"A Christian Observed"
1 Peter 3:8-18
October 18, 1998

I'm reading vv. 8-12 again because they are part of the argument extending on to v. 18. It all concerns the kind of response that Christians should make to suffering, especially that suffering visited upon them on account of their Christianity by those opposed to them for it.

v.13 He is picking up the thought of the quotation from Psalm 34. "Eager to do what is good" harks back to verse 11; and "harm" is a similar word to "evil" at the end of v. 12. It harks back to Isaiah 50:9 where the same verb is found: "It is the Lord who helps me, who shall harm me?"

He is using "harm" in a special sense of course. He has already admitted (2:20) that Christians can suffer abuse and loss in this world. What he means is that nothing that a man can do to a child of God can fundamentally touch the integrity of his person or ruin him in any ultimate sense. It is the confidence of God's people through both the OT and the NT: "All things work together for good to those who love God and who are called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28), a statement that is made precisely in reference to the trials and persecutions that Christians suffer in this world.

v.14 Jesus said something similar, of course. "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake" (Matthew 5:10).

The NIV has translated the citation from Isaiah 8:14 according to its meaning in the original Hebrew of Isaiah. There is a debate about whether the LXX translation of Isaiah 8:14, which is cited here by Peter, is an accurate translation of the original Hebrew. The Greek here seems to mean "Do not be afraid of them" whereas Isaiah clearly was being warned not to share the fears of the people, not to fear what they feared. It is a small point.

v.15 What the NIV editors do not make clear is that the sentence "set apart Christ as Lord" is the continuation of the quotation from Isaiah 8 begun in the previous verse. Isaiah 8:13 reads: "The Lord Almighty is the One you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread." The point here in vv. 14-15 is that the fear of the Lord is the antidote to the fear of man. A proper reverence for the Lord will give courage in the face of human opposition and threats. "Set apart" or "sanctify" Christ as Lord, means not that we are to make the Lord holy, of course, but that we are to acknowledge his holiness in our hearts, to give assent in our hearts to the majesty of the Lord, his sovereignty over every human being and every human power.

By the way, we have here one of the many instances in the NT of a text from the OT that unmistakably refers to Yahweh being referred to Jesus Christ. Such texts as this one demonstrate as clearly as could be demonstrated that Jesus is to be identified with Yahweh. It is texts like these to point Jehovah’s Witnesses to, if you find yourself in conversation with them. What we believe about Jesus is that many of the statements about Yahweh or Jehovah refer to Him! He is Yahweh!

v.16 The negative form of the point he already made in 2:12.

v.17 A repetition of the point made in 2:20. The "if it is God's will" refers to the suffering, not to the doing good. That is, if it should be God's will that you suffer... It is the more personal form of the "had to" in 1:6. "Had to" because God has willed it.

v.18 For the third time in the letter to this point, a moral injunction is based on the work of Christ as our Savior: 1:18ff.; 2:21ff. being the other two. And in this case we gather up both the thoughts of the previous two cases: by suffering for doing good Christians identify with Christ and follow in his steps; but they may do so confidently, because of Christ's victory over evil and the certainty of their eventual triumph and vindication in him. They have nothing to lose by doing good that produces hardship for them, for it pleases Christ in the present and they already have right and title to inheritance in heaven in due time and no opposition can keep them from it (the thought with which this section finishes in v. 22).

Now, as I have already suggested, Peter is returning to themes already introduced in the letter. At the same time, it is perhaps fair to say, as some commentators do, that it is here, with v. 13 that we begin the main section of the letter and that this section continues right up to the final greetings in 5:12. The trials, the persecution that these Christians were facing and to which Peter has made allusion previously now take center stage. And the arguments that follow are all, in turn, offered to console and to strengthen the believers in the face of their trials. He begins in these verses by speaking of the confidence with which a godly man of faithful life can face the opposition of the world.

We have considered these subject before, in this series of sermons, as Peter has raised the same points in largely the same way twice already in his letter. And so there will be a certain measure of repetition. Some things must be heard more than once. But there are differences, elaborations here that should be noticed especially. In his repetitions, Peter is also building his case, adding argument and explanation.

And the particular elaboration here is that in v. 15:

"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect..."

The word "answer" is the word "defense" or "apology." It can be used in more formal contexts, as of the defense one would make in court regarding charges that have been brought. But it can also be used, in a much less formal sense, of the everyday answer we give to people, especially as here, to people who disagree with us or condemn us. In an interesting use of the same word in 2 Corinthians 7:11, Paul refers to the godly sorrow of the Corinthians, provoked by his stern first letter, in which he had condemned them for various sins, and what that godly sorrow had produced in them: what earnestness, what "eagerness to clear yourselves..." That phrase "eagerness to clear yourselves" is this same word "apology", "defense", or "answer."

In other words, rather than fearing unbelievers and their opposition, Christians should gently and meekly, but clearly and forthrightly respond to their objections, seek to clear them, and to answer their questions about our faith.

