NOTES for Pe1 2:1-10

Christ is called a living stone, but we too are called to be living stones like Him. Once again the apostle points to the high calling entrusted to us: we are called to become like God, His fellow workers in salvation. After all, He created us in His image and likeness; and even though we have distorted His image through our sinfulness, this does not mean that the Lord has abandoned His original design.

The gathering of the faithful around Christ is the most important step toward restoring the world damaged by sin. Peter concludes the list of descriptions that reveal the vocation of Christians, a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation..., words on which we ought to reflect more often amid the bustle of daily life, by saying that Christians once were not a people, but now are the people of God. This recalls how the calling of Abraham began the journey of a people chosen to preserve faithfulness to the Lord. At first, to fulfill the ministry entrusted to them, the people had to separate themselves from their pagan neighbors. Now, however, the people of God are expanding: all who are called may enter, even if they have been rejected by others. But not by God.

In today's reading the apostle Peter calls us to love the Word of God as a newborn infant loves milk. For an infant, loving milk is natural; more than that, he loves nothing else, because milk is his only food! So what - should the Bible be our only source of information? From today on, should we read nothing except the Bible and send all books to the recycling pile? Or should we ignore the words of the apostle Peter and choose the information that seems most suitable to us at the moment?

It is doubtful that the apostle Peter meant to say that the Word of God is the only word to which one should listen and which one should hear. But he certainly meant that His word must be more important to us than any other word. After all, the Bible does not give us exhaustive information on every existing question (for example, questions of theoretical grammar are not addressed in it). But if there is a contradiction between some philosophical theory I find appealing and the Word of God, I choose the Word of God; otherwise I am not a Christian. The same applies to questions of morals and ethics: the criterion of the truth of any statement is the Word; it is precisely the pure milk and true food for us.

Graciousness is a very good word. It means exactly "something very good", only that this word is rarely used and that is why it keeps its expressiveness. So, our current verse proclaims that God is gracious; God is "very good". The vision of this is generally typical to people believing in a Unique God. The fact here is that if there are many gods, then to admit the existence of wicked gods is completely possible, even comfortable: because someone, maneuvering between the interests of various gods can reach his purposes. But if there is a single God, then the problem of His Graciousness becomes absolutely important for man: it is necessary to press forward to the good God, and to run away from the wicked ones!

Holy Scriptures speak about God's graciousness from the top pages, but all this is mostly only words, that is external information in regard to man. The New Testament brings a new knowledge of God - in the Holy Spirit, leading us to the union with the Father in the Christ Jesus, this knowledge is internal, similar to the way we recognize the taste of food. The psalmist of the Old Testament calls to “taste” (Ps 34:8) - the Christ says: "this is My Body... This is My Blood" (Matt. 26: 26-28). And the apostle Peter concludes: “ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious”.

An interesting idea sounds in Peter's message: it turns out that we cannot only see or hear God, but we can also taste Him. Although this idea is, perhaps, not so new. In psalms, for example, we sometimes find there the mention of the Torah that "is sweet" and "pleasant to the larynx". At first sight, such associations can show themselves strange and even a little bit low-lying: because the pleasure of taste and flavors, are generally mostly associated for us with food, and food (as usual to fallen people) with gluttony. But, maybe, it is just the problem of our sinfulness, our fallen human nature? In fact, it is especially in the Gospel that the messianic Kingdom is associated not with something "high" and "spiritual", but with “lowly” meals, with feast.

Moreover, the Jewish believers are always with pleasure ready to invite God on their table, all feasts suppose a meal, and for each meal they invite God, whether it is a Sabbath meal, Passover Seder or any other feast meal. And if it is so, then the sense of taste, from the eating of food are inseparable, in themselves no more and nor less spiritual, than any others. And God can speak with us through them as well as through sight or through hearing. But how - it is already another question. It is completely obvious that no sensation can tell us about spiritual realities nothing, if the sensual experience is reduced only to the information connected to the physical world. But why we should limit the domain of the perception of our feelings only with the physical world?

Only because is obvious for us the link of the sensual experience with physiology, with defined receivers and specific parts of the brain or the spinal cord? But is this link the proof that no other source of information, capable of forming in us such corresponding experience, except the physiology, does not exist? Obviously, no, quite as the existence of the physical world cannot be the proof of the non existence of many other worlds.

