The Eyes of the Lord are on the Righteous

please excuse what are probably a ridiculous number of typos.... very busy day....

We have come to a place in 1 Peter where some of the themes we met earlier in the letter come into focus again around the issue of suffering for one's relationship with Christ. Upon their conversion, Peter's brothers and sisters in Western Asia Minor found themselves immediately disenfranchised from the Roman social order; we think for the most part they would have experienced the sort of ostracising that would have moved them to the margins of society. The questions on every one's minds in this scenario would have probably been something like these: What have I gotten myself into? Is my experience with God and this new community of church real, genuine and worth the suffering I have now experienced? Why does God not vindicate his followers? I suggest these sorts of questions because it seems to me that these are the kinds of questions he is answering in his letter.


Early in the letter, Peter employs the categories of exile and alien (1:1, 2:11) to his brothers and sisters. In so doing he wants them to understand their role in the world as one which is connected to God's redemptive work in the world from the beginning of time. Abraham was a stranger, a wanderer, an exile when God worked through him to establish Israel; Israel had no home in Egypt but God redeemed them and gave them a home; and when Israel was exiled due to apostasy God did not abandon her but made promises of redemption to her. It is this latter period that Peter actually names at the beginning of his letter when he greets them as exiles of the dispersion (or, diaspora). So, remarkably and startlingly, Peter encourages these Gentile converts to see themselves as a new addition to God's ancient people; as such, they are the ones who are inheriting God's promises and through whom God is working to bring redemption to the world. They are a royal priesthood and a holy nation and are meant to mediate God's presence to the world in words and deeds (2:9-12). So, the answer to the question, what have I gotten myself into? is that they have gotten themselves into the mainstream of God's redemptive work in the world. Is the new community gathered around the resurrected Jesus real, genuine, and worth the suffering? Yes! Because of Jesus' resurrection (1:3) they and we are to believe that the darkness and evil of this world has been judged by God and has no future in God's world to come. Life apart from Christ is characterized as futility and like the grass and flower, will fade. God's work through Christ, though, endures forever (1:17-22). The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone (2:8,9). Why does not vindicate his followers? The answer to this question leads us to the verses we took up this Sunday and will consider again next Sunday.


In 3:8-18, Peter encourages the community to understand their suffering as itself a sign of their vindication - a bizarre notion and completely ridiculous if not for the resurrection, and we think here of the words of theologian Robert Jensen: "Jesus resurrection makes possible saying yes to ways of living that simply make no sense otherwise". One of the great themes of the OT is the suffering of the righteous and the promise of God's vindication of them. Peter invokes this theme in his citation of Psalm 34: "For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil." But he follows this with a rhetorical question which invites his audience to see themselves as the righteous upon whom the Lord's eyes rest, while simultaneously suggesting that vindication is tied fundamentally to identification with Christ and his mission in this world - not with the absence of suffering at the hands of the evil. "Who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?" Well, lots of people will which gives rise to the occasions Peter addresses in the previous verses (i.e. do not return evil for evil but good for evil, etc.). Peter's main point here is to continue to help his people to have a deeper conversion of their imagination. Here Joel Green's words are helpful:


"The issue is this: life-events do not come with self-contained and immediately obvious interpretations; rather we conceptualize them in terms of imaginative structures that we take to be true, normal, and good. As a rule the world at large casts a thick dark cloud of despair over experiences of suffering, distress, trials and alien status. Peter insists that such experiences on the part of his audience must be read according to a radically different pattern of thought - one that grows out of new birth."


So here, we are taught to read the proverbial language of the OT with a conversion of the imagination, specifically through the lens of suffering with Jesus as we live out his mission in a world that still opposes his righteousness. God does vindicate the righteous and his eyes are on them but, as we mentioned before suffering for one's association with Christ becomes the sign of vindication; the proberbial language of God's protection of the good is given a gospel saturated meaning, because the axioms articulated here find their center in a recalibration of the universe - a recalibration for which there is evidence in the OT of the long tradition of the suffering of the righteous, and which has now received the divine imprimatur in the life. death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Green)."


For these early Christians to whom Peter is writing, they were able to ascertain quite quickly that their new lives were against the stream of the broader society and culture. The culture told them by marginalizing them and subjecting them to opposition. This is not so much the case for us in our situation in our socio-cultural setting. Not to belittle the suffering that many have received through being rejected by their families and friends because of their faith in Christ but we simply do not have anywhere near the same experience that the early Christians did. So, I would argue that the onus is on us to be careful and prayerful as we think about what it means for us to be faithful to Christ within our own cultural setting. It is to this question that we will turn next week.


Questions for discussion:


1. What practices and habits should a Christian engage in regularly to assist her in an ongoing conversion of the imagination? Do you feel that you are where you need to be with these practices and habits?


2. What are some examples of sins that we might easily overlook because there is not as much social pressure on us to recognize our the ways in which we are to be counter-cultural? For example, in Peter's world to confess Jesus as savior and Lord was to immediately blaspheme the emperor and put one's self in peril. Hence, one was always aware of one's loyalties. For us, we are in no great peril from our government when we confess Jesus as savior and Lord. What sorts of things might we not see because of that?


3. The church often treats single people like people who aren't married yet and families are held up as a model of human flourishing in a way that it seems like family life is the preferred way to serve the Lord. Do you think the church has not understood how to swim against the stream in this category?