Liberated to Love
April 6, 2008
17If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. 18You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, 19but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. 20He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. 21Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. 22Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. 23You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.
I Peter 1:17-23
Most of us in here would probably agree that Easter has already come and gone for the year 2008. But not according to the church calendar. According to the church calendar, there is an entire Easter season, which begins on Easter Sunday and finishes seven weeks later on Pentecost. The Easter season actually lasts longer than the seasons of Advent or Lent, but for some reason, the church has never really put much emphasis on the Easter season. And I think that's a shame. Because the Easter season is the time in the church year when we are supposed to be thinking about the resurrection.
From our perspective in the 21st century, the resurrection seems pretty clears cut. Jesus rose from the dead…and that's that. But back in the 1st century, among the earliest followers of Christ, there was still a lot of discussion about what the resurrection really meant. And so, when we turn to Scripture, we find that there are actually many different ways that the Bible talks about the resurrection. There was no one definitive idea about what the resurrection accomplished. Everyone agreed that it was vitally important, but they talked about it in different ways. So, in some places, the Bible describes resurrection as an act of reconciliation. In other places, the resurrection is referred to as the culmination of the battle against death. But in our passage of Scripture today from 1st Peter, we find another image of resurrection. And that is the idea that somehow, in Christ, we have been ransomed. Verses 18 and 19 of this passage say, "You know that you were ransomed, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ." According to Peter, you and I have been ransomed. And that's the image of resurrection I want us to think about for a few minutes this morning.
Ransom is not a word we use very often from day to day. I would say when most of us hear that word, we probably think about being kidnapped. All of us have seen a TV show or a movie where somebody gets kidnapped and then the bad guys send a ransom note. And usually, the ransom is either a big sum of cash or something very valuable.
A good example is the story of Marvin. One day, Marvin came home and he found a ransom note slipped under his front door. The note said, "If you ever want to see your wife alive again, bring $50,000 to the 17th hole of your country club tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m." Well, sure enough, Marvin showed up, but it was well after 1:00 p.m. by the time he arrived. So, a masked man stepped out from behind the bushes and said, "You're three hours late. What took you so long?" And Marvin just pointed to his scorecard and said, "Gimme a break! I'm a 27 handicap."
Maybe that's not such a good example. But the point is, we usually think about ransom in terms of a swap. We give somebody one thing and they give us something in return. In other words, it's a pay-off. The kidnappers only release the prisoner if they receive the money.
But when we start comparing our idea of ransom to the resurrection, we hit some snags. For instance, if Jesus paid our ransom, who was he paying it to? I've heard some Christians claim that Jesus had to ransom us because we'd been kidnapped by Satan. That's a fascinating theory. But I happen to disagree with it 100%. Satan has never had control over this world. That's giving Satan far too much power. The idea that Jesus would stoop to paying off Satan just doesn't jive with my theology.
So, I think there's something else that Peter means when he talks about ransom in this passage. I think that Peter is using ransom here in the same way the Old Testament talks about the ransom of the Israelites from Egypt. In that sense, ransom becomes less about paying somebody off and more about a release. When God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, he didn't give anything to Pharaoh in return. That was the whole point. God didn't have to pay off Pharaoh. Because God and Pharaoh are not on equal terms. God is able to do what God wants when God wants no matter what we may or may not do in return.
And I think that's the parallel that Peter is drawing for us in this passage. Peter wants us to understand that the death and resurrection of Jesus was not primarily a pay off but a release. It was the moment we were freed from our captivity to sin. It was our liberation.
Now, maybe that distinction doesn't seem like a big deal to you. But I think it makes a big difference in how we think about Jesus. If we believe that the crucifixion and resurrection were a cosmic pay off, then we concede that Jesus got something in return. But that's not what happened. And so, I think it's much better, and much sounder biblically, to think what about what happened on Easter as an act of liberation.
Let's think for a minute about another act of liberation. We've all heard about the liberation of the concentration camps during World War II. During the war, millions of Jews were killed, but when the Allied troops came through, they started freeing the prisoners who remained in the camps. And in almost every single case, those prisoners had no idea the troops were coming. They didn't do a single thing to earn their salvation. They couldn't; they were prisoners. Nobody paid the Allies to free the Jews from the concentration camps. The Jews who survived weren't liberated because they had earned it. They were liberated because they were there and they needed it.
That's what Peter wants us to see about the death and resurrection of Jesus. It was a ransom not because we gave something in return but because we were held captive and we needed to be freed. And by talking about Christ in terms of liberation, Peter is deliberately connecting the resurrection of Jesus with everything that had come before. Peter was a good Jew. So, he saw the story of the Bible as a story of liberation. God's people were liberated from Egypt; they were liberated from the Philistines; they were liberated from exile in Babylon. And now, according to Peter, God's people have been liberated again. But this time, the liberation took the form of Jesus Christ.
You see, we make the mistake of assuming the resurrection was a first time kind of thing. And maybe in some ways it was. But in verse 20, Peter claims that "Jesus was destined before the foundation of the world." So, in a very real sense, the resurrection wasn't a new thing at all. It was a part of the plan from the very beginning. It was just a different twist on the same old salvation story. And in this passage, Peter is reminding us that the resurrection of Jesus isn't out of character for God. God has done this kind of thing before. God has been working for our liberation since before the foundation of the world, but in Christ, we are finally able to see that clearly for the first time.
I think Peter's original audience would probably have responded more positively to this message of liberation than we do today in 21st century America. When you live under a brutal regime that persecutes you for your religious beliefs, liberation sounds like what it is…which is good news. But I'm afraid that some of us in the church today no longer understand why liberation is such a big deal. When we have everything, it's hard to see why we need to be liberated.
But I believe we need to be liberated, just the same. Because I believe that no matter how wealthy and comfortable our life has become, all of us are still enslaved to something. We may not need to be liberated from religious persecution or physical hardship like the people Peter was addressing in this letter, but we still struggle with things that bind us. And in some ways, I believe the things that enslave us today are even more difficult to acknowledge because they're so intangible. Many of us are here are enslaved to a consumer lifestyle. We work all the time to buy things that won't really make us happy. But because it's a silver-lined prison, we never see it for what it is. Some of us in here are enslaved to guilt. And so, we spend our lives trying to make other people happy and constantly feeling worried that we aren't doing a good job. Some of us in here are enslaved to an illness or an addiction. But the point us, all of us need to be released from our captivity. All of us need to be liberated.
The good news that Peter shares in this passage is that we have not only been liberated in the death and resurrection of Christ; we have also been called to liberate others. And I think that's what the resurrection is all about. The resurrection allows us to see that love is not so much about feeling affectionate as it is acting in a way that gives people life. Why do we say that Jesus loves us? It's not because we think Jesus held us in warm regard. It's because Jesus died on the cross and rose again. It's because Jesus liberated us. In Luke Chapter 4, Jesus says that he had come to proclaim release to the captives. In John, Chapter 8, Jesus says that if we are his disciples, we will know the truth, and the truth will make us free.
To really love someone is an act of liberation. It is to give of ourselves completely and require nothing in return. That is what Jesus showed us. And that is the reason we have been freed. We have not been released from our captivity because Jesus paid somebody off. We have been released because we needed it. We have been released because we are loved. The death and resurrection of Jesus was the equivalent of our Exodus. It was the moment we were led away from bondage and freed to begin a new life. But the story of salvation isn't finished yet. Jesus is still working today to bring release to the captives. And so, this morning, let us continue to share that message of liberation to a world in need of love. AMEN