The Living Hope of Easter | Joy in Suffering (1 Peter 1:1-12)

 It’s not easy being a Christian in our world. It never has been. Jesus said that would be the case. We need a deeper joy, a deeper hope to live for to make it through. Easter gives that to us. So does the fact that God was thinking about us since before creation! The God who chose us before time began isn’t going to let go of us now. The future we have to look forward to will make everything worth it. That gives us reason for joy. Our suffering isn’t meaningless – it focuses us ever more sharply on the inheritance waiting for us.

Transcript

I knew the question was coming. I sat across the table from my friend as he walked me through the most difficult episode of his life, and as he finished his story, he gave me this look, a fusion of grief and anger, and said, “Where was God when I needed him?” Have you ever heard that question, or asked it yourself? In that moment of suffering, did you wonder where God was? It’s one of the most common critiques of Christianity, the so-called “problem of pain.” “If God is a loving God, why would he let that happen?” You can understand why this is a tremendous issue for people. We as a society are pretty empathetic when it comes to suffering. We don’t like to see it in the lives of others. We don’t like to feel it ourselves. We tend to view suffering and difficulty as intrusions into how life should be. We don’t see much use for it. Yet, most cultures throughout time haven’t had the same struggle with pain as we do. You can look at ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Rome, ancient China, and every culture would acknowledge there is value in suffering. But for many in our Western-influenced world, this is where Christianity hits a nerve. Why does God include suffering in my story? At least, could he tell us why he’s allowing this hurt? This idea that if we knew the “why,” it would be so much easier. But would it be? Today, as we continue the conversation we started last week about hope, we’re going to see how this living, dynamic, always-alive hope of Jesus answers a question you may have never asked yourself before: How can I best suffer?

Not “How can I avoid suffering?,” or “How can I know the reasons behind my suffering?” but rejecting the post-modern myth of suffering avoidance, and embracing what most humans have throughout time: Suffering will happen, and Christianity alone offers an amazing purpose for it. Who better to tell us more about that, than the man who’s been giving us his perspective of Jesus this entire year so far: Peter. At first glance, Peter might seem like the worst person to talk about what God has to say about suffering. He is not this heroic figure, who always stood firm by Jesus’ side, he is the one who denied, who deserted, and who despaired. Even after Jesus forgave him and renewed his hope-bringing purpose on the shores of Galilee, he still didn’t get it. Jesus tells him in John 21 the death that awaited Peter and he doesn’t stoically accept it, instead, he looks at the disciple John and says, “What about him?” Peter didn’t suffer well at first, but now we fast forward 30 years from that first Easter, and we find a child of God who has been so deeply transformed by the living hope of Jesus. So what does Peter have to tell us about suffering the best we can?

He starts by reminding us of who we are: Elect, exiled, chosen, blood-sprinkled, filled with grace and peace. He writes this beautiful song of hope and right towards the middle of it, he says this significant phrase when it comes to suffering, “In all this, you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” Peter is writing from Rome, likely a couple of years before he was executed to Christians who have been through the suffering of being shunned from their families, alone, and abused. And he says to them essentially, “Your pain is real, but consider more how what’s to come will make that suffering fade away in comparison.”  Do you see how counter-cultural this thought is? 

Our storms are but “a little while” compared to what’s to come? When suffering strikes, it often feels like it will never end. It seems like a sign of God’s absence, not his presence, so our sinful nature in concert with Satan tells us. They say that suffering produces nothing positive. They say that suffering is evidence that God doesn’t love you like he says he does. They say that suffering should be avoided even if it means self-medicating or avoiding, and like any other sin, what is Satan’s angle? Here it is: He doesn’t want you to experience what God has promised. He doesn’t want you to know the joy that comes through suffering. How does he do that? By trying to get you to forget who you are.

Which is exactly why Peter reminds you of your new identity. He says, “In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Through baptism, through faith, you are born into an existence, an identity of hope that gives you a joy beyond the boundaries of this world. This hope is not a “could happen” hope. It is already done! It’s rooted in the past, the absolutely certain resurrection of Jesus from the grave, an undeniable event. So to answer the question, “How can I best suffer?” we start by looking back to Jesus’ Easter victory, which gives us living hope. But maybe at this point, the question remains in your mind, “What about the right-here, right-now pain I’m enduring?”

That’s valid to ask. At the core of that, do you feel like your suffering isn’t necessary? Goes back to again our modern world, this idea that we can makeshift our lives to escape suffering at every corner. This idea that suffering is always destructive and not proactive. We lose ourselves in the soul space of sadness, and wonder why Jesus seems to be doing nothing about it. What are we to do in moments like that? The angels will show you. What do I mean?

If you look at the very end of this flat-out glorious gospel song of Peter, you find this peculiar verse, “Even angels long to look into such things.” What things? The gospel. The gospel that prophets and angels searched out intently. The gospel of the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. The word translated as “long,” is used in other contexts as “lust.” In other words, the angels are obsessive about looking into something so often you and I consider basic: That Jesus lived, died, and rose for us. But this gospel message has so much depth not even timelessness will exhaust its treasure, and wouldn’t you know we find echoes of its wonder even in our culture? The gospel after all is the story behind the story, the reality of all things.

