The Living Hope of Easter | Don't be Surprised Life Isn't Easy! (1 Peter 4:12-19)

It’s not easy being a Christian today. 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 us that living hope. But don’t be surprised by the suffering. Jesus experienced it too. Rejoice in it! It’s proof you belong to Him! Don’t be ashamed – be honored! We have nothing to fear about the future – but everything to look forward to! We are in the hands of the God who loved us so much He suffered for us and gave his life for us!

Transcript

To get our conversation started, I will present two scenarios to you. The only ground rule is you must be totally honest about which scenario sounds more attractive. Here’s the story: Imagine Jesus approached you and said, “You will be meeting a new next-door neighbor in a month who will mock you non-stop for your faith, be a major annoyance, and actually will successfully petition your community to evict you from your home. But, because of that, you will end up living in a more beautiful house, surrounded by people who will become your best friends in the world, and through your witness of suffering, more and more people will come to know me.” That’s scenario number 1. Here’s scenario number 2: Imagine Jesus came to you and told you the same story about how your next-door neighbor will mock your faith, be a major annoyance, and successfully evict you from your home. But instead of telling you how it will all turn out, Jesus simply says, “Just trust me.” Total honesty now…Which scenario would you prefer? It’s such a natural instinct to think that if we know the reasons, the results, of what we’re going through, then we have the hope of control. But is that real hope? Is hope for control what we long for or the enduring love of God that never fails? Here’s where Peter is taking us today. He’s saying that God has placed suffering in your story because he wants you to know love. The Lord wants you to experience the only pure love that gives you a home of hope. But to know his love, you must know suffering.

Is that uncomfortable to consider? That to know God’s love, we must suffer? The struggle for us, especially in our cultural context isn’t whether or not suffering is meaningful. By and large, we believe it is. Think of the expression Kelly Clarkson made famous, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” She actually took that from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who has made a sizable impact on our Western society. We tend to view suffering as meaningful only when it’s self-inflicted. What do I mean? We go to the gym even though it brings soreness. We stick to a diet even if we can’t eat key lime pie. We study until the wee hours of the morning, trading sleep for a great exam grade. All these are forms of suffering, but we see suffering as useful, we feel like we have control over it, and its results.

But when suffering surprises us, when we have no control over it, when we can’t understand what possible good could come through it, it feels like an intrusion to life. Which is exactly what Satan wants us to think. He wants us to see outside-inflicted suffering as useless, hurtful, and meaningless. He wants us to be caught off-guard and thrown into doubting God. Which is why Peter says this, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” When your AC goes out in the middle of July, when your boyfriend dumps you out of nowhere, when you receive a diagnosis you didn’t expect, is not our first response, surprise, shock, frustration, annoyance, maybe some anger? Regardless, it’s not love. Often in our sin, egged on by Satan, we don’t say, “Thank you, Jesus! You’re teaching me something through this!” Now to be fair, we as Christians are not called to be “happy maniacs” with a phony smile plastered to our faces like the classic “dog in a burning room” meme. We don’t look for suffering, but we expect it, and get this…we appreciate it. We don’t dread the fiery ordeal of the furnace, we see the Lord’s love shining brightly in the fire glow. 

For you and I to experience the home of God’s love, our hope in life must belong to him alone. Because when it is, we are given a Christ-framed view of suffering. To see it as a refining furnace to remove anything and everything that hinders us from living in the warmth of his love. I heard a story once about a silversmith who was asked the question, “How do you know when you’ve put the silver through the fire enough?” And the silversmith replied, “When I see my own face reflected I know it’s been through enough. It’s pure.” Isn’t that exactly what Jesus does for us? This is the “fiery ordeal…to test you” Peter is bringing up. Jesus lovingly puts us in the furnace of suffering to remove all our false hopes, all our misguided loves, so more and more his face is reflected in us and in the process we get to experience a love beaming with hope unlike anything else. That’s what inspires us to “Rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.” In other words, we rejoice in suffering because we know the coming joy. This joy will lead us to do what R.C.H. Lenski wrote, “We will be skipping and bubbling over with shouts of delight.” So when unexpected suffering comes, by faith, we don’t see it as a strange intrusion into our lives, we rejoice because we know the home to come. We know our Father in heaven loves us so much that he wants us to experience his hope to the full and that can only happen when he melts away all the false hopes from our hearts.

Yet, is there still a part of you that finds this truth to be unnatural at best, or masochistic at worst? Can you see the angle of Satan and our sinful nature being exposed here? For Peter to say that we’re blessed when we suffer in Jesus’ name, it’s the total opposite of the world’s definition of being blessed. The world’s definition of blessedness always has an element of control. If you have everything going your way, if you are in such control that nothing surprises you, you see everything coming, now that would be the blessed life! I call it the “Sherlock Holmes” view of suffering. In those movies, Robert Downey Jr. portrays how Sherlock could anticipate every move and counter-move of his opponent in a split second and thus always come out on top. But think about this, if you knew every move and counter move that would happen in your life, do you see how love couldn’t exist? 

