None of us knows what will happen next. All we can say is that it looks like life won't be the same again, whatever that might mean. And not knowing, not being able to predict with any certainty, can so easily shake and unsettle us.
When Peter wrote his second letter, his readers were facing the prospect of a 'new normal'. The age of the apostles was passing and would soon be gone (Peter talks about his own impending death in 1:14). The fixed points of security for their life and experiences as Christians were becoming loosened and their moorings slipped. Those who had known Jesus personally would soon be no more. How would they cope? What would the future hold? How do you even begin to imagine, let alone live from, a new normal?
Peter was writing to prepare them for that and sets his course from the very start when he says [you] "have received a faith as precious as ours." (1:1)
As an apostle, that is quite a statement for him to make. Everything, it seemed, was on Peter and the other apostles' side and was absent from those he was writing to. They could easily feel they had been given a second class ticket and sold just a little short on their journey.
But Peter is quite clear: their faith is as precious as that of the apostles. How so?
Because faith isn't fundamentally about our social location. In his first letter he details where they lived - Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia; a very wide variety of places and peoples. But faith isn't circumscribed by circumstances.
Nor does faith hinge on our place in history and our access to the physical reality of the life and ministry of Jesus. Peter had indeed seen Jesus, heard him teach, watched him die and seen him alive, resurrected. He had witnessed the transfiguration, which he mentions in 1:16-18, an experience that only 3 of the apostles shared in. But none of that elevates his faith beyond theirs. As Jesus told Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
And faith isn't a matter of our personality, nor our psychology. Those may influence how we experience it but they do not determine its worth or value. They are not what allows us to call faith 'precious'.
So what does? It's all down to its object, its focus: "our God and Saviour Jesus Christ" and the means by which that faith is given and received: "through [his] righteousness". It is Jesus and his precious person, his wonderful and unimpeachable faithfulness and integrity, and all in our place as Saviour - that is what makes faith so very precious. His consummate heart and his completed work.
And that is not in the slightest changed by the new normal we will enter. Because he is not changed, over all the years, through all the variations of our feelings and fortunes and failings. He gifts faith; he is its supreme object and delight. He walks with us as his people into all our tomorrows, carrying us in all our sorrows and sustaining his own life within us.
Through a faith that is immutably precious.
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Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills my breast;
But sweeter far Thy face to see,
And in Thy presence rest.
Nor voice can sing, nor heart can frame,
Nor can the memory find
A sweeter sound than Thy blest Name,
O Saviour of mankind!
O hope of every contrite heart,
O joy of all the meek,
To those who fall how kind Thou art!
How good to those who seek!
But what to those who find? Ah! this
Nor tongue nor pen can show:
The love of Jesus, what it is
None but His loved ones know.
Jesus, our only joy be Thou,
As Thou our prize wilt be;
Jesus, be Thou our glory now,
And through eternity.
Bernard of Clairvaux, 1091-1153
tr. by Edward Caswall, 1814-78
