1 Peter 3:13-22 Commentary

After hearing the Boy Scouts’ founder Robert Baden-Powell say the Scouts’ motto was “Be prepared,” someone reportedly asked him, “Prepared for what?” The founder allegedly answered, “Why, for any old thing.” In fact, in his manual, Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell wrote that to be prepared means “you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty” (https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2017/05/08/be-prepared-scout-motto-origin/).

In this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson Peter offers a similar summons to his scattered readers. In verse 15 he invites them to “Always [aei*] be prepared [hetoimoi] to give an answer [apologian] to everyone who asks you to give the reason [logon] for the hope [elpidos] that you have.” The Spirit may, in fact, prompt preachers to “organize” messages and sermons around that vital summons.

We might begin by noting 15’s aei (“always”) has both a contextual and general application. While Jesus’ modern friends sometimes view this verse as a summons to always be ready to talk about our faith, its immediate context is Peter’s return to the theme of Christians’ suffering for doing what’s right.

In 1 Peter 2:13-14 he rhetorically asks, “Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer [paschoite] for what is right [dikaiosynen], you are blessed [makarioi]. ‘Do not fear their threats [ouk phobethete]; do not be frightened [tarachthete]’.”

Peter, of course, had felt fear in the face of threats for doing what is the right thing that was following Jesus. He understood that fear is the most natural reaction to those threats. Yet the apostle summons Jesus’ followers to a more Christlike way.

In fact, he reminds us that in our response to persecution for doing good we take our cues from the suffering Christ. When the Roman and religious authorities tortured and crucified him, he didn’t lash out at them. The crucified Christ even prayed for his tormentors’ forgiveness.

Peter at least implies that even when others somehow harm us for doing what is right, the most appropriate response is to be constantly prepared to talk about our reason for our hope. His use of a legal term apologian (“give an answer”) suggests that those questions may be less like friendly banter than interrogations in a court of law.

But, of course, we don’t just prepare to share our hope in hostile settings. God’s dearly beloved people always want to be ready to share the cause of our hope whenever anyone asks us about it. Peter intimates we shouldn’t just be ready when the questions are friendly. Jesus’ friends are also ready to talk about our hope at any time and in any place.

Preachers might let the Spirit prompt us to summon our hearers to reflect on what they might say about the hope God has given them. We might even consider offering people a chance to quietly formulate a kind of summary statement of our hope. Preachers might remind hearers that simplicity is more valuable than profundity, and that sincerity is more vital than eloquence.

Christian hope has a number of facets. But perhaps central to them is our humble confidence that God will someday wipe away sin and its effects, as well as make all things both right and new. Christian hope includes a trust that God has graciously reserved space for all of God’s adopted children in the new earth and heaven that cannot be taken from us.

Peter, of course, offers advice about sharing this hope God has given us in verse 15b: “Do this with gentleness [prautetos] and respect [phobou].” Christians, in other words, don’t just share our hope in the gentle Christ with the same kind of gentleness that characterized our Lord and Savior. We also share our hope with the kind of phobou [“respect”] that we typically reserve for our attitude toward God.

Those with whom we share our faith are, after all, created in God’s image. So when we talk about our hope in the God we reverence, we do so with a deep, abiding and – dare we say – almost reverential attitude toward the people with whom we share.

As preachers close our consideration of Peter’s talk about sharing our hope, we might remind our hearers that others’ conversion to God-given hope isn’t based on what Christians say or do. Any such transformation is the work of the Holy Spirit. In a sense, Jesus’ followers mostly try to stay out of the Spirit’s way.

Preachers might follow the Spirit’s promptings in sharing some of Peter’s time and enthusiasm for exploring the reasons for this hope. In verse 18 the apostle remembers how “Christ … suffered [epathen] once for sins, the righteous [dikaios] for the unrighteous [adikon], to bring [prosagage] you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive [zoopoiethes] in the Spirit.”

