The name of Tullian Tchividjian may be faintly familiar to some of you; if so, it’s most likely for his high-profile moral failure in ministry over a decade ago—he resigned as senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale in 2015 after admitting to an extramarital affair; he’s now known to have had at least one other affair before that one. Up until that point, he’d largely been a golden boy—charismatic pastor, successful writer, and Billy Graham’s grandson—and while I must confess to an unreasoning prejudice against that category of person, he did some good stuff. In particular, I go back to an essay he wrote in 2013 titled “Church, We Have a Problem” in which he made a striking observation:
Spend any time in the American church, and you’ll hear legalism and lawlessness presented as two ditches on either side of the Gospel that we must avoid. Legalism, they say, happens when you focus too much on law or rules, and lawlessness when you focus too much on grace. . . .
It is more theologically accurate to say that the one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”). . . . Either way, you’re still trying to save yourself—which means both are legalistic, because both are self-salvation projects.
Tchividjian focused his application on the importance of preaching grace, but I value his comments most for what they show us about the world: the world wants us all to be legalists, and doesn’t much care which kind. It wants us to be conformists. Some times and cultures favor “keep the rules” conformists, others favor “break the rules” conformists, but what really matters either way aren’t the obvious rules being kept or broken. What matters is the deeper set you aren’t allowed to question.
We call our culture individualistic, and it is, in a sense: it values the desires of the individual above the well-being of the group. It’s quick to praise self-expression and values people creating their own identities for themselves. Here’s the thing, though: as people have observed about American culture going at least as far back as Mark Twain, it’s great to be an individual and chart your own course as long as you’re an individual just like everyone else. As long as your unique identity conforms to one of the socially-approved templates, you’re golden. If you’re actually different from the world, well . . . bummer of a birthmark, Hal.
What the world wants to know is simple: are you part of the system or not? If you are, if you follow its rules and honor its priorities, the world is running the show in your life. You’re its employee and its customer, operating under its management. Sure, the world isn’t monolithic. It has factions that want different things and approve of different things. That’s why we have the great tribal organizations we still call political parties, which are coalitions of these factions. On the surface, they disagree on everything. Look deeper, and you’ll find they share the same root principles and priorities—their disagreements, nasty and putrid as they increasingly are, are only over how to order them and apply them. Spenders and savers might seem completely different because they honor money in different ways, but they agree on its primacy and importance. That’s what the world cares about. Disciples of Jesus should see the world differently, but we keep falling back into these patterns, thinking and acting like the world owns and runs us, too.
Peter wants us to see the world and ourselves differently so we live differently. He starts here by laying out the basis for living differently: Therefore, since Christ suffered in the flesh. He’s reaching back to 3:18 to pick up the main thread of his argument, and he’s raising up Christ as our example—but how exactly he’s doing that is much disputed. This passage isn’t as hard as the verses immediately before it, but that doesn’t make it easy or obviously clear—and I part ways with the ESV for the rest of verse 1. Therefore, since Christ suffered in the flesh, Peter says, you also arm yourselves with the same insight (that is, that the one who suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin). On my read, he’s not making a statement about “whoever has suffered,” he’s talking about Jesus. Jesus suffered in the flesh, that suffering is done, and he no longer has to deal with sin. His suffering and death brought his victory, and he knew it would be so.
Therefore, Peter says, we also need to consciously equip ourselves with this insight. Because we are in Jesus by his Holy Spirit, our suffering has an end, our struggle with sin has an end, when this life ends. If we fight against our sin, if we suffer in the flesh for doing so—including, for instance, the suffering of earthly desires deliberately refused—we will ultimately share in the victory of Jesus over sin. We will cease from sin and it will trouble us no more. This is our weapon against the sins with which we struggle.
Peter is also concerned with what this looks like in practice—what’s the character of living differently? I think we see several aspects. One, our life is to be for a different purpose, no longer for human passions but for the will of God. Obviously then, two, our life should be expressed in different practices. Now, Peter’s list of things we shouldn’t be doing is pretty extreme—acts of lawlessness, lust, orgies, drunkenness, carousing, and so on. Everything on that list, in fact, was recognized and denounced as a vice by pagan writers, except for the last one, idolatry. That’s the key to understanding this verse, because when I say the Greco-Roman world recognized the other things as vices, there’s one big “but” there: they were all part of the celebration at one or more of the major Greco-Roman religious festivals.
The point isn’t just “Don’t do these things”; that would have been completely uncontroversial. The point is to abandon idolatry, to stop worshiping the gods of the culture, and thus not do these other things even when it’s socially expected. Doing that would mark you as someone who followed a different Lord than the world around you and gave your allegiance to a different authority—and thus as someone not properly under control. But Peter says, “Just don’t. There’s been quite enough time for that foolishness already.”
