“NEW BIRTH INTO LIVING HOPE”
I Peter 1:3
April 26, 2014
Westmount Park United Church

In our reading from the Book of Acts Peter accuses his fellow Israelites of doing a terrible and tragic thing. He denounces them for conspiring to kill Jesus of Nazareth by handing him over to the Romans to be crucified. Unnecessary death is a tragedy, and death by crucifixion is particularly painful and cruel. The death of Jesus, who was so clearly a man of God, as attested by the wonderful deeds he performed, was the worst possible tragedy. But, Peter declares, God has reversed the terrible tragedy of Jesus’ death by crucifixion. The good news of resurrection is just as wonderful as Jesus’ crucifixion was terrible.
What is particularly wonderful about the good news of resurrection is that it is not just about what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. It is about new life, renewed life for everyone. That is the declaration which is made in the letter which bears Peter’s name, and which we heard in our epistle reading. “By God’s great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” [I Peter 3:1] Because Jesus has been raised from the dead, because cruelty and injustice are conquered in resurrection, we now have new birth and living hope, hope in the midst of hopelessness, new life that emerges from death. Because God is a God of resurrection there are no depths of disappointment or disillusionment, no tragedies that cannot be overcome.
In the time that has passed since the cruel death by crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth there have been many other tragic injustices which have degraded life and disgraced human society. The reading from Acts calls to mind an ongoing human tragedy which has marred our civilization ever since the emergence of the Christian Church. It reminds us of the horror of the relentless persecution of Jews by Christians, a persecution which has been fueled by passages in the New Testament like this one from Acts in which Peter accuses his fellow Israelites of being responsible for the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ death was particularly tragic because he was completely innocent. He was sentenced to death because those who opposed him brought trumped up charges against him. But then, ironically, the vengeance of Jesus’ followers has led to trumped up charges being brought against Jews in every generation since then. Even the New Testament writers themselves went out of their way to place the blame for a Roman execution, not on the Empire, but on the Jews. We can only speculate on why the writers of the early Church did this. Perhaps it was because of the rivalry and animosity that existed between the renegade Christian sect and the synagogues whose authority they challenged, or perhaps it was out of fear of persecution by Rome. In any event there seems to have been a whitewash of the part which the Roman governor and his soldiers played in crucifying Jesus, and a deliberate shifting of blame to the Jews, who had neither the power nor the authority to crucify anyone. Indeed if it had been the Jewish religious leaders who had carried out a death sentence upon Jesus he would have died by stoning, not by crucifixion. What prompted the New Testament writers to blame the Jews and absolve the Romans we don’t know for sure, but the result, down through history, has been horrible and tragic acts of persecution, culminating in the holocaust of the last century in which six million Jews died at the hands of Christians.
So the capacity of human societies to act with unspeakable cruelty, including so called Christian societies, did not end with the passing of the Roman Empire. And the belief that inflicting pain and death can be a justifiable means to achieve some greater good continues to blind human beings to the fact that violence does nothing but breed further violence. Acts of violence, including acts of war, are born of desperation and in the end they do not resolve the conflicts which lead to them.
Canada has fairly recently extricated itself from fighting a war in Afghanistan where we were caught in the middle of conflicts that have plagued that land for decades, indeed for centuries, and which will never be resolved by force of arms. Fifteen years ago we were at war in the Balkans, trying by force of arms to settle the conflict over Kosovo which goes back not just decades or centuries but a whole millennium, to the days when Christians thought they had to use force of arms to defend their faith against the advancement of Islam. How tragically ironic that the crusaders fought battles to defend the one who said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” [Luke 6:27 29] Jesus taught his followers that they must love all their neighbours without exception, even those of other social and religious groups. It was precisely to combat ethnic and religious hatred amongst his fellow Jews that Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan. How tragic it is when those who claim to be disciples of Jesus forget that they have rebirth into living hope, not through the power of the sword, but through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
It is said that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. After all our tragic lessons have we learned the folly of violence and the futility of war? Have we learned that the only way to be reconciled with our enemies is to treat them with love and respect? Admittedly it is a difficult lesson to learn when our human natures seem so naturally bent on answering insult with insult and aggression with aggression. Shakespeare’s plays and characters are timeless because they portray human nature so well, like Macbeth who reflects that most tragic element in our nature, our inability to retreat from the path of bloody confrontation once we have embarked upon it. Once he has drawn blood to achieve his ambitions Macbeth cannot stop. “I am in blood stepp’d in so far,” he says, “that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Once we are embarked on the course of bloody confrontation it seems almost impossible to turn back.
When First Peter speaks of our being given “new birth” into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead it is reminiscent of what Jesus told Nicodemus, that what he needed was to have a complete rebirth. [John 3:7] Living by faith in the power of resurrection is very very different from placing our hopes in the power of military alliances. If the tragedies of the centuries since Jesus’ crucifixion are to be reversed we must learn the lessons which Jesus taught his disciples, lessons which all those tragedies should have reinforced, that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” [Matthew 26:52] New birth into a living hope comes when we cast aside the sword and choose Jesus’ way of love and forgiveness. New birth into living hope comes when we place our complete trust in the God who raised Jesus from the dead.
The living hope we have is grounded in a miracle, and we must never stop believing in miracles of resurrection. We must never stop believing that love is stronger than hate, that the way to combat evil is with good, that the power of death is conquered by the power of resurrection.
Let us pray:.Oh God, we do earnestly pray for peace in our world, particularly in places of violent confrontation and war. We pray for resurrection miracles in which understanding and respect and peace triumph over bitterness and hatred and war. This we pray in the name of our resurrected Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.