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INTRODUCTION
Always have your answer ready for
people who
ask you the reason for the hope that you have.
1 Peter 3:15
With these words St. Peter encourages his fellow Christians to be ready to explain to others why they follow the new Christian way of life, why they have accepted Jesus Christ and believe in him. His words apply to believers of all times, to you and me today. If our Christian faith has real meaning for us, we should be ready to explain to others who may ask us why we believe and live as we do.
As life goes on, the most important questioner to whom I must be ready to explain my religious hope is myself. The most important questions to be answered are the ones I ask myself when I am alone. What does Jesus Christ mean to me? Why do I believe in him and try to follow him? What difference does he make to my life? If I cannot answer these questions to my own self, I am unlikely to be able to explain my Christian hope to others.
Let us notice the kind of questions we are speaking about here. We are not concerned so much with intellectual questions and answers. We are not talking about scoring high marks in a Christian doctrine exam. Many of us would feel intimidated by such an exam. Recent years have seen rapid and startling changes in our world. It is very obvious in the area of technology, but it is happening with equal speed and force in the world of ideas, culture and religious beliefs. One of my favourite comic postcards shows a picture of a bewildered teddy bear poring over a large book with a caption that says, ‘There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about!’ We can be intimidated by the development of science, technology and new skills in our secular world. Now, our faith life, our religious beliefs and practices are subject to their own growth process and development. As a result many good Christians feel less confident about explaining or defending their Christian beliefs. Startled by new interpretations of traditional faith, they feel less secure.
Thus it may seem harder than ever in our time to respond to Peter’s urging that we should be ready to explain our Christian hope to those who ask. But the Christian message, the Good News, is more about salvation than about having correct answers to difficult doctrinal questions or providing neat solutions to the complex problems of life. The heart and centre of our faith is a person, Jesus Christ, and this person, Jesus, offers a salvation that may be deeply experienced, just at a time when correct doctrinal answers elude us.
If we were to ask Peter himself to explain the hope he had, I am sure he would start to speak of Jesus Christ, how he met him and how life was never the same again. And Peter understands that this Jesus is at the centre of the lives of the Christians he is writing to. To them he writes, ‘You did not see Jesus, yet you love him; and still without seeing him, you are filled with a joy so glorious that it cannot be described, because you believe.’ This book offers some reflections which may help us to share the experience of those early Christians who, like us, did not see the Lord but loved him. That love was real for them. Indeed it was the greatest reality in their lives and filled them with a joy so glorious that it was difficult to describe.