In Jesus’s last few days before his passion and death, and again when he appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, he seemingly said one word more than any other: peace. “Peace I leave with you,” he says today, “my peace I give to you.” And to a group of tense and frightened disciples who were confused about what the next day was going to bring, they must have been welcome words. A sense of peace was what they wanted and needed. And yet, after these beautiful and reassuring words, the disciples didn’t get very much peace. Immediately after this passage, Jesus says, “Arise, let us leave this place,” and they head off to the worst, most dangerous, most discouraging days of struggle that any of them would ever face.
It was the same after the resurrection, when the disciples are hiding and discouraged again, feeling as if God has confused them and abandoned them. They’ve forgotten all about the so-called peace Jesus promised them before he left them. But when he appears to them again, the one thing he wants them to understand is that the Spirit that he is giving them will bring them peace, not an ordinary kind of peace, maybe, but peace nevertheless. It’s true that somehow that Spirit Jesus promised them gave them the courage to get out of that room and remember why they were disciples, but again this time, they didn’t live what we would think of as peaceful lives: they encountered conflict both internal and external, they undertook lives of constant travel and uncertainty, they got handed the project of evangelizing the world, which in case you haven’t noticed, doesn’t always go smoothly or quickly.
So what is this peace that Jesus gave them and promised them they would have? I grew up in the 1960s, God help me, and we all said peace to one another back then, I think maybe as a way of reinforcing the desire to chill out, to detach. And even now, we would define peace as more the absence of what afflicts us than the presence of something powerful. For many of us, peace is part of the phrase peace and quiet, and while another phrase, rest in peace, might be going a little too far in describing what we want, at least right now, the fact is we do want rest, and quiet, we want freedom from the burdens and the conflicts that each week brings, whether it’s a job that is a source of constant agida or a relationship that is nothing but conflict and disagreement and exhaustion. We want a break, some peace, and you know what? If that’s what you need to get through life right now, you’re entitled to it.
But clearly, this idea of taking time on the sidelines when life has beaten us up wasn’t the peace that Jesus is promising in this gospel. The peace of Christ is not that kind of peace, he says it’s not something that the world gives at all. He’s thinking of something else for us.
Real peace, to Jesus, means that God is inspiring us and caring for us and teaching us. Peace is communion with God, a confidence that what God has promised, God will do. This is not something that is available to us now and then, but we are being offered a constant awareness that the Spirit of God is protecting us and giving us inspiration to go forward. Later in this gospel Jesus says, In the world you find suffering, but have courage: I have conquered the world. That’s peace: He’s not telling the disciples that they’ll be able to detach from conflicts and the struggle for justice, instead it means that they will have the strength and energy and love to see everything through.
The peace of Christ is not the absence of difficulties. It is not a detachment from what upsets us or challenges us. If Christ conquered the world, then Christians have to, too, not with power or force, but by a total surrender to loving others. It seems to be right after the disciples were offered the peace of Christ that they were also reminded to get moving. They had been made new creatures, and reminded and inspired by everything Christ ever said. That’s the peace that we are offered here, not peace and quiet, always, but a confident love that nothing can shake.
Do you know people who live their lives inspired by peace like that? They take on hard projects and say courageous things and suffer setbacks, but it does not knock them to the ground, they still feel this peace, this sense that God has somehow got their back. It’s like when Martin Luther King in the last speech he ever gave said he wasn’t really worried about how all his struggles would turn out because he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. After seeing that vision of where God was headed, he could be at peace even in the midst of a struggle he would not live to see the end of.
In fifteen minutes or so when we all turn to one another and say “peace be with you,” of course it means that we’re wishing one another well. We are even saying that we love one another. But we’re saying a lot more than that. We are repeating the words of Jesus on the night before he died, the words he said when he came into the locked room to inspire his hiding disciples. We’re saying that God is present, always present, in the person next to us, and in all of us, and that there isn’t any struggle for love or for justice that we should ever be afraid of.