Someone Else’s Mail

Seventh Sunday of Easter — 1 Peter 4:12–14; 5:6–11, RCL, Year A

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 [1 Peter 4:12].

There is a New Testament letter that most of us read the way we might read someone else’s mail. We recognize the language. We affirm the theology. And we sense, if we are honest, that it was written for people living in circumstances rather different from our own.

That letter is First Peter—the letter that has served as the Epistle reading throughout this year’s Easter season. It is addressed to communities scattered across Asia Minor — Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia — people the author describes as “aliens and exiles.” These were communities for whom Christian faith carried a genuine social cost: marginalization, suspicion, sometimes legal exposure.

We have not, most of us, been pushed to any edge at all.

Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas famously described the church as a community of “resident aliens” — people whose primary citizenship lies elsewhere, whose lives are meant to appear recognizably different from the surrounding culture. Some years ago, I told Will—only half joking—that we seem to have managed the “resident” part rather well. It is the “alien” part that gives us trouble.

All this raises an uncomfortable question as we come to this passage. Peter tells his readers — not harshly, but as Beloved — not to be surprised that faithfulness has cost them so much. The warning is severe, but it is spoken with affection. Rather than scolding frightened people, he is steadying them.

The irony, for most of us, runs in precisely the opposite direction. We would be surprised if faith cost us anything at all — beyond, perhaps, a few dollars in the plate on Sunday morning.

Earlier in the chapter, Peter used the same “surprise” word to describe the surrounding culture’s reaction to Christian behavior. The pagans are surprised that these believers no longer participate in the old patterns of life. They cannot make sense of what they are seeing.

Verse 12 turns the idea around. The surrounding culture is surprised because it lacks the framework to understand faithfulness. Christians should not be surprised because they know the shape of the story they are living inside. Christ suffered. Christ was raised. Those who bear his name should not find suffering unintelligible.

Peter is not asking them to stop feeling pain. He is asking them to stop being bewildered by it — to interpret their circumstances through the gospel rather than through the assumptions of the surrounding world.

For Peter’s readers, suffering could be reframed as participation rather than abandonment. For us, the passage raises a prior question: whether we have ever truly inhabited that story ourselves, or whether we have mostly read it comfortably from the outside.

Peter continues:

The Spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you [4:14b].

Not will rest. Not eventually, after the suffering has passed. Is resting. Present tense.

The language echoes Isaiah, where the Spirit rests upon the coming servant of the Lord. At the Jordan, when Jesus emerges from the water, the Spirit descends upon him — before the wilderness, before the ministry, before the cross. The Spirit does not wait for vindication before arriving.

Peter makes the same claim for these pressured communities. The divine presence that accompanied Jesus into suffering accompanies them into theirs. They are not abandoned. They are, in the most precise sense, inhabited.

Perhaps that is why this text appears during Eastertide. We are still within the fifty days, still learning what resurrection means. Peter’s word is that the same Spirit that animated the risen Christ is already resting upon ordinary believers living under pressure.

That is not a comfort that removes the difficulty. It is a presence that accompanies it.

In the second portion of this Sunday’s reading, Peter writes:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God [5:6].

That phrase carries enormous weight within the Jewish imagination. It is Exodus language — the hand that parted the sea, shattered Pharaoh’s pretensions, and brought slaves into freedom.

And yet the mighty hand is not, in this moment, removing anything. The communities Peter addresses remain in their difficulty. What Peter asks of them beneath that mighty hand is not triumphalism, but trust.

Then comes one of the best-known lines in the epistle:

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you [5:7].

Detached from its setting, the verse often becomes generic advice for worriers. But Peter has something more specific in view. He is speaking to people who genuinely do not know what their faithfulness may cost them tomorrow.

Most of us carry different anxieties. The biopsy results. The retirement account. The relationship fraying at the edges. The quiet sense that time is moving faster than we can manage.

These are not small things. But neither are they exactly what Peter had in mind.

And yet the God who steadied believers facing genuine persecution is the same God who meets people in ordinary fear. The mighty hand that does not immediately remove the difficulty is the same hand that holds fragile people together while they wait. The tenderness of “He cares for you” lands almost unexpectedly after the grandeur of divine sovereignty.

We are not Peter’s original audience. But we are not beyond the reach of what he is saying.

And after the fiery ordeal and the anxiety and the roaring adversary [4:12], Peter leaves his readers with four final verbs:

The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you [5:10].

Peter does not promise that the difficulty will vanish. He promises that God will meet fragile people within it — and hold them fast.

We are not Peter’s original audience. But we are not beyond the reach of what he is saying.