1 Peter 2:19-25 Commentary

The faithful proclamation of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson poses some challenges. In terms of the church year, its focus on Jesus’ suffering seems to orient it more to a Lenten or Holy Week than Easter theme. Preachers may need the Spirit to help us be a bit creative to make 1 Peter 2:19-25 “fit” into an Easter season setting.

What’s more, verse 19’s “for” [gar*] closely links the verse to what Peter has just written, but the RCL omits. In verse 18 he writes, “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.”

The RCL’s editors may have wanted to save preachers from the challenge of having to explain the apostle’s summons to Christian slaves’ submission to their masters in a 15-25 minute message. But by omitting verse 18’s difficult call from this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson, those editors effectively unmoored this Lesson from its vital context. Those who wish to explore that context may find some help in reviewing an earlier commentary  on this text.

Preachers who wish to let the Spirit help us locate 1 Peter 2:19-25 in an Easter context might consider arranging our message around how those whom God has raised with Christ live in the light of that. Quite specifically, we might focus on the shape of post-Easter life that sometimes includes “unjust suffering” [paschon adikos]” (19).

Peter invites his exiled readers to take our cue from the suffering Christ. The Christ whom Christians worship today is not just the risen Christ; he is also the suffering Christ. It’s as if the apostle wants his readers to never forget that before the Father raised him from the dead and to the heavenly realm, the Son of God suffered deeply.

However, Christ didn’t just suffer profoundly. He also responded to his adikos (“unjust) suffering in an extraordinary way. Christ, remembers Peter in verse 22, “committed no sin [hamartian ouk], and no deceit [horethe dolos] was found in his mouth.” Even when he suffered so horrifically, the Son of God obeyed his Father perfectly. The apostle reminds his readers that, in other words, the suffering Christ completely resisted all temptation to say anything that was either treacherous or deceitful.

Even when others caused the incarnate Son of God to suffer unjustly, he remained perfectly obedient to the Father. “When they hurled insults at him [loidoroumenos],” Peter remembers, “he did not retaliate [anteloidorei]; when he suffered [paschon], he made no threats [ouk epeilei]” (23a, b). In the words of the NRSV, when Christ “was abused, he did not return abuse.” In other words, Christ refused to retaliate in any way against his verbal and physical abusers.

Jesus’ biblically literate friends can hardly hear verse 23 without thinking about Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the suffering servant. “He was oppressed and afflicted,” the prophet writes in Isaiah 53:7, “Yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he did not open his mouth.” Preachers might choose to refer to examples of Jesus’ silent suffering as Matthew 27:12-14 and 34-44 describes it.

In fact, Peter goes on to marvel, when Christ stood before human judges, he did nothing to defend himself. Instead, “He entrusted [paredidou] himself to him who judges justly [krinonti dikaios]” (23c). When Christ stood before judges whose sin blinded them to his glory, he silently submitted to their wrongful judgment knowing that he was ultimately responsible not to them, but to the God who krinonti dikaios (“judges justly). As The Message paraphrases this, “Christ suffered in silence, content to let God set things right.”

This silent suffering, Peter reminds his sometimes abused scattered readers, extended all the way to Golgotha. Christ “’himself’,” the apostle celebrates in verse 24a, “’bore [aneneken] our sins’ in his body [to somati autou] on the cross.” The sinless, eternal Son of God, in other words, absorbed the punishment for our sins that we deserve.

Yet Peter goes on to insist when God raised this suffering Servant from the dead, God also raised Jesus’ adopted siblings from our spiritual death. The apostle spends much of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson exploring what our resurrection life looks like.

The apostle admits that at least some of Jesus’ adopted siblings post-Easter life includes sharing in some of our Elder Brother’s unjust suffering. He uses a variety of terms to describe that suffering. In verse 19 Peter, as we’ve already noted, speaks of paschon dikaion (“unjust suffering”). He goes on to reference suffering [paschontes] “for doing good [agathopoiountes]” (20b).