At the heart of this change in practices is a different posture from the world. Christianity isn’t actually about morality. It involves morality, but that’s not the primary concern or focus. The world is all about morality. It’s always talking about morality, even when denouncing Christian morality. The difference is God is on about transformation, changing us from the inside out by the power of his Spirit. The change in behavior and morality is an effect, it’s the fruit, not the main thing. The world is about control. That’s the central concern, and that’s the purpose. We’ve been set free from that control, and we need to live free of it. The old owner is gone, and we’re under new management.
1 Peter 4:6 has tied a lot of brains in knots over the years, but I think if we take it together with verse 5, what we see is the vindication of living differently. The world goes after those who defy it to follow Christ; it judges, condemns, and sentences such deviants and considers their death to be its victory. Peter says, no, those who have died for Christ will be vindicated in the end. The world thinks it has the last word, but it doesn’t—God does. His final judgment is coming, and he will determine the true victory. The fact we die physically before that judgment comes doesn’t change anything; it doesn’t mean the gospel is ineffective, it doesn’t mean God failed us, or forgot about us, or gave up on us and decided not to save us after all. It just means he’s working on a much greater scale than we can wrap our brains around.
Quick side note: 4:6, like 3:19, has been used to argue for the possibility of conversion after death. I think we can see that’s not what Peter’s talking about. That said, I believe there’s an implicit understanding in 4:6 that everyone will have a true opportunity to respond to Jesus in some way—no one will be condemned for reasons of their chronological or cognitive situation. No one will be condemned because they couldn’t know about Jesus. That isn’t actively taught in this verse, however; I would support it primarily from other texts.
With verse 7, we get a bit of a shift in the mood of the letter, one we can capture with the line, “It’s later than it’s ever been.” Do you feel that? It’s a little hard when it’s November 1 and the afternoon high is supposed to be nearly 70. Then again, Tuesday is Election Day, and our screens have turned black and ominous with political ads. I made a crack about that some weeks ago, and I swear some campaign director in Columbus heard me and said, “Hold my beer.” It seems like 80% of the ads out there are trying to convince me the other candidate should go to jail, and when I’m in a sour enough mood, I agree with all of them. That’s not a ballot, it’s a bill of indictment; Your Honor, we ask they be held without bail and remanded for trial sometime next spring. A storm is coming, and the skies are dark.
Look to the world’s horizon. We managed to go to war with Iran, having apparently failed to grasp that Iran is as physically unconquerable as Afghanistan, only much bigger—and it wasn’t even over the things that really matter. Twelve years ago, the Obama administration was concerned about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. What I said at the time remains true today: if they want to develop weapons of mass destruction, we can’t really stop them, and we don’t know how close they might be—and the government of Iran is the geopolitical equivalent of a homicidal sociopath. North Korea has had nuclear weapons for a decade or two, and I’m not sure what you’d compare them to; that may be the most fundamentally deranged government and political culture in human history. Geopolitics have gotten so crazy, El Salvador just invaded Haiti—with no argument from the Haitian government, such as it is. The skies are dark; a storm is coming.
And our nation? Well, to borrow from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven”; and unlike Tennyson’s Ulysses, we can no longer claim to be “One equal temper of heroic hearts / . . . strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Our culture is collapsing back into a class system; the real divide isn’t between Democrat and Republican anymore, but between the elites and the plebes. When that reality started sinking into the national political consciousness, the elites, who’ve been committed for forty years to the proposition the best way to win elections is to get voters terrified of the other candidate, took that commitment and . . . what? Doubled down on it? Trebled down? Quadrupled? Squared it? Cubed it? Turned it up to 11? That acid has eaten the flesh of our political system, and now it’s bleaching the bones. That’s how we got the sort of ads I mentioned a moment ago. As far as I can tell, though, our elites don’t care, because they’ve turned in on themselves. They’re too focused on playing their own power games and enabling their own self-interest—particularly with regard to sexual politics—to take the problems of the world around them seriously on their own terms rather than as opportunities for political gain. And sacrificial leadership? Forget it. The skies are dark, the wind is rising, the crew are in their staterooms, and the captain is down in the hospitality suite.
I believe an end is looming—not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it. If you don’t see that, I encourage you to squint a little, because that’s a point of contact for us to Peter as he offers his instruction and to Jesus as he tells his hearers this parable. This is the horizon that frames them both. Peter’s audience could see it: the wind of unofficial persecution was rising, and Hurricane Nero was visible in the distance. Those who stood around Jesus couldn’t, but roughly 40 years later, Jerusalem would burn and the temple would be dismantled down to the last stone by soldiers seeking the gold that had melted into the cracks. Whether they knew it or not, the end of the world as they had known it was around the corner.
