Who, when he was reviled. — This “who” might be rendered by and yet He. Conscious though He was of being blameless (John 8:46), it did not make Him retaliate upon His accusers by counter-accusations, true though these might have been. The word here translated “revile” is the same which reappears in 1 Peter 3:9 as “railing,” and a sample of what it means is given in John 9:28. The servants would be particularly liable to be thus abused, and instances are not wanting in the comic poets where they lose their self-control under it, and openly rate their owners in return. The “suffering,” on the other hand, implies actual bodily maltreatment, “buffeting” (1 Peter 2:20) and the like, to which the slaves could not answer directly by striking in return, but would sometimes take their revenge by “threats” of what they would do — run away, or burn the house, or poison the food, or do little acts of spite. Instances of our Lord’s silence or meekness under “reviling” may be seen in John 7:20; John 8:40; Matthew 12:24, as well as in the accounts of the Passion. There are no recorded instances, until the last day of His life, of His “suffering” in the sense here intended; but the tense of the verbs “reviled,” “threatened,” “committed,” shows that the writer was not thinking exclusively of any one occasion, but of our Lord’s constant habit, though naturally there would be uppermost in St. Peter’s mind the hours while he stood warming himself at Caiaphas’ fire, with the denial on his lips, and saw the Messiah blindfold and buffeted. He is also thinking of Isaiah 53:7.
But committed himself. — This was His only form of revenge. As the Greek does not express the grammatical object of the verb, it is better not to supply one so definite as “Himself” or “His cause,” rather, “but would leave it to Him that judgeth righteously.” M. Renan (Antéchrist, p. 117) says that this passage “requires it to be understood that the incident of Jesus praying for His murderers was not known by Peter;” and other critics have held the same view. But (1) St. Peter, as we have said, is speaking of what was the constant habit of Jesus, not of what He did on the day of His crucifixion only. (2) The word does not necessarily imply any act or word of direct appeal to God to judge between His murderers and Him; on the contrary, the leading thought is that of “passing the matter over” to God (comp. Romans 12:19), by simply refusing to take any action in self-defence. (3) It would have been unlike the usual method of the Epistles to make direct reference to any of the minor details of our Lord’s history. (4) Such a reference here would be beyond the point, for St. Peter said nothing in 1 Peter 2:19 about praying for the bad masters, and here he is only justifying by Christ’s example the position he had laid down there.
To him that judgeth righteously. — God is described in the aspect which is most reassuring to men who are suffering unjustly (2 Thessalonians 1:5). This looks back to that “consciousness of God” spoken of in 1 Peter 2:19. There is a curious various reading which is adopted by the Vulgate, though without any solid authority, and evidently a mere blunder, the interpretation of which we may leave to those who are committed to it: “He gave Himself over to him (or, to one) who judgeth unrighteously.” St. Cyprian seems to have understood it of our Lord’s voluntary self-surrender to Pilate.