1 Peter 2:2-10 Commentary

God uses God’s image-bearers’ race, gender, history and other things to shape who we are. Yet while those factors help form us, Jesus’ friends don’t find our central identity in them. We are first and foremost what Peter refers to in verse 10 as “the people of God [laos Theou*].” By professing that, the apostle summons Jesus’ resurrected friends to always think of and view both our adopted siblings in Christ and us primarily as God’s dearly beloved people.

But, of course, while the apostle uses a variety of images to describe our Christian identity, we derive our primary identity from our adopted big brother, Jesus Christ. So wise preachers may seriously want to consider beginning any proclamation of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s great news by exploring how Peter identifies Christ.

The Jesus Christ whom the apostle describes in this Lesson is, in some way, paradoxical. In one sense 1 Peter 2’s risen Christ is “both … and.” The apostle emphasizes how God and people naturally have very different views of the risen Christ. One theme to which he returns several times is the rejection Christ experienced and continues to experience from people.

For example, in verse 4 the apostle speaks of him as “the living stone [lithon zonta] — rejected by [apodedokimasmenoi] humans but chosen [eklekton] by God and precious [entimon] to him.” Peter refers to Christ similarly in verse 7 when he refers to him as “The stone the builders rejected [apedokimasan] [but who] has become the cornerstone [kephalen gonias].”

The Incarnate Son of God came to his own people, the descendants of Abraham whom God had called to be God’s very own. Yet when Jesus Christ came to his contemporaries, most of them, including his fellow Jews, apedokimasan (“rejected”) him. In fact, by employing a perfect participle in verse 4, the apostle mourns how God’s image-bearers continue to reject him even 2.000 years after he returned to the heavenly realm.

Yet while his contemporaries rejected Jesus, God, marvels Peter in verse 4, both chose and viewed him as “precious.” While people continue to dishonor Christ by either rejecting or simply ignoring him, God honors him as the eternal Son of the living God. We might even say Jesus Christ is more valuable than the worth of all of world history’s precious metals combined.

In verse 7 the apostle goes on to grieve how the incarnate Son of God is a “stone that causes people to stumble [lithos proskommatos] and a rock that makes them fall [skandalou].” While Christ is, by God’s amazing grace through the work of the Holy Spirit, a “stone” on which God is building God’s church, he is someone over whom many people stumble and at whom they take such deep offense that they refuse to trust he will rescue them. The precious Jesus Christ continues to be, in other words, a scandal to so very many people.

Verse 8’s description of this widespread rejection is fraught with challenging assertions. There, after all, the apostle writes, “people who stumble [proskoptousin] [over the living Christ do so] because they disobey [apeithountes] the message – which is what they were also destined [etetheisan] for.”

Led by the Spirit, preachers will want to proclaim this verse through the lense of their own faith tradition. But perhaps all of us might at least say this: the “tripping” and “falling” people who reject Christ do is a failure to live in the ways for which God created them to live. Yet Peter doesn’t make it perfectly clear who does the destining to such disobedience. Is it God or the path which people have chosen for themselves?

No matter how preachers interpret this profession, we share Peter’s grief at the message. Jesus Christ is the most precious one who ever lived. He who has done so much asks comparatively little. And yet far too many people have deliberately chosen to go their own way rather than follow him. They treat him as a worthless pebble rather than a precious jewel.

God, by contrast, honors Christ as the lithon zonta (“living stone”). He is, in fact, the cornerstone [kephalen gonias] of the Body of Christ that is the holy, catholic Church. Christ is the foundation of the Church. He is, in a very real sense, the first “stone” God laid as part of God’s building project that is the Church of Jesus Christ.

Yet this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson and, in fact, the world and Church’s story turns on verse 9’s “but” [de]. While countless people have rejected the precious Christ, the Holy Spirit has empowered God’s dearly beloved people to “come” (4) to him in faith. While so many people view and treat Christ as worth no more than a hunk of worthless rock, God has brought God’s adopted children to see him as the cornerstone of the Church into which God has graciously incorporated us.

How does Peter describe God’s dearly beloved people? In verse 3 he asserts we “have tasted [egeusasthe] that the Lord is good [chrestos].” God’s dearly beloved people have discovered God’s kindness, pleasantness and gentleness to be so compelling that we can figuratively taste them. Or following the lead of The Message, we might profess the Spirit has given us “a taste of God.”

In verse 5 Peter goes on assert, “you also, like living stones [lithoi zontes], are being built into a spiritual house [oikos pneumatikos] to be a holy priesthood [hierateuma hagion], offering spiritual sacrifices [pneumatikas thysias] acceptable [euprosdektous] to God through Jesus Christ.”

This is yet another Petrine profession that’s so theologically saturated that it nearly oozes theology. By referring to Jesus’ followers to stones, Peter very closely links us to Christ, God’s chosen and precious cornerstone. By doing so, the apostle also at least alludes to the fact that Jesus’ adopted siblings too can become a kind of stumbling block to others’ potential Christian faith by acting in ways that are less than loving toward our neighbors.

What’s more, by referring twice (5, 9) to God’s dearly beloved people as a priesthood that offers spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, Peter links us to God’s Old Testament priests who at their best served God by offering sacrifices on Israel’s behalf. We, of course, no longer offer animals or produce as sacrifices. But we offer our whole selves in loving service to both God and our neighbors.

Jesus’ friends, however, never forget that our sacrifices’ acceptability is always based on Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. Had Christ not sacrificed everything for us, our acts of love for God and our neighbor wouldn’t please God. Because of Christ’s sacrifice, God graciously approves of even our smallest acts of sacrificial service.

In fact, verse 9 seems to suggest that God graciously made us a “royal priesthood” not just so that we might be priests, but also “so that [we] may declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light.” We might even infer part of our priestly sacrifice is what The Message calls “speak[ing] out for” God, “to tell others of night and day difference he has made for” us.

In addition to all that, in verse 9 Peter speaks of us Jesus’ friends as “a chosen people … a holy nation, God’s special possession.” We live in a world in which even Christ’s Church is deeply divided along theological, political, socio-economic, racial and other lines. That suggests both that the Spirit must work very hard to make Jesus’ followers into one nation and that any human efforts to divide that holy nation run counter to God’s deepest desires for us.

When Jesus’ followers see Christians with whom we politically disagree, we see not enemies but fellow citizens of the holy nation that is God’s kingdom. When Christians deal with our siblings in Christ who look and sound different than us, we see not strangers but God’s peripoiesen (“special possession[s]).”

After all, Peter sings in verse 10, “once you were not a people [ou laos], but now you are the people of God [laos Theou]; once you had not received mercy [ouk eleemenoi], but now you have received mercy [eleethentes].” God graciously took a disparate band of rebels and turned us into God’s beloved group of adopted children to whom God continues to show mercy every hour of every day. God, in the parphrase The Message offers, turned us “from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.”

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

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In his book A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight shares some powerful and sobering thoughts about the gospel that the apostle Paul preached. He notes how it produced local churches that were much different than ours today in America.

He writes, “About 90 percent of American churches have developed in such a way that about 90 percent of the people in those churches are of the same color. Which is to say that only about 10 percent of churches are integrated.

“Why might this be so? Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, in their prophetic book Divided by Faith, conclude with this: ’The processes that generate church growth, internal strength, and vitality in a religious marketplace also internally homogenize and externally divide people.

“’Conversely, the processes intended to promote the inclusion of different peoples also tend to weaken the internal identity, strength, and vitality of volunteer organizations.’ In other words, ’The gospel we preach shapes the kind of churches we create. The kind of church we have shapes the gospel we preach.’”