NOTES for Pe1 3:21

Peter pays particular attention to what he calls a ‘good conscience’. He also connects it with readiness to answer anyone who asks about Christian hope ‘with humility and fear’. He is evidently speaking of an answer that bears witness, to be given in humility and in the fear of God. Clearly, these things are all connected, and a ‘good conscience’ underlies them all. The corresponding Greek word means not only ‘conscience’ but also ‘awareness of oneself’ and ‘self-awareness’. The subject here is a person's inward state: how clearly they are aware of what they live by.

Awareness is central to spiritual life in general and especially important in a Christian's life. To be aware of anything means that the will of the one who is aware participates in what is apprehended—a will deliberately directed towards the object of awareness. The will is the principal instrument of spiritual life: through it we make choices and decisions. Without it, we cannot build a system of values or follow it.

Awareness is precisely an experience or action in which the will of the person experiencing or acting participates purposefully. An experience or action from which the person does not inwardly withdraw, does not try to ignore reality, but is fully present in it, forming an attitude towards what is happening and making the corresponding choice. Of course, unless a person is spiritually rooted in the Kingdom, this degree of awareness is generally beyond their reach.

But when it is present, their witness sounds entirely natural, whatever the outward circumstances. Then one really can answer anyone while remaining in God's presence, without the insolence or aggression that usually arise from a desire for self-assertion. A Christian, however, has no need to assert themselves, simply because God has already established them through Christ in His Kingdom. All that remains is to carry that Kingdom into the world, without worrying about what others will think or say of them.

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).

The twelve verses from the First Catholic Epistle of the apostle Peter that we read today seem like a very large passage because of the abundance of exceptionally important things the apostle says. The most important, perhaps, are the apostle's words about what our baptism is. The stereotypes of our consciousness force us to relate to baptism, how shall we put it... in different ways. Sometimes for us it is a rite of initiation, or something like a vaccination against illnesses and misfortunes.

That is why it is so important to hear what the apostle Peter says: baptism, according to his words, is not the washing away of bodily uncleanness, that is, it has nothing to do with ritual purity. The apostle states that the main thing in baptism is the pledge to God of a good conscience. The Greek word here means not merely a promise, but a promise made solemnly, a vow. For various reasons, for most of us this event itself, the making of baptismal vows, passes unnoticed. Partly for that reason we do not keep these vows in memory, the "pledge to God of a good conscience." But the apostle Peter says that precisely this baptism, this promise or oath to Christ, saves us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

No less important is that everything else, apart from a good conscience, remains offstage. Salvation is given by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and by nothing else. To receive it, one must promise God to have a good conscience and fulfill that promise. First, such Christ-centeredness is important in itself, because anything that claims the central place in our life apart from the Son of God Himself is an idol. Second, this view of the apostle contains within itself all the countless variety of forms of Christian calling.

In this connection it is also significant that the apostle speaks about our lot. He speaks of the persecutions that fall to Christians with remarkable calm, as something fully understandable to him. He grounds this in the fact that a good conscience before God draws every Christian onto the Way of the Cross, which the Head of the Church also walked. But, following the Teacher and Lord, the apostle Peter says to us: do not be afraid; this is the way of life.