on". He thereby made his future victory here and now. To hope is to live already in the present in the consciousness of the final victory, of salvation. I bring into the present what is mine as a future promise.
Once, a young girl, writing in her garden, was startled by a shadow that fell on her paper. When she looked up, she saw that the shadow was cast by her long-absent betrothed, standing behind her. When the shadow of the cross was cast on Jesus, He saw in that shadow the face of His heavenly Father, and then He said, "From now on". Hope takes hold and proclaims with certainty the presence of victory. The apostle Peter says it in this way in the passage we read: to lay hold of that "incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading" inheritance "which is reserved in heaven for us, who by the power of God are kept through faith for the ages, ready to be made manifest in the last time." (1 Peter 1:4-5) So even death cannot extinguish the living hope. This hope is alive and well even when worldly science, authority and wisdom can only say "give up all hope" - even at the grave! This hope knows that it has a future. The man who hopes in the risen Christ is not on his way to death, but to receiving his inheritance. And this is not a meagre consolation and a hazy uncertainty for him. Just as the heir knows what awaits him, so living hope is the ultimate certainty! To live in hope is to be not a vagabond of this life, tossed about by the whim of fate, but a wanderer, welcomed home, whose hope grows with every kilometre travelled, because he is closer to fulfilment! So let us try to see the path we are on, the intermediate stages of our lives, the stages on which we are lost: under a living hope!
It also follows that a man of hope is a man of liberated life. The apostle Peter emphasises this twice in the passage we have just read. In this hope, he says, "you rejoice, though now, if you must be, you are somewhat sorrowful in the midst of various temptations, ... whom, though you have not seen, you love; in whom, though you do not now see, yet you believe, you rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory" (1 Peter 1:6-8). I could almost say that the very reality of Jesus, the possibility of communion with Him, is proved by the fact that anyone who dares to believe in Him can rejoice, rejoice with an inexplicable joy, even when he would otherwise have no reason to rejoice. This joy is not a mood, not an emotion, but a deeply resonant keynote of life. A quiet inner serenity. I felt it most clearly when I stood beside my parents' coffin. My heart ached unspeakably and yet I could still feel joy inside. It was not the joy of cheer, but the joy of faith in the invisible Christ. The joy of hope triumphing over death, the joy of the inexpressible and glorious joy of which Peter writes. Nor was the apostle Paul quite sure of his joy in Philippi prison, where he sat in the dark, his body bleeding from the lashes, in a stockshroud, and yet he had so much joy that he was compelled to sing. It was not merriment - he could hardly have been in a cheerful mood - but that certain inexpressible and glorified joy. The joy of liberation. Something like a mother must be after childbirth: there is still much pain, but even greater is the inner joy that comes from the hope of a new life!
Brothers and sisters, we who have such hope should really not walk in this world so uncertain, half-hearted, discouraged, irritated, depressed, depressed, as if God were raising us on pickled cucumbers! Christians who are head-shrugging, with broken backs, speaking with great solemnity, in a smeared voice, are only testifying that there is something wrong with their faith in Christ. To love Christ, whom you have not seen, is to prove that you can be impartial, kind, natural and direct with everyone. After all, Christ addressed people with a message of joy, with the gospel!
I often see the confidence of people who have money in their pockets, and the poise of people who have been given numbered seats, walking through the concert hall. This is how we must walk in the world, because we are people with money in our pockets - not money, more than that, because we are children of the richest Father, children of the Lord of the world! And we are the people who have a numbered place - that is, not numbered, but assured of a place in heaven - who know where we belong, who have a living hope through the resurrection of Christ.
And I know that we are burdened, we are worn out by the cares of everyday life, we are tired, we are often not very cheerful, but let us try to start the day in the morning with a living hope that counts the possibilities of God. Let us begin with the thanksgiving of the Apostle Peter: how good, a day begins again, a great opportunity to show my love for the invisible Jesus to visible people and to be of use to them with that inexpressible and glorious joy! "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has begotten us anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!"
Amen
Date: 29 August 1954.
Lesson
1Pt 1,3-12