NOTES for Pe1 2:24
Speaking about the earthly ministry of the Savior, Peter, quite as the other apostles, pays a special attention on His death on the cross. And it is in particular the meaning of such a death that he sees in the fact that it made possible for the believers the total liberation from the power of sin, opening them righteousness in all its plenitude. What he means then? Of course, the examples of righteous men, which ended their life in martyr, at the moment of the Jewish people, were already well known, and some of them are related in to relatively recent times. Each of such an example became the living witness on the fact that righteousness is more important than life, that the main question of the human life is not how long we are going to live, and even not if we are going to live or die, but rather how to live and how to die.
The death of Jesus on the cross was a tremendous proof of it, especially that, unlike the common fallen man, for Him death was inevitable at all: He made His choice, being freed from the idea that sooner or later it will be necessary for Him to die, which facilitates to some the idea of the fast end of agonies. But if the death of Jesus was simply the death of a righteous and a witness, it wouldn’t distinguish itself at all from the death of those who died for their righteousness or their witness, long time before His coming to the world. Such a death can be an example for others, but it can free nobody from sin, which in our fallen world hangs over everyone. And in this is the problem that Jesus died not simply as a witness of the Kingdom. He died for the sake of the Kingdom that He brought in the world.
If He refused His earthly path (and in the fallen world this path had to end inevitably with a violent death), the Kingdom would not have entered our world, but remained foreign to it. And then, one could speak of course about no victory on sin, about no plenitude of righteousness. Nothing then was going to change in the world generally, and it would remain today such as it was several millenniums before the coming of Christ. And the apostle, certainly, understands this perfectly. He understands who Jesus is and what He has done. And reminds that to the addressees of his message: because without such an understanding, there is no Christianity.