It always is, even in the best of times. We can’t control the future, and we can never be sure what will hit us next. I don’t expect any of us to be dead by tomorrow, but any of us could be. One moment’s distraction at just the wrong time, and you could be hit by a bus, or a train; or you could lose control of your car. Or something weirder could happen. Our oldest and most beloved member in Grand Lake was walking to church one spring morning when an enraged bull moose charged down the alley behind our house and killed him. Between one moment and the next, everything can change forever—and any moment could be that moment. The bottom line, I think, is Gandalf is right when he tells Frodo, at the very beginning of The Lord of the Rings, we don’t get to decide when we live, or how long, or what the world is like. Rather, he says, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
This calls us to the discipline of living differently. We’re under new management; as Jesus tells us in our parable this morning, we’re stewards of the king’s business. If the nobleman in the parable gets his way, he’ll come back with even greater power, but if his disloyal subjects get theirs, he’ll be exiled and replaced. This means he’s left his servants in a precarious position—he’s gone, but most of his enemies are still around, and when the cat’s away, the mice will play. He leaves each of them with money and a choice: will they stake everything on his victorious return—because obeying their master’s command will earn them the hatred of those who hate him—or will they act as if he isn’t coming back? Note well: when he returns, it’s the choice that matters to him. He doesn’t judge them on their financial acumen, he judges them on their faithfulness: did they stay true to him and do his business while he was away, or not?
And what is the king’s business? To what should we give the time we have left as the end draws nearer? First, prayer that is clear-eyed and sober-minded, grounded in the mindset and way of life he’s been talking about. We shouldn’t lapse into lazy fatalism that God’s going to do what he’s going to do regardless of us; Scripture is clear that our prayers are involved in what God wills to do. At the same time, our prayers should be realistic, not wishcasting. Second, Peter says, Above all, keep loving each other earnestly. When Jesus returned to the Father, he gave us the gift of his love, making us free to love each other humbly and sacrificially. We need to be intentional about that, we need to keep deciding to love one another in that way. If we don’t, hatred will creep in, through its various guises—dislike, mistrust, bitterness—and sow conflict, gossip, backbiting, and undermining of leadership. That’s why Peter says love covers a multitude of sins: it’s heavy ground cover that keeps those seeds from sprouting and growing. It prevents them from bearing fruit in our own lives, and it keeps them from spreading in the community of believers. British pastor N. J. D. White says it well:
A man who puts himself under the control of the love of God acts, when a private personal injury has been done to him, as though nothing had occurred. In this way, by simply ignoring the unkind act or the insulting word, . . . he brings the evil thing to an end; it dies and leaves no seed. . . . This consideration gives dignity and worth inestimable to the feeble efforts of the most insignificant of us to make love the controlling principle in our daily lives.
Peter’s third command is to something undervalued in our culture and in the contemporary Western church: hospitality. We don’t see hospitality as a theological concern, or as a primary virtue, and it is both. It’s also a practical concern in many parts of the world even today, and it was in Peter’s time—outside the modern West in time and space, hospitality can easily be a matter of life or death—but it’s profoundly significant theologically. In particular, there’s an opposition between hospitality and purity—there shouldn’t be, but there is, and it’s growing. Eighteen years ago, when Jonathan Haidt deployed the concept of moral psychology and the moral spectrum, he could say conservatives care about the purity slider and liberals don’t, and nobody really argued. That’s not true anymore. It may be it never was, it’s just that liberals’ purity concerns weren’t being challenged, but it’s certainly not true now.
What this means—and here’s where the opposition comes in—is across the range of our divisions, most people see other people through a purity filter. The most important thing about other people is how pure they are; this determines how you relate to them. If they’re impure, they must be condemned and rejected until they purify themselves. The only theological question that matters in looking at another person is whether they’re good enough. Jesus saw people through a hospitality filter. What mattered is whether they needed to share his life—and everyone did, and does. Thus, he ate with tax collectors, he ate with prostitutes, he touched people with unclean skin conditions, he even ate with Pharisees. He welcomed the unwelcome, and what’s more, he accepted the welcome of the unwelcome. He didn’t affirm them as they were, but he welcomed them anyway.
If he who was sinless did that, how much more should we? After all, if we face ourselves honestly, it’s not just “those people out there” who are impure: it’s us. We are the unacceptable, we are the unwelcome, and yet we have been welcomed by Jesus as we are now and accepted by God as we are in Jesus. It’s not just “those people,” whoever our “those” may be, who have much that is earthly in them which must be put to death: so do we, and just as much. If Paul could say, with complete seriousness, “It is a true saying and worthy of full acceptance that Jesus Christ came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost,” we should certainly do the same. In that spirit this morning, let us—all of us, even me—accept the hospitality of Christ as he invites us to his table. Let us come recognizing we didn’t earn our invitation; we didn’t pass his purity standard; we didn’t impress him with anything. No: as Malcolm Muggeridge said, we are the beggars at the foot of God’s door, and he welcomes us in.
Photo ©2019 Phil Gyford. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. Image has been cropped to fit.