Peace
John 14:27 Easter 6
9 May 2010
”Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.” So said Jesus to his disciples in the hours before his crucifixion. It was also the first thing he said to them after his resurrection: Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Somehow, from the very beginning, the story of Jesus has been about peace. The angels who announced his birth to the shepherds sang: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” On the other hand, it seems that Jesus may mean more by the word than we do: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Those are also the words of Jesus. In today’s Gospel he said that the kind of peace he was giving was not the kind that the world offered. So our task for today is to try to understand what kind of peace it is that Jesus first offered his disciples and still offers us today.
Perhaps the place to start is with notions of peace that are common in the world around us. In Jesus’ own day, there was certainly an interest in peace. In the Greco-Roman world there was an everlasting state of war, as one author put it, and peace referred to those blessed times in between when people could get on with their lives. In order to secure a more general peace, the Roman empire had extended its control over the whole Mediterranean world—the famous Pax Romana—and there were many who were grateful for a cessation from war—although there was a price to be paid in subservience to the strong arm of Rome. That still seems to be the idea most have in mind—peace is a lack of external threat so individuals can get on with their lives.
In the Old Testament, the word peace—or shalom—also could mean a cessation of conflict, of standing down from war, but it also came to have a highly concentrated religious meaning as well. It referred to a state of reconciliation with God, especially within the context of the covenant, and to the possession of the blessings which God bestowed upon his faithful people. It could refer to a peaceful prosperity which was the gift of God, as in Psalm 85: “Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts. Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.”
Already in this passage we see a kind of longing for a salvation which does not really exist yet. And the prophets proclaimed a time of great peace in the future when God will have acted to save his people so that they can enter into true peace, when sins of the people are done away and the conditions of the new age have come to pass. For example, in Isaiah 9: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.” Or in Isaiah 57:”I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the LORD; and I will heal them.” In Ezekiel 37 we read this: “I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary among them forevermore.” The word for all of this, as well as the word used for normal greetings amongst fellow Jews, was shalom, peace.
So when we come to the New Testament, the time of Jesus, in whom all the prophecies and hopes for peace and salvation were embodied, it is proclaimed that Jesus’ gift to his disciples and to the world is peace. In Acts 10 we hear: “You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all.” The first meaning of the word peace, then, is salvation. The peace Jesus brings is not peace as the world understands it, merely an interlude in conditions of everlasting war. It is not a mere outward freedom from confict that lets you do what you want. Nor is it some kind of inner freedom from anxiety, necessarily. Peace is to be understood as well-being, the security that comes from having entered into salvation. Its opposite is not anxiety but affliction. As Jesus put it in John 16: “I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have trouble. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” It is no contradiction for the Christian to experience intense troubles and perhaps even anxiety about the way things are—especially with loved ones—under the conditions of this world. Jesus, as I understand him, did not promise freedom from anxiety, but rather the possession of genuine peace, salvation, security in God. I remember Bishop Michael Marshall once saying in a conference here, that God doesn’t give us a kind of decaf spirituality—that is, one that will never keep us awake at night. Jesus also said in our Gospel lesson today: “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.” That is, very soon it will look as if I have lost control over my own life, but the Father is still in control, and so things will work out according to his will. That knowledge, that relationship with the Father that Jesus had, is the basis of our peace.
As one of the commentators upon this subject put it (Werner Foerster, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, eirene), “Peace thus means far more than the opposite of strife . . . It implies the divinely willed and therefore salutary state of all things, the normal state, to the degree that sin is a disruption of the normal.” That is a beautiful idea: peace is the normal condition of God’s created world, a condition we have pretty much ruined, but which God himself restored to us through the Sacrifice and Resurrection of his only Son. In the Kingdom of God we can enter into the normal state of humanity again—peace with God, salvation, restoration. And that also has implications for our inner life: In Romans 15, Paul said: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Earlier in Romans (5) he had put it this way: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” We can experience peace as a return to the normalcy of the intended relationship between Creator and creature, now Redeemer and redeemed.
