What on earth did Jesus mean when he promised his disciples peace? Within hours, after a sleepless night spent in anguished prayer, he would be surrounded by a posse of soldiers, arraigned before a rigged court, presented to a frenzied crowd who would bay for his blood, and publicly crucified, the innocent victim of one of the cruellest means of execution ever devised. What peace was that?
Going back to our first reading, we have Isaiah’s vision of a holy mountain where the fiercest wild animals would lie down peacefully with the most vulnerable sheep and goats, under the care of a little child. But even this peaceful scene depended on the terrifying presence in the background of a new leader rising up from the ruins of the house of Jesse, who would strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and slay the wicked with the breath of his lips. It seems that even around the holy mountain there was to be a cordon of superpower violence.
Have we ourselves received a legacy of peace? To be sure, few of us under the age of 80 has had direct experience of war, but our peace was bought at the cost of the lives of millions of our countrymen, and has been preserved at the cost of many more lives, both military and civilian, lost on all sides in the lesser wars which have kept the peace for us since 1945. We remember to-day with deep gratitude all those whose lives have been sacrificed to keep far from us the threat of death and destruction that our parents and grandparents had to face. But we know that the world is still very far from being at peace. We see violence and war on our television screens almost every day, in Iraq and Palestine, in Rwanda and Darfur, even on the streets of our own cities, on our crowded trains and buses ripped apart by terrorism, in the glossy towers that reach up into the sky above our heads, and we know that however fortunate we may be in the prosperous suburb of a great western city, our world is not at peace.
No wonder Jesus says of his peace, I do not give to you as the world gives. How then does he give us his peace? Is it real, or are we the victims of a pious con? The first part of the answer has to lie in what we know about Jesus himself. What peace did he know? What peace did he have to give? No stranger to conflict and controversy, he was exposed to all the pressures that crowd in on us. His emotions were engaged just as ours are; he could be angry or deeply moved. He could relax with his friends, but he was never too busy to give his loving care and his undivided attention to those who needed him. In all this there was a calmness and composure, a true peace, at the heart of his being that never deserted him. The picture of Jesus asleep in the back of the storm-tossed boat while all around him were at their wits end, encapsulates the peace he carried with him. His peace did not depend on an absence of either busy-ness or conflict or stress, but on an inner resource, an inner resource which any of us would love to share and now, as he faces death, his peace is the gift that he offers to his disciples, and to us.
The earlier part of our reading from St John’s gospel reveals some of the secrets of his inner peace. First and foremost there is no unsettling tension, no difference of thought or word or deed between Jesus and his Father. Do you not believe, he says to Philip, that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works (John 14.10). Nor is there any tension between the love and the obedience which binds the Father and the Son together. They are so utterly at one that obedience is never at issue even as he wrestles with his destiny in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ love for his father and his father’s love for him is the basis on which their wills come together. Jesus understood what his Father required of him because he was uniquely close to his Father, but he promises us the gift of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit of Truth, who will fulfil the same function in us and for us. Paul writes of the mind that was in Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 2.16; Phil 2.5). And we know from our own experience, limited and imperfect as it may be, that even we can do the right thing, and therefore be at peace about doing it, even in the face of our own doubts or the opposition of others, if we are as sure as we can be that we have understood, under the Spirit’s guidance, what it is that God our Father in his wisdom and love is asking of us? We can know and be obedient to the mind of Christ, as Jesus knew and was obedient to the mind of his Father. That is the first secret of the peace which Jesus gives.
And then there is the coming and going. Jesus tries to explain to the puzzled disciples that he is both going away and coming to them (v 28). He is going to his Father to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, and then he will come to fetch them, so that they may be where he is (v 3). What could be more natural? We go ahead to get everything ready for our friends, and then we come back to fetch them, so that we can enjoy being together again in the place that we have got ready. There is no need for our friends to be anxious about it. They don’t need detailed directions because we will be with them to show them the way. It’s a very straightforward little parable but Jesus takes it a step further. He won’t just show us the way, or even just accompany us on the journey. He is the way, so that with him, we really cannot get lost. Stop worrying, Thomas. I am the way, and the truth and the life (v 6). You know me, so you know the way or at least, you know as much as you need to know about the way.
All this may seem to have taken us some distance from the question of peace. But that is because we don’t usually go to the heart of what makes for peace. What Jesus is telling us, or so it seems to me, is that his peace depends first and foremost on his remaining inseparable from his Father, so close that love and obedience are one. And secondly, he can give us that same peace, because when he has gone to his Father and returned to us, his Spirit will be able to dwell in us, as his Father’s Spirit dwelt in Him. We therefore can be so close to him that there need be no gap between our love and our obedience. We may need to wrestle with our understanding of what he asks of us, as Jesus himself had to do, but if we really want to know, and really want to do what he has in mind for us, then his Spirit of peace and truth, dwelling within us, will give us the same knowledge and the same peace that he knew.
If only it could always be like that. Sadly you and I know that we are all too easily distracted, drifting away from our identification with his will for us, having to be called back, and that of course is why our peace is far from perfect too. But the gift is always there, and one day, when the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea, then at last Isaiah’s vision of peace will be realised for all humanity. We do not know when that day will be, but meanwhile we can accept for ourselves the gift that Jesus offers. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.