1 Peter 3:13-22

“Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” (1 Peter 3:15)

Two very different things sit side by side here: practical counsel for a suspected minority, and the most obscure paragraph in the letter. The word for defense in v. 15 is a legal term, and the word for reason suggests an account that can actually be stated, but the instruction is qualified at once by gentleness and respect, which limits what kind of speech is meant. Verses 18-22 then move from Christ’s death to a proclamation made to the spirits in prison (v. 19), read by some as preaching to the dead of Noah’s generation and by others, following the Enoch traditions, as an announcement of judgment to the imprisoned angelic figures of Genesis 6:1-4; the verse stands behind the creed’s line about the descent. The flood becomes a figure of baptism, and notably not as a washing but as a rescue through water (vv. 20-21). The whole sequence is fastened to Easter by its last clause.

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