Born Again?

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you, but rejoice. 

The first letter of Peter is addressed : ‘to the elect dwelling in the diaspora,’ in the dispersion. Sadly, it is unclear which one: Jerusalem has been sacked repeatedly and the Jewish people exiled  just as many times. It could be written by the apostle peter from prison in Rome… but that would be surprising as this letter is written in very elegant, literary Greek, which would be surprising from the pen of Peter… whose Aramaic accent even, was not the best. As soon as he opened his mouth, Peter betrayed his humble origins in Galilee. So this letter could also have been written after the second Jewish revolt, that of Bar Kochva which ended with the mass suicide in the fortress of Massada, which many of you visited, in 135AD. It was a pretty conclusive defeat, annihilation really… so why does Peter, let’s call him Peter, write that his hearers should rejoice?

Because, he wrote, no matter what hardships you may have to endure:

‘In his great mercy, God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’

Let’s think about this new birth for a moment.

New birth… I tend to be a little indignant when born-again Christians tell that I’m going to hell in a handcart if I am not born again… well, as Dennis Skinner said: ‘pardon me for getting it right the first time.’ 

He’s right. It’s a curious assumption that such a second birth is needed because something was wrong with you in the first place, even if you were a Christian already, and something so wrong it’ll doom you unless you become another man or another woman, unless you literally are born anew. There aren’t two types of Christians, the unregenerate and the saved. You either follow Christ or you don’t. Still, some assume that this second birth is conditional in accepting Jesus as your personal saviour and trusting in his saving death, yet note that Peter in his letter did write that God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, not through faith in what his death has wrought. Hope and resurrection not faith and death.

It is hope in Christ’s resurrection that gives us new birth, he asserts. We can make sense of that. There’s an enormous gap between living as if this life were all there is and living with the sure hope it’s not. Many ills spring from the belief that this life is all there is. I said belief because that’s what it is, just like the belief that there will be another life. Evidence that this life is, is not evidence that there is no other, last I checked, no more than evidence that apples exist disprove the existence of oranges. 

All manners of ills are born from either belief if trusted blindly. Firm faith in the world to come can breed an unhealthy neglect for even the most basic justice in the present one, and dreadful fatalism to boot: never you mind you poor downtrodden sods, everything will be better in heaven. But there are downsides too to believing that this is the only life, the only world. It’s the only bite of the apple you’ll ever get, this world is ours to do as we please with it: exploit, pollute, who cares, the end is nigh and it’ll truly be the end? 

These are two sides of the same coin, psychologically, two ways people have of ridding themselves of guilt. It’s blatant in the belief that there will be no reward, no punishment, no consequence… but born again Christianity is equally suspect. Let me illustrate this. I’ve been hearing confessions for decades, now; I know a Catholic lady who did something truly hideous. She found it quite difficult to live with, and rightly so, but then she met a born-again preacher, and all her sins were wiped clean. She was born again. No need to think about the past any more. Now, I believe in forgiveness like your garden variety Christian, but if you dared even mention that this may have been a cheap spiritual trick, all hell would break loose. Her entire sense of self now depended on the belief that the slate had been wiped right clean. No attempt to explain how her receiving this second birth in no way changed anything for the people she’d hurt so appallingly: it was a squeaky clean start, a new baptism, a new birth. 

This is not new. Some people in the early church believed that no certain forgiveness of sins could be granted after baptism. Some Roman emperors therefore, knowing that they had to do a little evil, indeed a lot of evil to stay at the top, delayed baptism till they were on their death bed… but surely this is spiritual cheating. Forgiveness is not the erasure of all past deeds. Rather, it is their overcoming through love and repentance. Because we are able to forgive one another, God also shall forgive, that is what our Lord taught us. Whatever we bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever we forgive one earth will be forgiven in heaven; that is what Christ taught. This is what we ask every time we pray the Lord’s prayer: forgive us as we also forgive. God has promised that his hands would be tied by our decisions: the forgiveness of the very people we sin against must be secured if it can be, only go to the priest if it cannot, not to escape God’s wrath if you do not. That’s not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, it’s a god worthy of derision, something from a Monty Python sketch. Remember the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, it was not far off the mark.

Then raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits… in thy mercy. Then thou must count to three, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in God’s sight, shall snuff it."

In his great mercy, God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The whole chapter of Peter’s letter that we began to read ends with this line: ‘As he who calls you is holy, be holy yourselves, for it is written: “you shall be holy, for I am holy.” Not you shall be wrathful or vengeful, as I am wrathful or vengeful, but you shall be merciful as I am merciful. To be holy as God is holy is to be relentlessly forgiving, like him. This is what the Lord taught in no uncertain terms: that is to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.