Christ, in other words, shared in his adopted siblings’ suffering (14). But while we sometimes bring our suffering on ourselves, Christ didn’t deserve to suffer. He was, after all, the most righteous person who ever lived. The perfectly righteous Christ, in fact, suffered for the sake of unrighteous people like his friends in order to hymas prosagage to Theou (“bring us to God”). He suffered, died and was raised to life again in order to bring us into a faithful reception of God’s amazing grace.

Few verses that describe the suffering, risen Christ’s work are more mysterious and, thus, controversial than verses 19-20. In his commentary on Peter’s letters and the book of Jude, Martin Luther wrote: “A wonderful text is this, and a more obscure passage perhaps than any other in the New Testament, so that I do not know for certainty just what Peter means.”

In this mysterious text Peter describes how “After being made alive, [Christ] went and made proclamation [ekeryxen] to the imprisoned [phylake] spirits [pneumasin] – to those who were disobedient [apeithesasin] long ago when God waited patiently [makrothymia] in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water [diesothesan di’ hydatos].”

Preachers will need to follow the Spirit’s promptings as we choose how deeply to delve into 1 Peter 3:19-20. But we might note at least how it points to the enormous chronological and cultural gap between Peter’s time and ours. We sense that the Spirit helped Peter’s contemporaries see and understand something in this that’s too distant for us to completely understand.

What’s more, verses 19-20 remind God’s dearly beloved people that the risen Christ let nothing stop him from proclaiming the great news of his resurrection. It would seem that even the mysterious circumstances of Noah’s contemporaries who’d rejected God could not keep them from somehow hearing the greatest news the world has ever heard.

On top of that, Peter is eager to link water to both judgment and salvation. The waters that drowned those who rebelled against God and God’s purposes in one sense rescued faithful Noah and his family. After all, those waters both raised them above the chaos of a sinful world and gave Noah and his family’s world a new start by cleansing God’s world.

But, of course, water never rescued anyone from the rebellious path we naturally choose for ourselves. Water, instead, as Peter reminds his readers, “symbolizes [antitypon] baptism that now saves [sozei] you also – not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience [syneideseos] before God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (21).

This verse too is laden with mysterious imagery. But it suggests Peter is eager to clarify the value of baptism. He insists the sacrament all by itself doesn’t guarantee salvation. However, it points Jesus’ friends to Christ’s saving life, death and resurrection that does rescue his followers. In fact, through the work of the Holy Spirit, the means of grace that is baptism reminds us that because of the risen and ascended Christ’s redeeming work, those he rescues can have a syneideseos agathes (“clear conscience”) toward God.

The Message may offer preachers a pastoral way to end a proclamation of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s gospel.  Its parphrase of verse 22 is this: “Jesus has the last word on everything and everyone, from angels to armies. He’s standing right alongside God, and what he says goes.”

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

Illustration

I have never recounted these stories in a sermon because I worry it makes me sound like some kind of hero that I’m not. But preachers might use them or take them a springboard to explain what talking about the hope we have might look like.

A number of years ago I tore a retina in my eye that a local retinologist repaired. As I went on a follow-up visit to him, I told my doctor about my ongoing treatment for leukemia. At the end of his exam he asked me, “Do you ever wonder why a man of God like yourself has to experience this kind of suffering?”

I admitted that I wonder why I must deal with leukemia. But I then added, “I don’t fully understand why I must be sick. But I believe that this is precisely the kind of human misery that Jesus came into the world to someday take away, and that, in the meantime, his Spirit stays with me at all times.”

Sometime later my wife and I were sharing a Sabbath meal with some Jewish friends. Over dessert a high school student asked us, “So who do you guys really pray to? God or Jesus?” I answered as humbly as I could, “In a way no one can fully explain, we believe that God and Jesus are the same person, so that when we pray to God, we’re also praying to Jesus.”

Both questioners were clearly intrigued by my answers to their hard questions. But that wouldn’t have happened had the Spirit not graciously prepared me to gently and respectfully “give an answer to everyone who asks” me “the reason for the hope that” I “have.”