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The General Epistles of Saints James, Peter, John, and Jude, Part 4: I Peter 1
Talk by Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen)
December 12, 2023

Topics include:
(1) Trials and the testing of our faith: necessary for us; 
(2) Already and not yet: we have a foretaste already of joy and our salvation in Christ, and yet we await the revelation of its fullness at the Second Coming; 
(3) The Jews were not expecting a humble God who would accept crucifixion and death out of love for his friends (and enemies), but a God who would grant them glory and dominion and riches in the world as an earthly King. But Christ imparts His own life to us, a Heavenly life, more valuable than all the riches in the world. The Sadducees did not even believe in heaven, an afterlife, or the spiritual world ... to them Christ's message was nonsense, even though the Prophets (esp. Isaiah) understood the nature of Christ's Kingdom; 
(4) Participation in the holiness of God, given to us by grace: agios, "un-earthly", rejecting anger and lust, conducting ourselves with fear during the time of our exile. Fear not that God will swish us or reject us, but that we might fall away from Him; 
(5) Union with Christ: in Christ, with Christ, as Christ, we can say Our Father. we enter into Christ's own relationship with His Father, sharing His mind, His faith, His living experience of communion with God. God is no longer the object of our faith, but Christ is the subject of our faith. Our faith is His activity by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The great mystery of the Gospel! 
(6) "The futile way of our forefathers": the Law of Moses; 
(7) Christ self-offering for us: received by the Father as a lamb without blemish or spot, in the absolute purity of His life, not as having all the sins of the world heaped on him, rejected, and hated and punished as an evildoer --- exit Calvinism; 
(8) A call to love, sober-mindedness, repentance from self absorption, focusing on being translated into the Kingdom of God, not on our own plans, of experiencing His grace and His presence. Our hope is not in politicians or wealth or power or in the things of this world, but in Jesus Christ who will come again and transform us (as we already taste) and make us like Himself, holy, not worldly.