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When I and my wife arrived in this country we faced an extremely annoying situation: we had no identities. Of course we did have our passports and visas in it, but they are no good to drive after three months, or to make any kind of contract like cell phones services or even garbage collecting services. We had no records, no credit; in only one word we had no identification.
We, than, became the “riders of the lost I.D.”. And it was most like a mission impossible: standing on lines at the social security department, answering questions, handing declarations from the seminary. At the DMV we have our worse time when were asked to provide a English translations of our Brazilian driver’s license but no one told us were to get a official Portuguese translator since we ourselves were not allowed to translate it.
Thanks to our Lord everything turned out fine and today we have all the documents that we need. But this whole situation shows us how important it is to have an identity. How it is important to be known and to know ourselves.
But identity is something that goes beyond social life. In fact, the Christian life also cares for definitions, for detailed explanations, especially in times of doubt, suffering and persecution. This is what we find in the first epistle of the apostle Peter. He is here addressing, probably around 63 A.D., a group of churches who were not yet facing a official persecution (the one that would be established by Nero some years later), but a social persecution, possibly a pressure from society, and, because of that, they were also in need of guidance and care.
The whole letter can be divided in three big sections, having the Christian identity in view: (1) Identity of Christian Doctrine – 1.13 to 2.10; (2) Identity of Christian behavior among a wicked society – 2.11 to 4.11; (3) Identity of Christian behavior towards a hostile world.
The first two verses which will be further analyzed, generally regarded as greetings and salutations, curiously addresses to the issue of identity and can also be structured in a two point outline which we are going to follow during their exposition: (1) The identity of the writer in relations to the Church; (2) The identity of recipients in relation to God and the world.
