Fourth Sunday of Easter — 1 Peter 2:19–25
For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly [1 Peter 2:19].
The passage the Lectionary gives us this week [the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A] begins at verse 19. But it begins in the middle of something.
A few words earlier, Peter addresses household slaves directly — not their masters, not the heads of households who held power over them, but the slaves themselves. That is already unusual. Ancient household codes, the genre Peter is working within here, were typically addressed to the paterfamilias, the male head of the household, who was then instructed on the proper management of those beneath him. Peter inverts the convention entirely. He speaks to those without power as if they are moral agents with full standing before God. Because they are.
Which means that when he speaks, in the verses that follow, about enduring unjust suffering, he is not proposing a spiritual discipline for those with the leisure to adopt one. He is speaking into a condition — the actual shape of actual lives. These are people inside a structure they did not choose and cannot easily leave.
That is the ground from which everything else in this passage grows.
Then Peter gives words that are exceedingly difficult to hear.
He says that enduring unjust suffering — not suffering for your own failures but rather absorbing the consequences of someone else's wrong — is a grace. The Greek word is charis. Not that grace accompanies such suffering. Not that God is present somewhere nearby while it happens. The bearing itself is called charis.
That is not a comfortable claim. It has been used, across the centuries, to tell people in brutal situations to stay put and call it holy. That distortion is worth naming, because that is not where Peter’s emphasis lies. He is not saying the injustice is good, or that the suffering is deserved, or that those who endure it should stop wanting it to end. He is saying something more precise and more difficult: that something can be preserved within unjust suffering — something that does not collapse into retaliation or harden into bitterness — and that this preservation, this holding of the line, is itself where grace is found.
The distinction matters. The suffering is not the grace. What is done within the suffering — the refusal to become what has been done to you —the tracing, however unsteadily, of a pattern not drawn by you is what Peter is reaching for.
He is not finished, however. He cannot leave the claim to stand on its own, because it cannot. So he turns immediately to Christ.
The word Peter uses for “example” is hypogrammos. It appears only once in the New Testament — this is it. In the ancient world it described the faint letters a teacher would trace on a writing tablet for a student to follow, guiding the hand line by line over what had already been drawn.
Not a model admired from a distance. A pattern already laid down, waiting for the hand to follow it.
And what has been laid down is this: when He was abused, He did not return abuse. When He suffered, He did not threaten. He did not deny that wrong had been done. He did not redefine it or minimize it. He released it — not into nothingness, but into a judgment not his to carry out in that moment. He entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.
That is the line. And it is the hardest one to trace.
I stood once at a graveside for a family I barely knew — one of those occasions when a funeral home calls because there is no pastor, no church home, no one else to come. Perhaps twenty people gathered. I knew enough about the situation to know that among them was a woman who had carried on a lengthy affair with the man we were burying. His widow knew it too. He had told her himself, near the end.
I watched the widow when that woman came forward. The anger was there — I could see it in her eyes, quiet and controlled, but unmistakably present. She knew. The wrong was real and she was not pretending otherwise.
And she was cordial.
I had half-expected something else. I was close enough to see what was in her eyes, but whatever held her back from acting on it was not mine to see. She did not give the woman any indication that she knew. She simply — held the line.
I have thought about that graveside more than once since then. Peter would say he knows what held her. But standing there that day, watching it happen, what I saw was someone tracing a pattern she had not drawn — unsteadily, at real cost, in full awareness of the wrong done to her — and not going her own way.
But Peter does not leave the community there — hand on the line, bearing what should not have to be borne. The passage turns.
Verses 24 and 25 shift the register entirely. What has been, up to this point, a word about what the community is called to do becomes a word about what has been done for them. The focus moves from the pattern being traced to the one who drew it — and what his drawing of it cost.
He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed [1 Peter 2:24].
Peter is drawing here from Isaiah 53 — the fourth Servant Song — almost verbatim in places, working from the Greek translation his readers would have known. The suffering servant who bore Israel's plight, who was wounded for transgressions not his own, who was led like a sheep to slaughter without opening his mouth — that figure has been, all along, the one whose letters are on the page. Christ did not trace a pattern laid down by someone else. He laid it down himself, at the cost the Isaiah passage names without flinching.
And then the final image, drawn from the same chapter of Isaiah: you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls [2:25].
Not: you have successfully completed the exercise. Not: you have traced the lines cleanly and may now rest. The community Peter addresses is still in the middle of its situation — still inside the structure, still absorbing what it should not have to absorb. But they have been gathered. Found. Returned to the one who is, at once, the pattern they are tracing and the shepherd who keeps finding them when they lose it.
That is not the same thing as resolution. But it is not nothing.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter carries a name in the old tradition: Good Shepherd Sunday. The Gospel reading each year in this season reaches for the shepherd passages in John. The reading from the Psalter is the familiar, soothing Twenty-Third. It is not accidental that Peter ends here too — with the shepherd, with the guardian of souls, with the one who sought and found what had gone astray.
But the Epistle passage does not end in a pasture. It ends in the middle of things, which is where most of us actually live. The structure is still there. The wrong is still real. The line is still on the page, waiting for an unsteady hand.
What Peter offers is not a program for achieving the kind of steadiness the widow at that graveside somehow found. He does not explain it, and neither will I. What he offers is the prior fact: that the line was drawn before we were asked to trace it, that the one who drew it is the same one who bears us when we cannot follow it, and that the bearing of unjust suffering without retaliation — however imperfectly, however unsteadily — is called, in this letter, grace.
Not because the wrong is not wrong.
Because of Who is near.
Be First to Comment