Today brings a reading from 1 Peter - the 1st Letter of Peter. People may remember this year because of football, as they also remember 1966. I remember 1966 as the year that 1 Peter was one of two set books of the New Testament which some ordination candidates were required to study, with close reference to the Greek text. Happy days!

The first letter of Peter. In the early centuries, conventions about authorship were different from today. If you wanted to pay tribute to someone special, and felt that you had some connection with them, and were on their wavelength, or had been their disciple, or knew their friends, you might attach their name to a piece of your writing, without it being thought dishonest. Had people thought that Peter definitely sat down and wrote this short book, it would probably be on page 1 of the New Testament. No one seems to have attached Peter’s name to the main content until 200AD. 

You have to judge date and authorship of this sort of writings by what is in them. And, indeed, judge their value, by what they contain and not by a label on the cover. Which other writers does the author seem to have read? When did those writers live? If the writer was the fisherman, Peter, arguably the very closest friend of Jesus, why doesn’t he quote Jesus and have special reminiscences, and how did the fisherman come to sound so educated? You also need to ask, what sort of society and period of history seems to underlie what you are reading? 

1 Peter is set out as a letter. It has a short opening section. Then a long main section which seems to be someone’s sermon about the Christian life, addressed to people recently baptised in the very early years of the Church. Then there is a very dramatic change in tone and style, leading to closing words. 

The passage we heard is part of the main section addressed to newly baptised Christians. It is smoothly written, but not overly down to earth. If you behave well, it seems to argue, no one much is going to harm you. That might occasionally happen, Christian slaves could be unjustly punished, but things will normally be alright. Good behaviour is going to be respected, generally. People are pretty decent.  

The writer seems over optimistic, inexperienced, naive. No one who had known something like the 20th century Jewish Holocaust could write like that. But towards the end of the short book, it all suddenly changes. The style becomes hastier and more nervous. Do not be surprised by the fiery ordeal that has come upon you. Christians now are into something like the holocaust, a savage persecution. There were 10 periods of persecution in the Roman Empire before the Emperor Constantine became Christian in the early 300s AD. 

We can perhaps pick out some useful ideas in the book.  

We might think that there is health and health. We may well have known people with significant ailments or disabilities. In an obvious sense they were not fine. Yet in a deeper sense they might be very fine. Genuine, human people with attractive characters, somehow inspirational, and undefeated by their circumstances.

So, similarly, 1 Peter seems to say there is getting into trouble and getting into trouble. People can be harmed unjustly, persecuted, punished, for being decent Christians, but, in a deeper sense, they can also be unharmed and strong at a spiritual level. That, says the writer, is very different from being in trouble for criminal activity, which does go with spiritual harm and weakness. Furthermore, those good people who are punished unjustly, simply because they are Christians, have a special fellowship with Christ, the good person who suffered unjustly, and yet is alive and triumphant for evermore.

Two other ideas might stand out. If challenged about what we believe, we must be ready to give a proper explanation of our Faith. Be ready to give an account of the hope that is in you. Perhaps, for us, that means actually engaging with the Jehovah’s Witnesses if they come to our door undermining Christian ideas of the divinity of Christ, and misunderstanding God as the Trinity. Perhaps that means some studying first.  

The other idea is, the one about us, as baptised Christians, being born again into a ‘living hope’ by the Resurrection of Christ. Sometimes we read that part at funerals. Living hope. You might think that all hopes were ‘living’, - had a measure of life in them. But there are hopes and hopes. We may work to make education, or the environment, or farming, or the legal system, or racial and religious freedoms, or even the Church of England, better in the years ahead. Which is commendable, although we might never live to see all the results. ‘Living hope’, on the other hand, is a hope for us, not so much for the future of society. We being personally linked now and forever to the Risen Christ, who is already beyond death.