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Monday, June 25, 2007
Peace: A Place To Stand
Romans 5:1-11
Frederick Buechner says, in Wishful Thinking, "Peace has come to mean the time when there aren't any wars or even when there aren't any major wars. Beggars can't be choosers; we'd most of us settle for that. But in Hebrew peace, shalom, means fullness, means having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself."
St. Paul says, in Romans 5, that we have peace with God (and with each other by the grace of God) because God wants us to be spiritually whole and happy. And has done everything that was needed to make it happen.
Think about that long enough, and your whole life could be turned inside-out, rightside-up, at long last.
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The 19th-century American artist Edward Hicks painted about 100 versions of "The Peaceable Kingdom."
That makes sense, since he was a leader among the Quakers (aka the Society of Friends) who are world-famous for their commitment to the things that make for peace.
Each painting features at least one child and a few animals, all of them gazing contentedly out at us, inviting us to join their happy party. Lions and lambs, wildcats and kitchen cats, all lounge together without a bloody tooth or claw in sight. Many of the paintings also include in the background a party of famous Quakers, like William Penn, busy making peace with Native Americans and other non-Quaker neighbors.
It doesn't take a Bible scholar to read Hicks' pictures as calls to recapture what the world lost when Adam and Eve were run out of the Garden of Eden. Their willfulness, according to Genesis 3, demolished for all of us the "original blessing" of harmony between God, people, and the world of animals, vegetables, and minerals.
Ever since, it seems, our human tribe has been desperately looking for some secret door to let us back into that secret garden.
Yet the real world is torn apart by strife, suspicion, and self-protection against enemies both real and imagined. It's downright dangerous to open up your hands, let alone your mind or your heart, when people and parties, nations and denominations, could do you deadly damage if given half a chance.
Is peace, then, a wishful dream?
Jesus once told his disciples, "I have come not to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). The fact is people will divide, sometimes violently, over Christ and his claim on our lives. All your best intentions might be thrown back in your face by folks who reject your faith in Christ. So much for peaceable kingdoms.
But on the last night they ate together, the night he was ripped away from them to die on the cross, he said to them, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you" (John 14:27). Spiritual health and happiness even in the worst of trying circumstances.
How can Jesus expect to have it both ways with us? Is peace, after all, just a wishful dream?
Frederick Buechner, in Wishful Thinking, says it this way: "The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle but the presence of love."
Love... Joy... Peace.... Always, it seems, in just that order.
posted by Jack Buckley at
11:03 AM
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