Peace feels like a gentle word. Peace in English and Friede in German, can mean stillness, the banishment of disturbance, the relief at the end of hostility. Yet we talk of winning the war but losing the peace; and so we have an inkling that peace can be uneasy and unsatisfactory, lacking resolution and perpetuating the injustice that caused the strife in the first place. We are still living with the consequences of short-sighted fixes from the First World War onwards. The massacred Armenians of Turkey and the Mediterranean were never given their homeland. The Christian Assyrians, inheritors of a 2,500 year-old civilisation, are still at the oppressive mercy of Islamic Kurds, Arabs and Persians alike. The Greeks and Turks dispossessed of their ancient foothold in each other’s lands seem perpetually irreconcilable. The price of peace in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa has been modern boundaries to states that do not unite people but force some into dispossession and migration, or oppression and persecution under the yoke of others. Without naming them, all are the results of poor peace-deals that have led to unending conflict. So forgive me if I place a question mark against our instinctive definition of peace.
If, however, you turn to Latin you will see that the idea of peace is not necessarily so gentle, but comes with force and impact. Indeed, impact comes from the Latin word pax. You can tell that this word is hard-hitting – pax in Latin, pace in Italian, paz in Spanish, paix in French, and our own English words derived from Latin – pact, impact, compact, impinge, punch, pacify. They all come from the idea of fastening things tight together, and thus making a binding agreement you could never wriggle out of. At the time Our Lord Jesus was born, St Luke tells us that the Emperor was Augustus and he had brought the whole world to peace. This “Pax Romana” was a peace imposed by authority and force of arms, after decades of exhausting and ruinous civil war for control of Rome and the riches of its expanding empire. St Luke evidently thinks such a condition in the world was a herald for the coming of the Prince of Peace. To St Luke it was a force for good, but a force none the less. When he records the song of the angels that at Christ’s birth there is not only glory to God in the highest but peace on earth, he means no mere gentle sentiment or merely the absence of war, or even its abolition. He means a new driving force, to be constantly at work in the world leaving nothing unchanged.
Each of today’s readings refers to peace in exactly this way. Let us see if we may understand their meaning by using a different word for peace that still comes from the Latin word pax.
- The prophet Isaiah (66.10-14) says, “Rejoice Jerusalem. For thus says the Lord, Now towards her I send flowing with impact like a river, and like a stream in spate, the glory of the nations.
- The Lord says to his 72 disciples, “Whatever house you go into, let your first words be ‘Impact upon this house’. And if a man lives there who has already experienced this impact, your own impact will go and rest on him; if not it will come back to you. Cure those who are sick and say, the Kingdom is upon you.” (Luke 10.1-12, 17-20) He goes on to discuss with the disciples the impact that the very mention of His name had had on the devils who had fled from them.
- Lastly, St Paul tells the church at Galatia, a group much like our own this evening looking to Christ for the answers to life, that peace comes to all who follow the rule that the true cause of transformation in the world is the Cross (Galatians 6.14-18). For once we have been struck by the Cross and the Lord Who was crucified on it, we are now a new creature. We new creatures have marks all over us: not of what or who we were, but the same as those on Christ. Peace to St Paul is therefore the most massive impact on our souls and bodies. It changes how we think. It changes our vision of the world. It alters the way we speak. It turns the way we behave inside out. Peace is not the disappearance of difficulty; it is the beginning of an impact taking its lifelong effect. Its mark we can never erase. It is the mark of the Cross on our forehead at baptism. It is the wound that became a scar that everyone ought to be able to recognise as soon as they catch sight of us.
But there is more. In the Hebrew, Aramaic and Semitic world in which Christ and the apostles lived, “peace” is a normal, everyday greeting. We know it as Shalom in Hebrew, Salaam in Arabic, and Sliem in Maltese. It can mean tranquillity and wellbeing, wholeness and completion, concord and harmony, just as peace does in English. But it can also mean something pacified, something atoned for, something submitted to and accepted. There is a clue in the word Islam, which speaks of achieving peace only when you have submitted to the one God. For the followers of Jesus Christ, who is that One God, he reconciles everything in harmony, resolving all things that were at odds, abolishing our evil that is hostile to God’s good, bringing wholeness to the world of people, and achieving completion to His work of creation by one means alone: He makes peace by His Blood shed on the Cross (Colossians 1.20-22). The greatest peace of all, then, is that river in full spate of which Isaiah spoke. It is the impact of the Blood of Christ which no other force can withstand. It is the arrival of the new creation which is the Kingdom of God, coming with all its force and impact, whenever the Christian utters the name of Christ and announces the effect of the Cross.
“Peace, be still,” cries Christ above the storm and it is still. How often do we call out with His Name as a curse of casual indignation or the bare-teeth howl of attack. It is not always easy to be a man of peace, or a woman of peace, even with that Name on your lips.
But in our quieter and most clear-sighted moments, the Name of Jesus Christ is not only the tranquillity and wholeness for which we long. It is the lifelong and sustained effect which transforms us, and the whole world of people among whom we belong, into the Kingdom. We believe in Christ because of His impact on our every thought, word and act - whether they have originated from His Kingdom, or whether they are what needs immediate correction so that we are set back on the course that is true. We believe in Christ, not just because it is our culture, or a personal belief. We believe in Christ because this is how the entire created universe has been constructed. It is there we can see that Christ is its universal King ruling everything, especially everything hostile that disobeys Him. It is there we can see how everything fits together to make His Kingdom, which we pray will come on earth as it is in heaven.
When we pray for someone who has died, we say, “May they rest in peace.” But this peace is no escape from the world or a departure from its struggles. It is to witness by Christ’s light the impact of His Kingdom taking its effect in every soul one by one, as they are won for Christ in this world and the next. Thus in a few moments’ time we will worship the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world to grant us peace. “Peace,” says the Lord, “not as the world gives,” but the peace that is to see the Father in Christ, and to know the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send, so that we may always dwell in Christ. Do not be afraid of this, he says, because these words are part of the last conversation Jesus has, before He is betrayed and condemned to shed His Blood for us on the Cross. It is no wonder, then, that the Lord told us that if we would be His disciples we must take up our cross daily too. “Peace to all who follow this rule.”
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