And when God reveals to us His Kingdom, He uses the same feelings to tell us something about another world, of which before the arrival of Christ we did not almost know, of which formerly we saw only from far and which we can now join. And our feelings will also serve us here in the same way as in the old world, familiar for a long time. But now they reveal to us not our world, not yet transformed, but rather the Kingdom, where we shall have to live from now on.

Stones come in different kinds. Living ones, for example. We know that Christ is the cornerstone. We also know that He called the apostle Peter a rock. Today the apostle Peter reminds us that each of us is a living stone, and from these stones the Church of God is being built.

How, then, is it being built? By itself? In a certain sense, yes: the stones themselves are being joined into a spiritual house, as the apostle Peter says. They themselves "build themselves into" the Church! They? We do. We ourselves build the Church, finding our own place in it.

The apostle Peter says that all of us are stones from which the Church is being built. The words that Christ is the "cornerstone, chosen and precious" are more or less familiar. We also remember that Jesus said to Peter, "You are a stone, and on this stone I will build My Church" (Matt. 16:18). But it turns out that each of us is a stone from which the Church is being built. We are not simply in it; we are part of it. If there were no Christians, there would be no Church.

The stones from which the Church is built are not ordinary stones, but living ones. And this means that the Lord did not simply pick out objects of a suitable size and shape by some mechanical process. In His building plan each separate little stone is taken into account, because all of them are different and alive, and if they are alive, that means they change. This matters because the Church is not merely a building either; she is alive. So each of us is not a cog in a machine, but part of the living Church. And so it is important for us to remember that the Church is not two or three small stones, but all the stones together. If the living stones are hostile to one another, the Church will fall apart, and we see how this happens. If the stones strive for peace and love, the Lord will be able to build from them His house, the Church.

In the first half of this verse the apostle Peter proclaims that in those whom he addresses, and therefore in us, God's promise given through Moses at the conclusion of the covenant on Mount Sinai has been fulfilled (Ex. 19). But there it says that the promise concerns those who keep all the commandments given by God, the law of Moses. Do we keep them? And if we recall how Jesus interprets these commandments in His Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5), our conscience should immediately accuse us. And there is no need to think that this is how things are now, while in the time of the apostles everything was in order. The books of Acts and of the apostolic letters testify that even then righteousness and sin, holiness and apostasy were mixed in people, members of the Church, just as in us. Why, then, does Peter write this?

There is one Man who did not break the law, who filled up and fulfilled all the commandments: God's Chosen One, our King and High Priest, Christ. In Him everything God promised in His covenant is accomplished, and all this becomes ours then, and only then, when we unite our life with the life of Christ, when we hand our life into His hands and allow Him to govern our life. We only need not to be "distracted" from Him, always to seek Him, to look to Him, as Peter did when he walked on the water toward Jesus (Matt. 14:29-31).

But Peter says something else as well. In this new life we have a task: to bring it to other people, to witness before them to how the Lord has changed our life, to manifest such light and such love that people may see through us the fullness of the perfection of the One who Himself is Light, Love, and Life.

By calling Christians a "royal priesthood" and "a people for His own possession," the apostle thereby reminds them of the chief task of the Church, which, as we can see, consists first of all in bearing witness to the reality of the Kingdom that has already entered our world and is transforming it. Of course, the "excellence of the One who called you" refers to Christ Himself; otherwise this expression cannot be understood. But if witness to Christ is genuine, it will inevitably be first of all witness to the Kingdom that He brought into the world. Properly speaking, as Christians we could not bear witness to the world about anything else.

Of course, each of us will surely have something connected with our own tradition, cultural and religious. But witness to our tradition will no longer be our witness as Christians. It may be our witness as Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, or representatives of one more among the many religions that grew out of Christianity. Yet such witness has no direct relation to Christ or to the Kingdom. At best it can only be our historical and cultural interpretation of Christianity.

But Jesus does not offer us any interpretations. He offers us only Himself and the Kingdom that He brought into the world. And if we truly are, according to the apostle's word, "a holy people," that is, people who have a relation to this Kingdom, then only Christ and the Kingdom can and must be the meaning of our witness. Otherwise we will very quickly cease to be what the apostle calls us to be.