Hostages have been much in the news these days, for good reason. The most horrific fate is that of the Israelis kidnapped in October 2023. Many have died; some are still in captivity. Only a merciful God can heal the wounds of the ones released. May that same merciful God bring about the release of those who still survive. But other captives have also been released, with rather less publicity. Since taking office, President Trump and his administration have secured the release of 47 detained Americans abroad. Beneath the radar, kidnapping of businessmen and executives, often motivated by financial gain or political agendas, remains a significant concern in various parts of the world. Many American citizens have been taken by kidnappers, mostly in Mexico, whom the victims met on dating apps. They have had their ransoms paid by their families. Kidnapping is big business. The risk is low, the reward is high, and the publicity is fleeting.
But when the victims return - after weeks or months or years in captivity - what is it like for them? How happy they must be, you’d think, released from fear and bondage and their captor’s whims, home and safe and surrounded by people who not only love them but were willing to pay - who knows how much - to get them back. Wow. How grateful they must be. What a great perspective they must have on what’s important in life, after such an ordeal.
But it’s not that simple. There are the obvious traumas, of course, but there is also something called the Stockholm syndrome.
That’s when kidnap victims often get really attached to their captors. It happens more often than you might think - something about the fear and isolation does it. If it’s a political kidnap, the victim may convert to their captor’s ideology - remember Patty Hearst, back in the 70's? And then there’s guilt, and resentment - particularly if the family impoverished itself to raise the ransom - and a whole slew of other symptoms. No, the ransomed captive often doesn’t adjust at all well to being free from captivity.
Gratitude is a very mixed emotion in any case. I’ve been told that the Japanese, with their formally polite culture, have a lot of different ways to express gratitude - and every one of them conveys one degree of resentment or another. And in China, as I’m sure many of you have heard, if you save someone’s life they don’t owe you - you owe them.
So when the Psalm assigned to this 3rd Sunday in Easter asks “What shall I return to the LORD for all his bounty to me?” [Ps 116:12] the answer sounds pretty good: “I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice and call on the name of the LORD. I will pay my vows to YHWH God in the presence of all his people.” [Ps 116:17-18] But it actually doesn’t stand up to very close scrutiny. And I say that as one who really loves Psalm 116. It was one of the readings at my ordination. This is a song of heartfelt, poured-out gratitude to the God of our salvation, the redeemer of Israel, and the Psalmist is trying to express the magnitude of the debt that he feels. And his heart is absolutely in the right place: “I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.” [Ps 116:1-2] The kind of Sunday observance that the Psalmist is talking about it is at best only a seventh part of our lives. Making thank offerings is good. Praising God in worship is good. Keeping our promises to God is good - although of course it’s always a good idea to make sure that what you promised God is something that he wants.
But the proof of the genuineness of our gratitude to God really shows up most clearly outside of worship. I’m sure most of you are familiar with that passage from Micah, “What does the Lord require of you? Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” [Mi 6:8] The people of Israel had forgotten the character of God, and so the prophet Amos told them,
"I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.” [Amos 5:21-23]
Instead of responding to who God was and what God had done for them with obedience, they were trying to bribe God to look the other way while they did whatever they pleased.
You see, it’s just not natural to give up your life gladly - even to the person who saves it. More often than not, people will look for any excuse to get out of offering God what is due him in return for our salvation. And one very common response is just to do the formal religious thing without letting God’s character touch our lives the rest of the week. But in our modern age, another response has become just as common: it’s to get out of having to be in a relationship with God just by being nice.
We’ve all known people who say they don’t have to go to church to be a Christian, and we’ve all known people who aren’t even nominally Christian but are sure they’ll get to heaven because they’re nice people. And then of course there are the people who show up in church every Sunday but cheat on their taxes and their spouses and mistreat their subordinates. And, of course, there are the people who both ignore God and abuse their neighbors.
But the point Peter is trying to make in this passage of Scripture is that the proper response to God has to include both worship - the vertical relationship - and ethics - the horizontal relationship. Let me explain.
There are two basic themes in this passage: the first is what God expects of his people, and the second is the reasons behind those expectations.
"You shall be holy, for I am holy" puts the requirements in a nutshell. God’s holy character requires that his people also be particular sort. But it does seem like an awful lot to ask, doesn’t it? After all, we’re talking about people who didn’t have the wherewithal to save themselves. Which Peter points out in the very next verse: “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ.” Peter is making the point that we couldn’t buy ourselves out of captivity. Not gold, not power, not good deeds, only the death of Jesus Christ could buy us back from the enemy of our souls. So, if we couldn’t do that on our own, how can we obey God’s commandment to be holy? I mean, if we could do that, we wouldn’t have had to be ransomed, would we?
And what does he mean by holy, anyway?
There are three things that Peter points to as our necessary response to God:
The first is to “live in reverent fear.“ This isn’t dread or anxiety, but rather “the healthy response of a human being before an altogether different kind of being.” The title “Father” doesn’t only indicate intimacy and love, but also respect and submission. We need always to keep in mind not only the mercy of God, but also his role as righteous judge. We have to weigh the quality of our lives against the quality of God’s character. Every step we take and every move that we make should be in light of what God thinks we are doing. This is not legalism, any more than a desire to please a beloved husband or wife is legalism. Living with our eyes on God’s horizon causes a fundamental shift in our attitude toward the world.
The second response Peter urges on us is to trust God. Trusting God works out in practice in a number of important ways. The obvious one is simply to stop being anxious about life. In the context Peter is talking about, where the Christians are at best powerless and at worst persecuted, this basic kind of trust in God’s providence and protection is very important. But trusting God also works out in obedience. You see, if you really trust God, you’ll obey him. Because you figure he knows what he’s talking about, knows what it best for you, knows where you’re going and how to get from here to there, and so on and so forth, absolutely the most sensible thing to do is to follow the directions just as carefully as you can - from spending time in God’s Word to loving your enemies. Not to mention forgiving your brothers and sisters, which can be even harder than loving your enemies.
Peter’s third exhortation, to love one another deeply from the heart, is rooted in the other two. In fact, it is only possible because of the other two. Note that Peter assumes that we can love one another as we ought only after we “have purified our souls by our obedience to the truth”. Love grows out of both fearing and trusting God, not out of our own wills and abilities.
The kind of response God asks of us is not doable under our own power. The love God asks us to demonstrate to one another cannot grow in the unregenerate heart. The fundamental belief of our tolerant, anything goes society is that people are really good at heart... but this is of course not true. We only have to look at the news to realize the hollowness of that claim. The evil that the Russians are inflicting on the Ukranians, that the Chinese are inflicting on the Uighurs, the atrocities committed in North Korea, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Africa and other countries around the world stems from the unadorned reality of human nature, just as did the evil the Turks inflicted upon the Armenians a century ago, and so on around the globe and down the centuries. And we here, in what we used to call "God's country," are by no means either immune or innocent.
Many of the ethical standards that our secular world claims as the common property of all humankind do not arise from human wisdom; they are the residue of 2,000 years of Christian teaching, and another 2,000 of Jewish law and tradition before that. Not only do our hearts need regeneration, but also our minds. Not only can we not do good without God’s help, we can’t even know what good is. But we, having been freed from sin and taught that God is love, have somehow deceived ourselves into thinking that God is indulgent, and that the only debt we have is to our own appetites. We have embraced our sin as Stockholm syndrome suffers embrace their captors, and can no longer even imagine the true freedom of belonging to Christ.
We have been bought with a price. We are no longer our own. And the only appropriate response is to do what God wants from us in return:
To live in reverent fear, to trust God, becoming purified through obedience to the truth, and to love one another deeply from the heart
