In this you rejoice.
We are facing an unprecedented Easter, as a virus prevents us from gathering as the body of Christ in celebration of his resurrection. Despite our President’s optimism, reality is that the coronavirus will continue to keep us distanced from one another. So, what will it feel like on Easter morning? What will our services be like? Will we wear our Easter best? Will there be Easter lunch afterward? As I look ahead in anticipation, I feel the loss. Don't you?
I'm at home working on a sermon series on 1 Peter. I was pleasantly surprised to find an Easter message in the second sermon I planned for the series. In fact, 1Peter 1:3-6 would be the passage I would preach this Easter.
Listen to the passage.
3 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, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.6 In all this, you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.
The body of this text is beautiful as it describes our new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The resurrection is what we celebrate at Easter, right! We sing, "Up from the grave he arose! With a mighty triumph o’er his foes!" Or we sing, "Because He lives, I can face tomorrow!" and "Christ the Lord is risen today!" With shouts of praise, we declare our risen Lord because it is by his resurrection that we are given new birth into such a great inheritance. Through the resurrection, we have a living hope, and God's power will keep us until the coming of his final salvation.
The next phrase is what grabs me. "In all this, you greatly rejoice though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials." How true is this for us today. We are suffering. Some are sick and some have even lost family members to this virus. Others struggle financially because of the impact of our economic shutdown. We don't know how long this will last, and worry grips our hearts. So, Peter says to us, "In this, you greatly rejoice!" To be honest, rejoicing seems like the last thing I'm motivated to do.
However, there is a grammatical problem that we need to address. I have a Grammarly subscription that I use to correct all my writing errors. It catches a lot of mistakes! I am grateful to pay the fee in order to write in an intelligible manner. There is one correction that I seem to get all the time, an unclear antecedent. I make this error when my sentence does not clearly identify to which noun a subsequent pronoun refers. For example, I saw a sign that said, "If your dog makes a poop, put it in the bin." It is unclear from the wording of this sign whether you should put your dog or the poop in the bin.
So when Peter says, "In all this, you greatly rejoice," What does he mean by "all this?" We read it and think, “in all this suffering we greatly rejoice.” Or, “in the midst of all this suffering we rejoice.” We feel the suffering and it clouds our understanding. Grammatically, suffering comes after the “this” but in our minds we can’t get see anything but our pain. We need to re-frame our predisposed tendency and focus on what Peter is actually saying. When Peter says, "this" he refers to what Christ has done through the resurrection. Read it again with a focus on our new birth, our living hope, our unfading inheritance, our faith guarded by God's power until he comes back. "This" is an overwhelming reason to rejoice in any circumstance, in any suffering.
Where is your focus? Easter is a family tradition for the church that focuses us on the mighty power of God, raising Jesus from death into life! It is a sign for us that God's resurrecting power is at work in us by faith. Listen to Romans 8:1, "And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you."
As we remember the resurrection this Easter, let us not forget that there is power for us in the midst of our current crisis. There is the power to hope, the power to love, the power to proclaim the Gospel with boldness in Jesus' name. In all "THIS," we greatly rejoice because we have a savior who is ALIVE and who rose from the grave. Sinclair Ferguson says, “not rejoicing is a denial of what God has done.” If that is true, it is vital to our faith that we rejoice because by rejoicing we declare what we believe about Jesus. Jesus is our joy. So, this Easter, despite the confusion, uncertainty, sorrow, and pain, let us declare through our rejoicing words, faces and actions that Jesus is ALIVE and that He has saved us.