Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter 5, 3^rd of May 2026

 1 Peter 2:2-10

I love the fact that the season of Easter is ten days longer than the season of Lent; that it takes us fifty days to truly celebrate God’s defeat of hatred and darkness and death, and the victory of love and light and life. One month after Easter Sunday, we are still celebrating the resurrection, even if the chocolate eggs have all been eaten. Today’s reading from the First Letter of Peter is an appropriately celebratory one, with affirmations that the church has repeated down the centuries. But the reason it is so celebratory and encouraging is precisely that this letter was written to a vulnerable and scattered group of Christ-followers trying to understand why so many Jews have rejected Jesus as Messiah, and why they are being persecuted by the society around them. It is a letter for people whose hearts are troubled.

It is hard for us to understand exactly how vulnerable the first Christian communities were. The closest analogy I can imagine is the situation of Catholics until roughly the middle of the last century, or the situation of Shia Muslims in Australia today. They were and are seen by some of their fellow citizens not as compatriots who happen to worship differently, but as aliens who hold a secret loyalty to the nation’s enemies. If anything, the situation of the early churches was worse. Australia has a concept of multiculturalism that has allowed people of one hundred and twenty different faiths to become ‘Australian’. The Roman Empire had no such concept of a distinction between church and state to protect those who believed differently from persecution. The state was the church, and so those who chose to follow the Way of Jesus were traitors to the Empire.

Possibly even more painfully, Jews who chose to follow the Way of Jesus were often rejected by their families, communities, and synagogues. Their situation was analogous to that of non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews today. Former Supreme Court Judge and Yoorrook Commissioner Kevin Bell AO KC wrote an article in the Financial Review this week in which he criticised the ‘coordinated effort to define “Jewishness” through a single lens – one that equates Jewish identity with a specific political loyalty to Israel and its government, whatever they may do.’ He argues that Jewish organisations that tell Jews who advocate for Palestinian human rights that they are ‘less Jewish’ or ‘self-hating’ are committing an act of ‘lateral violence’. Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah experienced exactly that lateral violence in the first century. They were told that their allegiance to Jesus meant that they were no longer Jewish.

The First Letter of Peter addresses these ‘traitors,’ both Jews and Gentiles. Commentators believe that this letter was written near the end of the first century by a presbyter from Rome, who invoked the authority of the Apostle Peter. It is written to churches in Asia Minor, now Türkiye, at a time when the Jesus movement was everywhere spoken against. (Acts 28:22) We know that the recipients of this Letter included slaves and women and the poor, which is why the advice in last week’s reading began, ‘Slaves, obey your masters,’ even if the lectionary reading cut that address. These are not the powerful and strong of their society. Yet the author tells them that even though their communities have rejected them, they have reason to rejoice.

To justify this, the author uses a very Jewish way of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures: pesher. Pesher begins scriptural interpretation with the current situation of a community and interprets the situation as the fulfilment of Hebrew prophecy, giving the community a sense of identity and purpose. Today’s reading is dense with quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures. The author quotes from the Psalms (Psalm 34:8; Psalm 118:22), the prophecies of the First and Second Prophets Isaiah (Isaiah 8:14; 28:16; 43:20-21), the prophecies of Hosea (Hosea 1:6, 1:9, 2:3, 2:25) and even from Moses’ words in Exodus. (Exodus 19:6) The author reassures Jewish Christians who have been told that they are ‘less Jewish’ because they follow Jesus, that the Way of Jesus in which they walk is the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy.

Last week’s reading from this letter encouraged those who suffered for doing good to endure it without retaliation, in imitation of Christ, who suffered for them and left them an example to follow. Today’s reading comes from an earlier part of the Letter and describes an even closer identification between Jesus and the readers. It is only possible for us to follow Jesus’ example of non-violence because of the new identity we have been given by God, through Jesus. In a letter named after Peter, the rock, it is interesting that it is Jesus who is the living stone, a stone that ‘though rejected by mortals [was] yet chosen and precious in God’s sight’. If we allow ourselves to also be like living stones, built into the spiritual house of which Jesus is the cornerstone, things that otherwise might seem impossible, like experiencing violence without retaliation, can be done in imitation of him.

