1 Peter 2

1 Peter 2 is addressed to people who were being talked about. They lived in the towns of Asia Minor as a suspect minority, called evildoers by their neighbors, and Peter's first move is not to tell them how to behave but to tell them who they are. Newborn children hungry for pure milk. Living stones being fitted into a temple built on a stone that the builders threw away, which God made the cornerstone. And then the titles that once belonged only to Israel, given to former pagans: a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people God owns, called out of darkness into a light that Peter calls marvelous. You were not a people, he says, and now you are. Only after that does he say how to live. As strangers passing through, keep your conduct so clean that the slander falls apart on its own and the slanderers end up giving glory to God. Submit to the emperor and his governors, even under Nero, because free people do not need to use their freedom as a cover. Honor everyone. Then he speaks to the household servants, who could be beaten at their master's whim, and he does not pretend it is fair; he says unjust suffering borne for God's sake is a grace, because that is exactly what Christ did. He did not hit back or threaten, but handed himself over to the one who judges justly, and he carried our sins in his own body onto the tree so that by his wounds we could be healed. We were sheep wandering off, Peter ends, and now we have come back to the Shepherd.