This, of course, raises some familiar questions. Chiefly, about what kind of suffering is the apostle writing? Christians have generally answered that question in two ways. We’ve traditionally thought of Christian suffering as that Jesus’ friend experience for his sake. God’s adopted children often think of Christian suffering as what others, often including powerful people, inflict on us because we’re doing the “good” that is following Jesus. Friends of Jesus are experiencing that all over the world, but perhaps especially in parts of south and east Asia, as well as the Middle East.

However, Christians have also believed that Peter is at least alluding to the response of Christians to the kind of suffering that all of us endure as part of our daily lives. It includes responding to things like mental and physical health struggles. Suffering for Jesus’ sake at least secondarily refers to things like abuse, neglect, and various forms of violence against our persons or those we love. Peter invites us to consider how we will respond to the kinds of suffering that we experience every day of our lives.

The understandable and natural responses to such suffering include self-pity, anger or simple disengagement. Peter invites Jesus’ resurrected followers to a more cruciform way. He begins his summons with a call to a kind of divine awareness. “It is commendable,” the apostle writes in verse 19, “If someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God [syneidesin Theou].”

There are any number of reasons why one might choose to endure unjust suffering. They might include stoicism or fatalism. The apostle summons us to endure unjust suffering because of our awareness of God, including God’s character and commitment to caring for God’s dearly beloved people. Jesus’ friends put up with unjust suffering because we know who God is.

The apostle goes on to refer to God’s character when he writes “if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable to God [charis para Theo]” (20b). Among the striking and perhaps noteworthy aspects of this summons is Peter’s use of the word charis that we generally translate as “commendable.” In other places that word is translated as “grace.” So it’s almost as if the apostle is hinting that the power to endure suffering for Jesus’ sake is among God’s gifts of grace to God’s beleaguered adopted sons and daughters.

In our awareness of God in the midst of our suffering for Jesus’ sake, Peter summons us to look to our adopted Elder Brother for inspiration and guidance. In verse 21 the apostle announces God has “called [eklethete]” us to endure suffering for doing good “because Christ suffered for” us, “leaving” us “an example [hypogrammon], that” we should “follow in [epakolouthesete] his steps [ichnesin].”

We live in a culture that when it acknowledges Christ at all, points to the good example he was. Our contemporaries sometimes point to his exemplary unconditional love, compassion and gentleness. However, I can’t remember the last time a neighbor pointed to the example of Christ’s endurance of his suffering for doing good. Few of us want to imitate Christ by handling any kind of suffering without complaining.

And yet this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s Peter invites Jesus’ friends to follow in his footsteps by doing precisely that. When we suffer unjustly, we let the Holy Spirit equip us to respond not in the way our world naturally responds to it, but the way Jesus did.

This, in fact, seems to be a fundamental part of the kind of life to which the apostle summons his resurrected readers. Christ, he writes in verse 24, “’bore our sins’ in his body on the cross so that we might die [apogenomenoi] to sins and live [zesomen] for righteousness [dikaiosyne].”

Part of the death of sin’s control over us includes resisting the temptation to lash out at those who are causing us to suffer unjustly for following Jesus. Part of resurrected Christians’ living for righteousness includes suffering for Jesus’ sake in ways that point our tormentors to the Christ who by his Spirit lives in us.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

Jesus’ friends continue to suffer unjustly for doing the good that is following Jesus. International Christian Concern   recently reported on an attack on Congolese Christians on Maundy Thursday. The Allied Democratic Forces attack on Bafwakao in Democratic Republic of Congo killed dozens of Christians.

A civil society representative who wished to remain anonymous reported, “The initial death toll of 43 may rise further; some victims were burned inside their homes, and others are still in the bush. The attackers surprised the population in their sleep; the victims were killed by gunfire, and several were beheaded with machetes. The images are unbearable.”