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17 If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. 18 You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. 20 He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. 21 Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. 22 Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. 23 You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God. (1 Peter 1: 17-23 NRSV)
In 1975 I left the safety of home and hearth to move to Denver, Colorado to resume my seminary education. I had dropped out of SMU's Perkins School of Theology, worked for Ma Bell, and took advantage of the United Methodist Church's Crusade Scholarship and Iliff's School of Theology's invitation to keep studying to become a minister. I have to stress that 1975 Denver was not the Denver of today. I have to confess I had never lived outside of Texas and Colorado being a state park of Texas (so so Texans used to say to taunt and torment the two native Coloradans that lived there, I felt there might be enough Texans up there to help make me feel at home. I was wrong. Let's start with God's gift to humanity, Mexican food. The old chain El Chico's was the only restaurant that said it sold Mexican food. My having been exposed to it I tried my chances at another "Mexican" place and when I was seated, the server brought me a bowl of Fritos and a tiny bowl of ketchup. I kid you not. And it got worse. I don't have to say there were no HEB Grocery Stores, and there were no Spanish language UM churches. In many ways I was truly a stronger in a strange land. In some ways I truly was an exile from Texas.
Peter wrote this letter to the exiles of his time. The believers in Jesus had been scattered across the ancient world and so Peter writes to them. They are strangers, pilgrims, people who don’t quite fit. And in the middle of the Easter season — that stretch of glorious days between resurrection and Pentecost — Peter reminds us that this sense of not-quite-belonging is not a problem to be solved. It is the shape of the Christian life.
Because of the resurrection, our citizenship has shifted. We now belong to a kingdom that is not yet fully visible. We live, as the ancient phrase goes, in the world but not of it. Peter’s instruction to “live in reverent fear during the time of your exile” is not a call to anxiety. It is a call to awareness — to remember who you are, who you belong to, and how costly that belonging was.
Peter could have stopped at gratitude. He could have simply said, “You have been set free — rejoice!” But he is more precise than that. He names what we were ransomed from: “the futile ways inherited from your ancestors.” The word futile here is heavy. It is the same emptiness that the Preacher names in Ecclesiastes — vanity, vapor, a chasing after wind. Without the resurrection, all our striving, all our building, all our grasping amounts to exactly that.
And the price paid for our release? Not silver or gold — the currencies that drive so much of human life — but “the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish.” Peter reaches back to the Passover imagery every Jewish reader would instantly recognize: the unblemished lamb, the blood on the doorpost, the night of deliverance. Jesus is that Lamb. The cross is that doorpost. And Easter morning is God’s declaration that the ransom has been accepted.
This is why Peter can say that Christ “was destined before the foundation of the world.” The resurrection did not catch heaven by surprise. The empty tomb was not Plan B. From before creation, the Lamb was appointed, the price was purposed, and your freedom was planned.
Easter reorients everything, including where we place our hope. Peter says that through Christ, God “raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.” Notice the direction of this sentence. The resurrection is not primarily about our feelings of comfort or our theological categories. It is about the reorientation of the whole self — faith and hope, grounded not in circumstances, not in human systems, but in the God who raises the dead.
To set your hope on God is to live with a kind of stubborn confidence that refuses to be finally undone by grief, failure, or death. The disciples on Easter morning had to learn this. So did Peter himself — a man who had denied Christ three times and still found himself writing letters about the glorious hope of the resurrection. If the risen Lord could restore Peter’s hope, He can restore yours.
Peter’s letter arrives at its most pastoral moment in verses 22 and 23. All the theology of ransom and resurrection, of exile and hope, flows toward a single imperative: “love one another deeply from the heart.” The Greek word translated “deeply” carries the sense of something strained to its full capacity, stretched out, extended beyond comfort. Not polite affection. Not surface-level cordiality. Earnest, effortful, costly love.
This is possible, Peter says, because we have been “born anew” — not from perishable seed but from the living and enduring word of God. The same resurrection power that emptied the tomb has planted something imperishable in us. We are new creatures. And new creatures, shaped by Easter, love differently than the world does.
The world loves transactionally — giving in order to receive, relating in order to gain. But the ransomed people of God love because they have been loved at infinite cost. We love from the overflow of a grace we did not earn and could not purchase. Easter gives us both the reason and the power to love one another as the risen Christ has loved us.
PRAYER: Risen Lord, You ransomed us at a price beyond reckoning. Turn our eyes from futile things to the imperishable hope of the resurrection. Remind us today that we are exiles with a destination — and give us grace to love one another deeply while we walk the road home. In Your strong name we pray, Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, identify one person in your life who needs the kind of deep, earnest love Peter describes. Reach out to them in a concrete way — a note, a visit, a meal, a phone call — not because they have earned it, but because you have been ransomed to love.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! You have been born anew. Now go and love like it.
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
