When I set out back in February, to lay out the preaching calendar for this year, I had no thought of putting this sermon on Reformation Sunday. It’s appropriate, however, because the Reformation didn’t start as a church-planting movement. When Martin Luther went down to the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517 and posted a list of 95 statements on the main door, he was issuing an invitation to his fellow scholars to an academic debate on the theology and practice of the sale of indulgences. The church door was the community bulletin board. Whether you were a theology professor wanting to start a conversation or a university student wanting to find your lost cat, that’s where you posted the flier. Luther wasn’t trying to start something new, he was joining a chorus of voices going back over a century crying out in protest at the corruption of the institutional church and calling for reform. That’s why the great sea change he inadvertently began came to be known as the Protestant Reformation.
The way the Reformation is often discussed, you’d think the protest was the point, but it was only the means. Strange as it might sound, the spirit animating it was a spirit not of protest but of restoration. It wasn’t an angry, combative spirit demanding its rights and its own way—not at first—but an unyielding spirit calling the powers that be to self-examination and humble repentance. Sadly (for with the Protestant historian Mark Noll, I think we should celebrate the Reformation as a tragic necessity), the powers that be proved characteristically unwilling to humble themselves and repent. Instead, they responded with force, trying to crush Luther’s protest—and why not? It had worked for over a century. This time, however, God’s patience had come to an end: their use of force didn’t silence the spirit of restoration, it unleashed a spirit of retribution and the fury of generations.
It’s important to recognize two key points. One, the established church of medieval Europe was a real-world political power which controlled considerable territory, fielded its own armies, and demanded obedience from kings. This was a family squabble with real guns, like trying to hold a joint Hatfield-McCoy family reunion. The princes of the church had the power to look at you and legally define you to be not a Christian but a heretic—which meant, as a matter of official church teaching, someone whose proper fate was to be burned at the stake, like Jan Hus of Bohemia in 1415. The church could officially declare you to be not who you are and know yourself to be, denying your identity in Christ.
Two, every generation repeats the characteristic mistakes of the generation in power. In so doing, it creates the generation which will arise to depose it—which will in turn, once it gains power, forget the lessons which put it there in favor of the mistakes it rose to denounce. The lions of the present honor those who stood against the powers that be and the cultural consensus of the past, even as they vilify and demonize those who dare to stand against them and the cultural consensus they prefer. The church hierarchy of 1517 and the political-intellectual-cultural elite of 2027 share no beliefs in common but the one which actually motivates them: “We’re right, we’re better than everyone else, and we’ll crush you if you disagree.”
The Roman elites of AD 67 were no different, and neither was their willingness to crucify (literally) anyone who said otherwise. The faith and way of living of this small, dispersed group of believers in Jesus Christ called all their society’s assumptions into question. This is the reality Peter is helping them navigate. He begins this section of his letter with a proverb framed as a rhetorical question: “Who’s going to do harm to you for being eager to do good?” The expected answer, of course, is “No one.” It’s true enough in broad strokes, which is how proverbs work. Push them too far, and you run into problems; “haste makes waste,” but “he who hesitates is lost.” How can those both be true at the same time? They can’t—but if you know both are generally true, it’s just a matter of understanding which one applies in a specific situation. Peter is again saying, “If you do good as a Christian, there’s a lot which pagans will agree is good, and usually people won’t attack you for doing something they like.” Broadly speaking, people who do evil are punished while those who don’t, aren’t. The world can justify harming you for doing something it doesn’t like; harming you for doing good would violate its principles.
Of course, generally true is sometimes false. For one thing, there are always exceptions. Some people despise “do-gooders” and enjoy tormenting them. Others feel threatened by those whose goodness makes them look bad. Then there are those for whom it’s strictly business. “Nothing personal,” they might say, “the morally upright are easier to rip off and abuse, that’s all.” If you know the musical Les Misérables, you might think of the Thénardiers singing “Beggars at the Feast”: “Everywhere you go, law-abiding folk, doing what is decent, but they’re mostly broke! Singing to the Lord on Sundays, praying for the gifts He’ll send, but we’re the ones who take it, we’re the ones who make it in the end.”
Underlying this is the deeper reality of the world’s rebellion against God. The world might recognize individual actions as good, but the pattern of life that pleases God threatens the world even if the individual actions don’t. In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:6 (the fourth Beatitude), Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” They won’t be filled by anything the world has to offer because they aren’t hungry and thirsty for the bill of goods the world is selling—and that’s how it makes its living and keeps the bills paid. As New Testament scholar Paul Achtemeier put it, Roman authorities came to see Christianity as a “perverse and excessive superstition” (so Pliny the Younger, writing to the Emperor Trajan) because it had “caused the people to abandon their normal way of life . . . They had deserted the temples, they no longer frequented the meat markets, and they were allowing festivals to fall into disuse.” We see the first example of this in Acts 19 when the idolmakers of Ephesus launch a protest against Christianity because it’s seriously hurt the demand for their idols. It may not be justifiable on the world’s own terms, but the world doesn’t feel compelled to hold itself to them if it doesn’t want to.
