1 Peter 1:3
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy became our father again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,”
Where this sits
The opening of a letter to believers scattered across Asia Minor and facing hostility. Peter begins not with their situation but with a doxology.
Reflection
Living is the word that carries this verse, and Peter chose it against an obvious alternative.
A dead hope is one that has an object which is no longer there — a plan that has already failed, a person who is not coming back. Most disappointment works like this. The hoping continues for a while after the thing hoped for has gone, and the gap between them is what hurts.
Peter had personal experience of exactly that. Between the Friday and the Sunday, everything he had staked ten years on was in a grave, and he had additionally denied knowing the man. Whatever hope he had that weekend was dead in the precise sense.
So when he writes living hope, and attaches it to the resurrection, he is not reaching for a pleasant adjective. He is naming the difference between the Saturday and the Sunday, and he is the man who was there for both.
And the phrase rendered became our father again is the language of birth. The hope is not something Peter acquired by revising his outlook. It arrived with a new status, given rather than achieved, and dated to an event outside himself.
According to his great mercy is the only cause named. Not according to their endurance, which was about to be tested hard, and not according to Peter's record, which he never mentions without reason.
- Theme:
- Hope
- Book:
- 1 Peter