But the context suggests something further: that there will be that in a faithful Christian's living and character that will prompt such a curiosity and such a challenge. You have it already in v. 14 where Peter suggests that people in the culture around are burdened by fears of various kinds and that Christians, who do not have such fears, must, for that reason stand out and apart from the culture. We can think of so many things: the fear of death that, the Scripture says, holds men in bondage all their days; the fear of man and what man can do, the fear of God -- the wrong kind of fear, the guilty fear --, the fear of the future, of failure, and so on.

And in v. 16 he suggests, in the negative, as he had in the positive in 2:12, that Christian conduct must be a rebuke to the wicked to some degree. Honesty, faithfulness, generosity, love, humility, gentleness -- these are all traits that the world must recognize and its conscience must respect however otherwise it does not wish to do so. Being made in God's image as mankind is, the witness of their own hearts commends a faithful Christian life in many ways as the life that all men and women ought to live. Mother Teresa was revered in our day by large numbers of people who would repudiate root and branch the very convictions that made Mother Teresa what she was.

And so it has been from the beginning. In the fourth century, Julian the Apostate, the nephew of Constantine, who wanted to turn back the clock and restore paganism to the status of "official religion of the empire" which it had lost when his uncle had recognized Christianity, admitted to his advisers that paganism's problem was that it fared poorly in comparison with Christianity. The generosity of Christians and their bravery in the face of opposition, even the threat of death, had won for the Christians a great reputation in the empire. And, their treatment of the dead, he said, was another problem. They embodied a hope that the rest of the population knew nothing of. They did not fear what others feared; they had a courage that withstood even the fiercest and cruelest opposition and persecution, and they were generous and kind, even to those who were decidedly unkind to them. This could not help but produce situations in which people asked Christians to give the reason for the hope that they had.

For, you see, this is not just being nice. Lots of people are nice, though fewer are than are taken to be. It isn't even just being honest or kind. This is a life, a behavior, a character that is genuinely unnatural -- it flies in the face of the strongest inclinations of the human heart -- to fear death, to think vengefully of those who mistreat us, to curse those who curse us.

But Christians have their lives set on a completely different foundation, live according to a completely different principle, and that changes everything. It liberates them to live very differently, to live with hope and with a love that transcends even the hatred and cruelty of men. And that foundation, that principle, is the saving love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who gave himself, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God. It is not only that Christ set us an example of loving our enemies by loving us when we were his enemies, but in saving us from sin and death, in granting us an eternal inheritance with the saints in heaven, and in promising us his care while we are in this world, he liberated us from having to protect ourselves from others, or from having to grasp for every advantage, every pleasure, every satisfaction of this world while we are in it, for fear that when we leave this world we shall have no more. When you are a pilgrim and know that you will soon be in the Heavenly City, the difficulties of the way do not dismay you and certainly are not sufficient to overturn your character, to make you give up the deepest and most precious commitments of your life, the very commitments that put you on that road in the first place.

As Pascal put it:

"There is [even] some pleasure in being on board a ship battered by storms when one is certain of not perishing."

Winston Churchill gave an unbelieving witness to the same experience, in a letter home after some military action in which he was involved in Cuba as a young soldier: "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."

You read these verses, you ponder them in your mind, and you realize that the Christian life is really a mighty thing, that it is to be lived high above the ground, and, of course, founded on such principles and powers as it is, such promises and such a mighty love as it is, it is to be remarkably different than the life of worldly people who do not know Christ and have not experienced his love and do not have the sure hope of the life to come. I consider it one of my chief tasks as your minister, constantly to remind you of this; never to let the Christian life seem to you an ordinary or unremarkable thing.

Let me illustrate this in this way. In 1969 Simon Wiesenthal published his famous book The Sunflower. Wiesenthal, you remember, is the Jew who, having survived a Nazi concentration camp, devoted the rest of his life to hunting down Nazi war criminals. The Sunflower is about an encounter he had, while a concentration camp inmate, with a dying Nazi soldier named Karl. Wiesenthal was part of a cleaning detail assigned to a makeshift hospital for wounded German soldiers. As he went to the hospital with his detail, he would pass a cemetery for German soldiers in which each grave was decorated by a sunflower. He could not help but reflect on the difference between the treatment of German soldiers who had died and that meted out to his fellow Jews. Individual graves decorated by sunflowers vs. mass graves, unmarked, in which the victims of such terrible cruelty were unceremoniously dumped as so much refuse.

One day at the hospital Wiesenthal was ordered by a nurse, indeed a nun, to follow her into the building. He was led to a room where lay a 21 year old Nazi soldier, named Karl, his body wrapped in bandages, including his head and eyes. The young soldier was barely able to speak but before he died he wanted desperately to confess a crime that had been torturing his memory, a crime he had committed against Jews and so he felt must be confessed to a Jew. He wanted to confess his shame at having become a Nazi. Still more he wanted to confess his having killed a family of Jews trying to flee a building, crammed with hundreds of Jews, which the German soldiers had set afire. He could not get the faces of that family out of his mind. Actually, he told Wiesenthal, he had received his wounds, mortal wounds as it turned out, in a later battle in which he could not bring himself to shoot another group of Jews. While he stood there, unmoving, a shell exploded nearby that took his sight immediately and eventually his life.