Along with that deeper reality, however, is a deeper promise. The harm the world can do is only temporal, and therefore only temporary. The blessing of God is ultimate and eternal. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be blessed; in the eighth Beatitude, Matthew 5:10, Jesus specifically says those who suffer for righteousness’ sake will be blessed. Theirs, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, before which the kingdoms of this world will not stand.
To help his hearers understand how to respond when they face opposition and oppression for Jesus’ sake, Peter reaches back to Isaiah 8:12-13 to offer some dos and don’ts. First, on the level of our general spiritual and emotional orientation, don’t fear people who hurt you, and don’t be troubled by them. Instead, he says, fear the Lord. He doesn’t explicitly use the word “fear” in verse 15, but he doesn’t have to, for two reasons. One, Isaiah 8:13 does, so Peter’s original audience will hear it whether he uses the word or not. Two, Peter himself has said to fear God twice already, in 1:17 and 2:17. As we’ve seen with those verses, the fear of God isn’t terror of him in the expectation he wants to hurt us but the realization of how much bigger and greater God is than our understandings of “bigger” and “greater” can go, and how much more good he is than our best idea of “good” can be. The point is to revere Christ as the Holy One and honor him as the authority which stands above and relativizes any and every human authority.
There are additional “don’ts” in verses 15-17 which aren’t explicitly stated as such but are implicit in the positive instruction Peter gives. In fact, they’re all implicit in one word he uses: the word the ESV translates “gentleness,” the word traditionally rendered “meekness,” the Greek word praǘtēs. This is yet another callback to the Beatitudes, this time the third one, Matthew 5:5: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” As I’ve noted before, praǘtēs is one of the virtues discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, who defines the meek person as one “who is angry at the right things and towards the right people, and also in the right way, at the right time and for the right length of time.”
In responding to oppression, persecution, and suffering, then: one, don’t go on the offensive or respond in kind. Don’t match slander for slander and disrespect for disrespect, and don’t match the world’s unrestrained anger with your own. Two, don’t give up, don’t give in, don’t surrender. Three, don’t freeze up and say nothing, leaving the slander of the world unchallenged and unaddressed. Four, don’t retreat; don’t pull back behind closed doors and disconnect, don’t isolate yourself from the unbelieving world.
Instead, Peter says, be prepared to offer a defense to anyone who sees your hope and asks about it. There are three elements to this. One, the world should see your hope. This logically means, first, the world should be able to see you—you have to be fully and visibly in the world and engaged with the world. As the German New Testament scholar Leonhard Goppelt put it, “Faith does not close doors to relationships with other people out of either fear or hate. It turns, rather, in openness to others just as it turns to God.” Achtemeier agrees, writing, “Cultural isolation is not to be the route taken by the Christian community. It is to live its life openly in the midst of the unbelieving world, and just as openly to be prepared to explain the reasons for it.” There are degrees of openness depending on the degree of hostility toward Christianity in a given context—no one is suggesting Christians in Iran should put up a sign reading, “Tehran Church of the Resurrection” with a notice board declaring, “If Paul saw society today, we’d be getting a letter”—but even there, followers of Jesus should be engaged with their communities in a way which is visibly and meaningfully different from the people and the society around them.
Second, that difference should show the world its attacks on Christians and the gospel are false. Many won’t admit they see that—they’ll deny the evidence of their own eyes before they accept they might be wrong—but some will. Why? Because of your brilliance? No; Peter doesn’t say “when they see your brilliance” or “when they admit they can’t disprove your arguments.” Some will be moved to listen when they see and feel you have a hope they don’t have and can’t match. Arguments are a dime a dozen; the ones people can’t disprove, they can often dismiss as too hard to understand. Brilliance is less common but also less trustworthy, given how many brilliant people are also horrible and dishonest. But hope is precious and all too rare. If people longing for hope believe we might have it to offer, they will listen.
That’s element number one: people see your hope. Number two: they ask about it. It’s amazing how much more receptive and attentive people are when you wait until they want to listen to you than when you demand their attention and try to force them to hear you. Unfortunately, as noted last week, humble-mindedness is not in vogue these days. It probably never has been, but in a culture firmly committed to the proposition “You are entitled to my opinion,” humility in thought and conversation is particularly endangered. That’s unfortunate for the health of our society and the habits it forms in us, but it’s a blessing in one respect: if we can bring ourselves to believe not shouting is the best way to be heard and not demanding a hearing is the best way to be given one, those willing to give us an ear will be more likely to actually listen.