Early Christians were living in an honour/shame society in which honour was the highest cultural value, and dishonour was most to be avoided. They experience dishonour because of their status as aliens within the Roman Empire, exiles from the Jewish community, but this letter assures them that just like Jesus, they ‘will not be put to shame’. Instead, it is those who attack them for their allegiance who will stumble and be dishonoured. In the same way that Jesus seemed to have been dishonoured by dying the most shameful death the Romans knew but was shown the highest honour by God in the resurrection, so these small, vulnerable communities rejected by those around them have the highest status and honour possible as God’s own people.

‘You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’. The Greek words used are genos, ethnos, and laos. Genos was used to describe people who shared some sort of common ancestry and has sometimes been translated as ‘race’. It was often used to describe the people of Israel as not merely a nation but members of one family. Ethnos was used to describe those nations that were not Israel, foreigners, outsiders. Laos, on the other hand, was used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures to describe Israel as a nation. It had a sense of the common people rather than the elites. The new Christian community, made up of Jews and Gentiles, is described as all these things: a people with a shared ancestry; a nation of foreigners who have astonishingly become holy; a group that is, like Israel, made up of God’s own people. Quoting from the prophecy of Hosea, the author tells this mixed and motley crew that ‘Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people’. There could be no higher status.

Christians are not to become all these things for our own benefit. To be the people of God is a responsibility as well as a privilege. One of the most attractive parts of Ancient Israel’s sense of itself as ‘a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’ (Exodus 19:6) is that it was to be a blessing to other nations, mediating between them and God. Israel had been chosen not for its own good, but for the good of the world. As God said to Abraham, ‘In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’. (Genesis 12:3) Israel could only mediate between God and the world if it was holy; if its people behaved in ways that imitated the loving-kindness and mercy of God. This First Letter of Peter argues that the church has the same calling. God did not make Christians a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, so that we could boast about it, or relax into a sense of superiority, but so we could share the good news of Jesus, God’s light and love and astounding mercy, with the whole world.

When this letter was written, the Second Temple had only recently been destroyed. The people of Israel could no longer offer sacrifices to God. So, the author tells Christians that they are to offer spiritual sacrifices by living faithful and loving lives, as children of the Father, walking in the way of Jesus, transformed by the Holy Spirit. And just as the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit look beyond themselves to give life to all creation, those of us chosen by the Father, inspired by the Spirit, saved by Jesus, are to look beyond ourselves in love for God’s creation.

Christians in Australia do not face the sort of rejection and dishonour that the first recipients of this letter experienced. Today’s reading is dangerous for us, because we hear the reassurance that we are ‘God’s own people’ from a place of privilege rather than disadvantage. Rather than raising us from the ground and enabling us to stand strong in the face of persecution, the assurance that we are ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation’ could lead us to despise and reject others. The Hebrew Scriptures are full of stories of times when Israel’s sense of itself as chosen led it to be a curse rather than a blessing to the nations. Christian history has been equally full of times when the church has been a curse to non-Christians, including Jews. I began today’s reflection by referring to the Australians who treat Shia Muslims as aliens and discriminate against them. In the same way that the Hebrew Scriptures repeatedly told the people of Israel to remember that they had been aliens in Egypt, Christians must remember that once we were no people, a minority religion rejected by the surrounding community. Just as the people of Israel were told, ‘The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God,’ (Leviticus 19:34) Australian Christians must love members of religious minorities as ourselves, for we were a religious minority in the first century in Asia Minor.

And why could Christians possibly want to persecute others? I think that the persecution of those who are different from us comes more often from a feeling of insecurity than from a feeling of certainty. We have no reason to ever feel insecure. We are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people! Let us walk in God’s marvellous light. Amen.