Whether you’ve watched or read things like the “Dune” series, or Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, do you know what you find in each of these series that involve a ton of suffering and fighting and pain? There is a central figure who is looked to to end the suffering. There is a “messiah” figure who everyone looks to to make things right, that the suffering won’t be in vain. Do you see the reflection of the gospel? We as people are always searching for the One who can bring meaning to madness, purpose to suffering, and ultimately an end to pain and a restoration for all we’ve lost. Can you see Him? This is Jesus, who entered into our hopelessness to bring us a hope that can’t leave you or even the universe the same. How can we not obsess over that? How can we not want to keep thinking deeply about what this means for us?! So how do we best suffer? We look back at the undeniable event of Jesus’ resurrection, we look at the gospel in the present to prepare us to joyfully enter the furnace. 

Peter uses this very metaphor when he says, “These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” 
I have to wonder if Peter didn’t have a specific furnace story in mind when he wrote this. Remember Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? Despite knowing the consequences, they stood at the side of their LORD, to the point of being thrown into the fire, and yet what happened? They weren’t even burned, and God’s very presence was there in that fire with them. It’s exactly what the LORD promises his people in Isaiah 43, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine…When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” What does this tell you about your suffering? It’s not given you just to hurt you. It’s not given you to punish you. It’s not given you to end you. It’s given you to remove the dross, the distractions, the disillusionment, so you see Jesus through the lens of his hope-giving love. In your present suffering, God is saying, “I’m giving this to you because I love you.”

Abraham Calov puts it this way, “The essence of the cross is not punitive, but fatherly affliction and with the testing that is joined to it, a confirmation of the Father’s love.” Your suffering leads you back to the gospel, the very thing that Peter says, “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.” Have you ever found yourself speechless because you felt so loved? That’s what Jesus is obsessive about giving you. How do you best suffer? You best suffer when you run to Jesus who tells you that your future is guaranteed because he has defeated death, that God is taking care of your destiny, and that hope is always yours to live by. Why is this so relevant to the pain you’re enduring right now in your life? What does this have to do with the question you can’t stop asking yourself, “Why does Jesus not take this away from me?”

It means he wants you to run into his arms. He invites you to cry out, to question, to wrestle, but above all, he wants you to see how obsessive he is in loving you. There is one fact we cannot doubt about our God and that’s his love for you. Your Jesus who made you, who has known you before you knew yourself, loves you literally to death. He went through aloneness at a level we can’t comprehend, suffering that would break us, so you can have what Jesus said to those scared disciples in the locked room, “Peace.” He died and rose so one day you’ll get to laugh on glory’s side. He doesn’t put you in the flames and walk away, he not only walks with you, he shields you. He’s in the furnace with you, and when you see what suffering is designed to be, you know how best to suffer. The best way to suffer is to be a gospel-obsessor. To bring Jesus into the flames, the pain, the trial again and again and again and in so doing, you see the beauty of God’s hope beaming from the cross and empty tomb that opens your eyes to the gift of suffering. This hope-filled thought admittedly often leaves me a crying wreck because it gives uncontainable, inexpressible joy, “Lord, you love me so much that you’re willing to do whatever it takes so that I can be near you, that I can have a real home, that I can have real hope, that I can have you.” I know I’ve shared this quote with you before, but I’ll share it again, “In short, God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knew.”

So what does Christian suffering look like? It’s pausing. It’s reflecting. It’s acknowledging Jesus is in the struggle with you, and what happens when you do? You’re reminded that one day Jesus will come back, one day this will fade into the background because you have a guaranteed hope. You begin to see suffering as something not to be avoided, but a gift God has given you to lead into an even closer relationship with him, the most wondrous gift in the world, and just like our Christian ancestors before us, our suffering is so often not only for us, but the people around us. Often, it’s through the furnace of faith, that people can truly see the only true hope in the world. It’s our suffering that leads us to be as Martin Luther King Jr. put it in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” “extremists for love,” because the more you obsess over the gospel, the more you suffer well, the more hope you experience, and the more hope you share.

There may be no better life story that shows this than Peter’s. At the very end of his life, but two or three years after writing this letter we’ll be walking through until June, this former denier of Jesus, gave a lasting witness to the living hope of Jesus. As Peter and his wife awaited their own crucifixions in Rome, it was decided that she would be crucified first to inflict that much more pain on Peter. Eusebius, the church historian, writes this about Peter and his wife’s final day of being strangers and their first day of being home, “They say, accordingly, that when Peter saw his own wife led out to die, he rejoiced because of her summons and her return home, and called to her very encouragingly and comfortingly, addressing her by name, and saying, ‘Oh thou, remember the Lord.’ In your suffering, remember your Jesus who has chosen you, died for you, and rose for you to give you a hope that makes all your unanswered questions fade into a joy no doubt can touch. See him in your suffering. He’s there. Amen.