NOTES for Pe1 3:10-22

The Apostle Peter wrote his catholic Epistle around AD 63, at the very beginning of the period of persecution of Christians. At that time, the new people of God, chosen and sanctified by the Holy Spirit, entered upon the way of the Cross in following their Teacher. The apostle therefore writes about the meaning of suffering and relates the sufferings of the faithful to the saving suffering of Christ Himself. Tradition tells us that around the time this epistle was written, at the beginning of the persecutions in Rome, the apostle left the city at the insistence of the Christians, and on the road just outside the city walls he met Christ. “Lord, where are You going?” the Apostle Peter asked Him, and the Lord replied that He was going to Rome to be crucified there once again. On hearing this, Peter returned to Rome and suffered martyrdom there. A church called Domine quo vadis (Lord, where are You going?) was later built at the site of this encounter, and to this day it houses the stone upon which Christ’s feet stood.

Today’s passage from Peter’s Epistle seems to contain the apostle’s thoughts about precisely this. The apostle says that we must always be ready to give an answer for our hope, and explains that suffering for good deeds, when it is given to us by the will of the Creator, offers us an opportunity to meet and be united with Christ. The apostle writes that salvation itself was accomplished because Christ suffered innocently for our sins. The meaning of the apostle’s words is that our innocent suffering is mysteriously connected with Christ’s saving Passion. The Apostle Paul would express this thought as follows: “I fill up in my flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for His Body” (Col 1:24). In the Epistle to the Romans, in the passage read during the sacrament of Baptism, he adds: “we were buried with Him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4).