Three, be prepared to offer a defense. As noted earlier, this rules out going on the offensive, a point underscored by Peter’s stipulation of a clear conscience. In part, that addresses how we speak to others. We’ve already talked about meekness; the word the ESV translates as “respect” is the word “fear,” not toward people but toward God. The point is we can show the fear of God in our lives by treating others with respect, as people he made whom he loves, and by responding to them with meekness because we feel no need to defend ourselves against them. The gospel is scandalous enough to the sinful human heart as it is; if we speak in a way false to the character of God, the world will never hear truth in our words. This is also why it matters how we live; if our lives are not true to what we say we believe, our witness has no integrity.
Of course, words matter, too: people won’t understand what we believe if we can’t tell them. If someone asks the reason for our hope, we need to take both them and God seriously enough to be prepared to give them a good answer. That means we need to be able to express and explain what we believe, and to do so in a way they can understand. I find Karen Jobes’ observation on this point haunting: “This verse raises the question of how many Christians today could make an articulate statement of the reasons for their faith in Christ in terms that would be understood by modern society. Most ‘testimonies,’ when given at all, are given in a Christian gathering, using the jargon of the church, which makes perfect sense to the converted, but in terms that have little meaning for those who are not already believers. While such practice is an important part of a Christian’s development, according to Peter, believers must be able to relate the Christian faith to unbelievers by addressing their questions in terms they find meaningful.”
This section calls back to earlier parts of the letter in several ways. We’ve mentioned the fear of God. The encouragement to live in a way that calls the world’s charges into question recalls 2:12, while the statement it’s better to suffer for doing good than for doing evil repeats a point from 2:19-20—which introduces the biggest of all, Peter’s second appeal to the example of Christ in facing unjust suffering. The beginning of this section is easy: “Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” This is a straightforward statement of substitutionary atonement: Christ paid the penalty for sin on our behalf by his suffering and death, taking our sin on himself and giving us his righteousness in exchange.
The rest of this passage . . . stops being straightforward. It’s arguably the most difficult passage in the New Testament—Martin Luther thought so—but in wrestling with it this week, I think I finally came to understand it.
I’m going to keep this as simple as possible for the sake of time. If you want to go through it in detail, maybe I should take the next four Sundays and look at four weird places in Scripture. In any case, here are the key points. First, Genesis 6: “The sons of God saw the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. . . . The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men of old, the men of renown.” This provokes God to send the Flood, and so begins the story of Noah. I have long believed the “sons of God” in this story are angelic beings; people adopt other interpretations because that one is bizarre, but I think it’s the only consistent way to read the biblical text.
Second, 1 Peter 3:19 refers to “the spirits in prison.” Biblically, the word “spirit” always refers to non-human spiritual beings unless the text specifically says otherwise. To be consistent, then, Peter is referring to non-human spirits imprisoned for their disobedience during the time of Noah. The straightforward connection is with the “sons of God” in Genesis 6. Third, this may sound bizarre, but Peter didn’t invent it. There was a book which was influential at that time—it isn’t included even in the Catholic canon, but it’s cited in the book of Jude—called 1 Enoch, attributed to Enoch the grandfather of Noah. That’s the source of this story.
Fourth, if you wonder why Peter would do this, that’s where context matters. He’s writing to Christians in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. There were no less than four unique flood stories in Asia Minor which predate the first Jewish presence in the region. As a consequence, Noah was famous across Asia Minor to the point five separate Roman emperors of the second and third centuries had coins minted which showed Noah and his wife on one side and the emperor’s face on the other. The Sibylline Oracles, which were written in Asia Minor and may have already been circulating at the time of Peter’s letter, include oracles attributed to Noah’s daughter which contain sermons said to have been preached by Noah. Peter is connecting Jesus to a body of tradition which mattered deeply to the communities in which his audience lived. Part of Jesus’ victory through suffering was proclaiming to the fallen angels in prison his victory over them and all the evil they had unleashed.
[NOTES FOR CONCLUSION:]
On screen: one of the buses from the first Freedom Ride, attacked and firebombed on Mother’s Day, 1961 outside Anniston, Alabama
Mob held doors shut, trying to burn those inside alive; scattered when the fuel tank exploded, allowing the passengers to escape—they were then beaten by the mob
One of those on board: the last living Freedom Rider, Charles Person
Dick Rooker connection
This is what it can look like; but because they stood, neither attacking nor yielding, in the face of suffering, they became the axis around which the world turned.
Photo ©1961 US National Park Service. Public domain.