As Wiesenthal listened, he tells us later in his book, he realized the authenticity of the confession he was hearing even as he was repelled by the story that Karl told. But he could not forget the sunflowers in that neat cemetery and the mass graves of his fellow Jews and the fate that was, most probably, to befall him as well. Karl was asking for forgiveness, but should Wiesenthal give it to him? Between the two of them, Wiesenthal wrote, there seemed to rest a sunflower. "At last I made up my mind and without a word I left the room."

Interestingly, Wiesenthal remained troubled by that conversation and his failure to extend forgiveness to Karl. After the war he took time to visit Karl's mother, wanting to find out more about his character. What he learned only confirmed for him the tone of sincerity and truthfulness he had heard in Karl's confession. He ends his book with a question, not an answer, "Ought I to have forgiven him?"

Now, no one who has not suffered as Wiesenthal did, should venture to reproach him. Perhaps especially a Christian when many who visited that terrible evil on the Jews were folk who would have identified themselves as Christians. That is not my point at all. And that is not Peter's point. It is not what I should tell someone else to do that is of the greatest importance. It is what I myself should do. How I ought to respond to cruelty directed at me. My point is simply to say that faith in Jesus Christ must, absolutely must, fundamentally reshape one's thinking about such a question and one's answer to it. And the answer must of course be, "yes, I must forgive even such a man, even who has done such a thing." I must love that man; indeed, must love him even if he continues to be my enemy and never expresses remorse. A Christian's life must rise high above the principles of self-protection and vengeance that animate the lives of other men.

I have used before the story I took from Prof. Geoffrey Wainwright, the ecumenical Methodist Liturgical Scholar, late of Union Seminary in New York City, and from his book Doxology, which is a systematic theology written from the perspective of Christian worship.

"A Turkish officer raided and looted an Armenian home. He killed the aged parents and gave the daughters to the soldiers, keeping the eldest daughter for himself. Some time later she escaped and trained as a nurse. As time passed, she found herself nursing in a ward of Turkish officers. One night, by the light of a lantern, she saw the face of this officer. He was so gravely ill that without exceptional nursing he would die. The days passed, and he recovered. One day, the doctor stood by the bed with her and said to him, 'But for her devotion to you, you would be dead.' He looked at her and said, 'We have met before, haven't we?' 'Yes,' she said, 'we have met before.' 'Why didn't you kill me?' he asked. She replied, 'I am a follower of him who said "Love your enemies."'" [434]

Two very different responses to terrible evil and persecution. And Jesus Christ made the difference in those responses. The only perfect man who ever lived, loved his enemies and suffered their cruelty without repaying evil for evil, insult for insult. What is more, he saved his people from eternal woe precisely by loving them when they were his enemies, precisely by returning good to their evil, a boundless love for their hatred, generosity greater than can be conceived for their ungrateful and hard-hearted indifference. No one who ponders Christ's example can question the rightness of that nurse’s behavior, Christlike as it was. No Christian can refuse to forgive, to love others, without seeming to claim that his own sins against Christ were not so serious as the sins others have committed against himself.

And no one who ponders human nature and human experience can wonder at all that the Turkish officer would ask the woman why and how she could have done such a thing as she did for such a man as he had been to her. And that is why, with all respect to Mr. Wiesenthal, his moral quandary at the end, easy as it may be to understand and to sympathize with, does not provoke anyone to ask the reason for the hope that he has.

Jesus said in John 17 that the world would gather from the love of Christians for one another that there is something genuinely supernatural at the root, something generally supernatural about Christ, that his followers should live and love in such a way. But, still more, he has told us here, through his apostle, that the world will gather that there is something very much needing an explanation when Christians respond to suffering, especially suffering visited upon them by those who oppose them as Christians, with meekness, humility, love, blessing, kindness, patience, and hope.

People who live according to the principles and powers of this world do not respond to evil and insult in such a way.

The Lord has given the world, in a sense, a right to pass judgment on the integrity and authenticity of our Christian living. Does our love for one another force the world to reckon with the true nature of Jesus Christ? Does our reaction to the unkindness of others force them to wonder where our life of hope, patience, gentleness, and courage comes from? Are we producing such responses in the people around us?

Now, we do not often, today in America, suffer such active opposition on account of our Christianity as Peter's readers did. Though, it would be well for us to ask if we avoid that opposition in part by silence and conformity and that if we were striving more to live a truly Christlike life of loving witness we would face more active opposition. That is always something we must consider and think about and pray through. Paul said, "if we would live godly lives in this world we will suffer persecution."

But, be that as it may, there are opportunities without number for us to respond to people in ways that betray the hope that we have, to repay indifference or active unkindness with kindness of our own, and to show ourselves unafraid of what others fear. I have been thinking of this these days and have found my days are full of such opportunities. I have found them so. Your conscience will direct you as you seek to put on this, highest, truest part of the Christlike character and in your hearts set apart Jesus Christ as Lord.