The word peace is found in parallel with the word life and so it refers to the fact that our restoration to peace is actually our participation in a new life, which is our original life restored through Christ and taken to an even deeper level. As once we were only creatures of God, now we are actually sons and daughters through the one and only Son, our Lord Jesus, through the agency of the Holy Spirit: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8: 6) And within the sphere of the Church, we have peace with each other: “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. (Romans 14) And this peace is not only a gift, but a pursuit, as the letter to the Hebrews makes clear: “Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” That is, we are not pursuing only feelings of good will or merely tolerant relationships, but a common salvation in company with all other believers.
So what do we conclude from all of this? Three things, I believe: first of all, if you are looking to your religion primarily as a way to have a peaceful life, to reach a kind of inner repose and freedom from anxiety—especially in a complicated and frantic world—it is not necessarily Jesus’ peace that you are after. The peace that Jesus brings is the restoration of normalcy, that is, salvation, life in anticipation of the age of the Kingdom to come—but it is a life lived at cross-purposes with this world. In the world we shall have trouble—sometimes a lot of it—but we live in the security of knowing that Jesus has overcome already all of our opposition.
Secondly, our knowledge and experience of the victory of Christ does mean that we also have a present experience of peace—and joy, too. The triumph of Christ, of course, will only be known perfectly in the age to come, but even now we live out of our future: the life of the age to come flows back to us now. The life of that future is the reality of the Body and Blood of Christ which we partake of in Communion—a sharing in the Messianic Banquet of the age to come. It is the reality of the Holy Spirit indwelling our hearts now. So the peace and joy of the Kingdom can be a part of our present experience. If we share now in the massive reality of the salvation that Christ has won for us it is bound to have an effect on us personally. If we are alive in the Kingdom, then we shall know ourselves to be alive. I know that I have a lot more to learn about joy and peace as present experience—especially the paradox of being joyful in suffering, which comes through so clearly in St Paul. But this I can understand: because our knowledge of peace—and of joy, too—is not linked to current conditions but to the realities of grace and salvation and the Kingdom of God, that means that peace can still be a reality in our hearts beneath the anxieties of the present moment, because we know that our anxieties are temporal, while the peace we have begun to experience is everlasting. Joy is found in the same list of the fruits of the Spirit as peace. And they are related. Joy is a way to describe a sense of fullness in being alive, of living into the meaning of our existence. In being given peace through Christ, our true lives have been restored to us. Life is good because the life we have in Christ is the life we were meant for. To know that you are living into the entire reason for your being, your existence, is to know joy—even if times are tough, things don’t go right, and your sorrows are great. Joy is deeper than a feeling of happiness or great pleasure. In that way it is like peace, which is deeper than a lack of conflict, but is in reality the experience of salvation. But there is an important qualification to make. I don’t believe we always have to feel joyful and peaceful. I believe that joy and peace are deep within us since we have been given the gift of salvation, of normalcy. But we often have to live more on the surface of things to handle the affairs of everyday life. There life can be painful and complicated. Still, at the depths are our joy and peace, which we can reach as we leave the surface issues and probe the depths. Sometimes the peace and joy rise to the surface also. But this highlights again the need for periods of quiet and solitude: to get in touch with peace and joy again.
Finally, to be at peace with God and each other and to share in the blessings of the Kingdom, has a missional, that is, a vocational side. We are to share our peace, be peacemakers, and so be seen as God’s own sons and daughters. Here, I think, we could do a lot to make our world a better place, but even more to witness to the reality of the Kingdom. People are still struggling against each other for many reasons. Most of those reasons are not justified. Most of them are evil, sinful, and wicked. To know God’s peace must also mean to spread it around, to make peace between ourselves and others, to reconcile those who are variance with each other who will listen to us, to live in peace with all who are willing to be at peace with us, and perhaps even those who are not. If peace is primarily the fruit of our reconciliation with God, then our mission, as our catechism puts it, is to extend that reconciliation into the world, until all people are reconciled with God in Christ. That is, while this world lasts in its present form, we shall not lack for a peace-driven mission.
So when we exchange the peace at Mass today, let us think of the powerful meaning of the peace we have been given and the peace we are to share, with each other and with a troubled world.