Editor's note

The first epistle opens with a doxology unlike any other in the New Testament. Peter is writing, probably from Rome, to scattered communities of Christians in the provinces of Asia Minor who are beginning to suffer for the Name. Before he speaks of their trials he tells them what they have been given. The hope, he says, is not a wish but a thing alive, born from the Resurrection of Christ, kept in heaven for them as gold is kept in a treasury, and revealing itself even now in a love that does not need to see in order to believe.

Editor's note

Having reminded the scattered Christians of what they have been given, Peter turns to who they have been made. He gathers up the great titles God once gave to Israel at Sinai and applies them, unhesitatingly, to a handful of believers in Pontus and Bithynia. The Church, he says, is no afterthought: it is the people God has been gathering all along. Their calling, like Israel's, is to be a kingdom of priests, that is, to stand between the world and God and offer the world up to Him.

Editor's note

Near the end of the first epistle Peter speaks to the presbyters, the elders, of the churches. He speaks as one of them. He does not invoke his place among the Twelve or his commission by the lake; he calls himself 'a witness of the sufferings of Christ' and a fellow elder. To his brothers in the pastoral office he gives the counsel he himself received: feed the flock, and do not domineer over it. The chief Shepherd, when He appears, will weigh how the under-shepherds have kept His sheep.

Editor's note

The first epistle closes with a counsel that the Orthodox Church reads at compline and that pilgrims write on the walls of cells. Peter, who once sank in the waves for looking at them instead of at Christ, now tells the persecuted to set down the weight they were not meant to carry. He does not say their cares are small. He says God minds about them, and that the proud man's resistance and the anxious man's clutching are at root one sickness, the refusal to let God be God.

Editor's note

The second epistle, written near the end of Peter's life and aware of it, is a charge laid on the next generation. He warns of false teachers, recalls the holy mountain where he saw the glory, and ends with a sentence that has been read as his own last word to the Church. The Christian life, he says, is not a height to be reached and held. It is a growth, and the soil it grows in is the knowledge of Christ, who is Himself the ground and the goal.