If you knew in advance everything a person would bring you by having a relationship with them, you wouldn’t be loving them for them, you would be loving them for what they would give you. Like a gym trainer, you use them to better your physical health but that’s where it ends. Or an HVAC technician or an electrician, you have a transactional relationship which is but a means to an end and not an end itself. Now translate that thought to your connection with God. If God is merely a means to the end that we want, the story we want to control, we wouldn’t know love. It’s the lovelessness of sin. When we don’t love the Lord for him, we miss out on our true home, and without his love we cannot have hope. 

That’s why we need constant reminders of how deep his love is for us, which is exactly why Peter gives us an identity check with one simple word to start this section, “Ἀγαπητοί.” The NIV translates it as “dear friends,” but literally it’s “Loved ones,” you who are agape-loved, unconditionally-loved, selflessly-loved, eternally-loved by Jesus. You are blessed because “if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name.”

Out of all people to say that, it’s stunning that it’s Peter. Remember a couple of months ago? This was the guy who rebuked Jesus for talking about taking up a cross and following him. This is the guy after Jesus rose from the dead who didn’t want to suffer at all and said “What about him?” The guy who wanted Jesus to keep all suffering away from him so he could avoid it. But now as he approaches his own death on a literal cross, he sees our Christian cross-bearing in an entirely new light. He sees what it really is: We are given suffering because Jesus wants you and me to know the living hope of his love. He wants us to rejoice that his name is on us. 

On the day of your baptism, Jesus gave you his identifying mark, megaphoning to the world that you belong to him! The greatest identity, the greatest hope! Yet this closeness with him also means you can expect the same treatment he received. Like Jesus said, “As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” The world sees us as strange intrusions because we reflect a love this world without God cannot understand. Jesus, the only perfect human being to ever walk this earth. Jesus who always loved people as they needed to be loved. How could anyone hate Jesus? Yet, he was nailed to a cross. But think about what his suffering accomplished. As the hymn says, “How great the pain of searing loss! The Father turns His face away; As wounds which marred the Chosen One Bring many sons to glory.” His suffering made you his own. It’s why we rejoice in the guaranteed result of our sufferings: It brings you closer to the hope-emanating presence of Jesus, your greatest friend. Think about it. The higher the intensity of suffering you go through with a friend, the deeper the friendship becomes, right? Jesus wants that with you! To enjoy the deepest identification with him. His love that gives you the glory of significance.

The significance that not only will suffering bring you closer to Jesus, but you will be vindicated on the Last Day. Your pain will not be wasted nor will your unjust treatment go without justice. That’s what Peter is getting at in verses 17 and 18. Unbelievers will first be judged on how they treated the household of God, and then they’ll be judged according to the all-important gospel they rejected. This is the love for this dying world that spurs us on, that we live out the hope of Jesus, waiting joyfully and expectantly for the Lord to do what he does best: Change hearts. 

With it being Mother’s Day, I can’t help but think of a mom whose faith shined this way. At my childhood church, this amazing Christian mom in her 70s, would always sit in the front right pew of the church, and without fail every Sunday, she would check to see if her kids came through the door. Sunday after Sunday, year after year they never came, and when I’d watch her do this each week, I couldn’t help but feel sadness. But as I think about it now, she was living out hope. Yes, these kids she had brought up in the Lord, shared Jesus with, worshipped with, never came through the door, not yet, the suffering she as a mom went through, and yet every Sunday she had that same hope her kids would return. But that’s what the hope of Jesus does, it opens our eyes beyond the suffering to see the glory that we long for.

I know only from a distance the unique calling of a mother. The nurturing, the fierce love, the self-sacrifice, and yes the empathic hurt felt when your child hurts. I also know some of you never experienced such a mom, or getting to be a mom, and the ache that remains, longing for what can never be. Yet, no matter your experience with motherhood has been dear family in Christ, you can say you’ve experienced real love which gives you the hope of home. You’ve witnessed the nurturing love of God who has had a plan for you from before time began, the fierce love of your Savior who went through the most lonely abandonment to wrap you in his arms, who chose to experience your hurt, and the Spirit who fills you with an inexpressive joy through Word and sacrament. Do you see how your suffering shows your true significance? How God longs for you to place your entire hope and trust in him? Anyone and anything else we place our hope in will falter, but when Jesus is our all in all, when we “commit ourselves to (our) faithful Creator,” when we deposit all we are in the hands of our Creator -Redeemer-Sanctifier who never will go back on his Word, who will never leave you longing, who will never isolate you, you continue to do good, you suffer well, because, in your suffering, you know the Savior is there. You’re home.

It’s why we praise God for Christians who remind us that we are “loved ones” of Jesus, especially today those Christians, biological or not, whom God sent to be moms to you. Those women who shared hope with you, reminded you of what we truly want, our one thing. What is our one thing? To know our true home. A home found in an operating room, a funeral home, your bedroom in your restlessness. What is this home that suffering opens to you? Jesus. It’s in that space you bubble over with joy even in pain, because joy is the only response a child of God can have next to him. Don’t be surprised if tears start flowing, because you now know what the only real love in the world is. That’s living hope. Amen.