November 3 – 1 Peter 2:18-3:7

This week we’ve got a passage that will take some care to sort through, but it’ll be worth it—personally I’ve found that the thorniest passages often bear the most fruit. Last week, in 1 Peter 2:13, Peter started laying out something like a “household code,” a genre with which his readers would’ve been very familiar. In our passage this week we’ll see him address slaves, wives, and husbands, and as we work through some of the things that will likely offend our modern sensibilities, we’ll see him present the suffering Christ as the example for all Christian obedience, particularly obedience in hardships.

On a different note, with the election going on, don’t miss Talking about politics in CG (?)→ 

Let me give a couple points of advice for this week. First off, consider sending the link to this guide out to your group members ahead of time so they can make use of the extra resources included below. I’ve included scans from a commentary on 1 Peter by Dr. Karen Jobes, a first rate scholar at Wheaton, and she does an excellent job of going deep in the weeds on Peter’s context. Second, in discussion, I’d recommend getting people to reference multiple translations. The CSB journals we’ve handed out for this series are a fine translation, but I think you’ll find certain word choices in other translations like the ESV or NIV might be useful (ex. “weaker vessel” in 3:7 ESV is the more literal translation compared to the CSB’s “weaker partner”). Lastly, there’s a discussion primer for you to use below which should provide some helpful information for your discussion. In the paragraphs to follow you’ll find a bit more, but the primer will help catch everyone up on a few key ideas for discussion.

You’ll find much more about this in the Jobes scans below, but in the first century, Peter’s audience would have been quite familiar with household codes, which philosophers and teachers prescribed for orderly conduct in families and societies at large. Jobes points out how Peter does this to simultaneously uphold certain cultural elements and to subvert others. For example, he addresses the family as a fundamental building block of society (FYI, in Roman society, slaves were considered members of the household). Also he recognizes the cultural bounds in which slaves and women would need to operate in Roman society, though not without pushing some buttons.

For example, other household codes were consistently addressed to the patriarch of a family, telling him how to direct his wife, children and slaves. In contrast, Peter speaks directly to slaves and women, and in the opposite order of Greek household codes, which typically ran top to bottom. He also messes with the power dynamics involved, like how a slave might win his master over to Christ, since traditionally family members had to observe the patriarch’s religion rather than maintaining separate religious allegiances, and the way in which women were co-heirs of Christ alongside their husbands, a laughably egalitarian thing to say in Peter’s day.

There are other little one-off things to address here, like what he means by “weaker vessel,” why Peter mentions Sarah calling Abraham “lord,” and why he didn’t direct slaves to seek their freedom like Paul does in 1 Corinthians 7:21. Jobes has more on all this, but briefly, let’s discuss what a wife being subject to her husband doesn’t mean. When it comes up in discussion, feel free to point out two things. First, the text speaks to wives and husbands, so this is not about all women being subject to all men. This is strictly in the context of a marital covenant, and don’t miss the warning to men later in the text that disrespect of their wives disrupts their relationship with the Lord (3:7). Second, we always read scripture in context, and we have many other passages which speak to the way in which men and women are called to behave towards one another. Passages like Matthew 5:31-32, 1 Corinthians 7:1-16, 1 Corinthians 13, Ephesians 5:1-33, etc., all contribute to the conversation and help us see how this is most certainly not a requirement for a woman to remain in an abusive marriage, or to do things against her conscience or the Lord’s will.

In discussion, we’ll try to drive towards the unifying idea across the guidance given to slaves, women, and men in this passage: the example of the suffering Jesus. As Jobes explains, “The basis for Peter’s reworking of social expectations is the example of Jesus Christ as the Suffering Servant of God, in whose footsteps all Christians—including slaves, wives, and husbands—are to follow” (p. 187). On this basis Peter can encourage slaves towards faithful work even when mistreated and women towards honorable relationships with husbands who have not yet submitted their lives to Christ. Faithfulness in the midst of suffering is a theme throughout the book, so we’ll look back at 1 Peter 2:11-12 to remind us of this (we also saw it back in 1:6-7).

We’ll wrap up by connecting this passage to our lives, asking how we ourselves can remain faithful even in hardships in work and in our relationships. That might feel like a stretch from “slaves and wives” to “work and relationships,” but while none of us are first-century indentured servants, we all have had (or will have) relationships in which we worked for someone who treated us poorly; similarly, not all of us are husbands or wives, so asking generally about relationships will let unmarried folks still apply the text. In the last question we’ll recognize just how much we need the Lord’s help to be faithful in all this, particularly when we are mistreated or cultural pressures tell us to behave differently (ex. culturally acceptable ostentatiousness in 3:3). In all this we look to God for help and we remember Christ, who exemplifies what it means to resist the world and suffer for it while also proving that faithfulness to God regardless of the cost is, in the end, the only thing that matters.

Dr. Karen Jobes on 1 Peter 2:18-25
Dr. Karen Jobes on 1 Peter 3:1-7

Discussion primer:
Peter’s context was drastically different than we might assume. First off, slaves in Roman society were indentured servants of all ethnicities who worked for a set number of years to buy their freedom, unlike American race-based slavery with which we’re more familiar. Second, this society was so deeply patriarchal that, while this passage might seem old-fashioned to us, it was advocating for a serious shake-up of the cultural order back then. In Peter’s day, things called “household codes” were written to men to instruct them in running their households in an orderly fashion. Here, Peter uses the household code format but changes things about it, addressing slaves and women directly rather than speaking only to men, starting at the bottom ranks of slaves rather than leaving them for last, and treating women as equal with men before God in verse 7, a novel concept at the time.

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