“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Peter 1:3 RSV)”
Probably no apostle felt the death of Jesus more agonizingly than Peter. He had boasted that he would not leave him or forsake him, that he would stay true and fight for him even unto death. He meant so well, but he failed so miserably. When the moment came, a little girl’s question upset him, and melted all his bravado, and he denied his Lord. So to the appalling collapse of hope that all the apostles experienced in the death of Jesus, in Peter’s case was added the shame and disgrace of his own denial. It is no wonder that the last view we have of Peter in the Gospels is his going out into the dark of the night, weeping bitterly.
I am sure there may be some like that here this morning whose hopes have been crushed, whose dreams have been unfulfilled. Maybe just a few years ago you had glorious dreams of what you would like to be, and what you would like to do, and now they are all faded away, or collapsed about you. You meant to do well, but you ended up wrong, somehow. We can even have bad days that make us feel that way.
It is those kinds of moments and that kind of day that the resurrection of Jesus is designed to relieve and to help. We celebrate Easter and the great triumph of Christ over the grave but we often forget that Easter also stands for the presence of Christ with us to meet the pressures of life as they come to us day by day. I am sure Peter had that in mind when he wrote this text, for you to recall that after the resurrection of Jesus we are told in the Gospels that he appeared privately to Peter. Evidently the sensitive heart of Jesus understood how Peter felt in the hour of his monumental failure and collapse of faith, and he sought him out, and appeared to him, and doubtless restored him to some sense of personal worth again.
All we need do is align ourselves with all that Jesus represents, regardless of what it was with us before, our failings, Jesus lives in our hearts to forgive us, to sustain us, to encourage us, to strengthen us, to correct us. He guides us all the way through life to the end, and then does not leave us desolate, but takes us on through to that life beyond.