By Kanishka Raffel / Archbishop of Sydney
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you (1 Pet 1:3-4 NIV)
The Buddhist faith in which I was raised teaches rebirth. The Christian faith into which, by God’s grace, I was rescued, teaches that you must be born again. It might sound like these two faiths have something in common, but in fact, this is not so.
The Buddhist faith teaches “rebirth”—the idea that after death, you are born into another lifetime. It’s called “rebirth” because the life into which you are reborn depends on the life you have lived: what you sow in one life, you reap in your next life. I recall an elderly relative suffering in hospital after being hit by a motorcycle plaintively asking, “What did I do to deserve this?” He believed his suffering was his “karma”—something sown in a past life. But he didn’t know what had caused it, and he didn’t know why it happened. Tragically and poignantly, his was a “hopeless” rebirth.
In contrast, the Apostle Peter writes to God’s elect strangers—chosen by God but rejected by the world—and encourages them with the fact that they have a “new birth into a living hope” (1 Pet 1:3). This birth is birth into a life now and into eternity. It’s a gift of God, not something we earn or deserve. As the gift of God, it is a “living hope”, because it’s founded on the mercy of God, guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus, and focused on an imperishable inheritance kept safe for us in heaven.
Furthermore, this new birth is not one conditioned by the life we live. It is new birth by the mercy of God—not according to what we deserve, but according to his kindness and love—not according to justice, but according to mercy. Unlike the rebirth of eastern philosophy, our new birth does not depend on what we have sown in previous lives, but on what Jesus has “sown” in his death and resurrection. By his death, Jesus pays the due penalty for our sin, and his resurrection is a precursor to our own resurrection: “He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet 1:3). The new birth of the Christian is a birth into hope, because our evil has been atoned for in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
In our culture, “hope” can be a very weak word. To say that we hope for something is the same as saying, “We wish”. But in the Bible, hope is a sure expectation—a confident anticipation. In the Bible, hope stands alongside faith and love as the indestructible and indispensable markers of the Christian person (1 Cor 13:13; Col 1:5; 1 Thess 1:3, 5:8).
But these are not things we strive for; they are gifts that God gives us on the basis of the work Jesus completed. Just as an executed will gives rise to a sure expectation of an inheritance, so the resurrection of Jesus from the dead gives rise to our sure expectation of life with God, which begins now, but only comes into its fullness in the future—“an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade”, kept in heaven for us (1 Pet 1:4).
The elect people of God are marked in the world as strangers, because we are people who live for an imperishable inheritance in a culture that implicitly and explicitly treats what is passing, fading and perishing as most important. When there are so many goods and entertainments to be acquired and experienced, the dynamic that increasingly drives the world is being able to generate enough money in a sufficiently compressed amount of time to be able to squeeze into the remaining time the stuff money can buy. So we spend now and pay back three times as much later; we have little time for relationships with people that don’t involve some benefit for us; and relationships are commodified and made secondary to acquisition, consumption and the attainment of “life goals”. We’re pressed for time, we’re pressed for money, and we’re desperate to have as much of the best of everything as soon and as often as we can.
In many ways, Sydney is a place of transient trinkets, hollow promises and glittering voids. There is havoc, destroyed lives, despair, epidemics of gambling, loneliness, immorality and exploitation everywhere. But by the mercy of God, we can have new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead into an imperishable inheritance.
Here is the shape of the salvation in which Peter wants to encourage his readers to stand fast (1 Pet 5:12). Here is the gospel of hope that we seek to make known to our friends, family and community in Sydney and beyond. Here is the hope for Sydney and the world. Here is the purpose on which Moore College exists: to serve by equipping men and women for ministries of the Word so that in a world of fading glory, they may be the Lord’s messengers of living hope.
