Peace Twofold Bestowed
In
the upper room the disciples encounter the ongoing reality of Jesus,
and the whole world changes. When someone we love dies, we build a
mausoleum to them in our hearts and memories, and everything they did
and said slowly acquires the soft focus that time brings. Time gradually
erodes the real person, who was always more than our experience of
them, and leaves us instead with a fading memory.
But Jesus is rock solid
present reality, not a ghost who fades away but a person who stands
before us and says 'peace be with you.'
This is a peace that flows
from the reality of what Jesus has done for us on the cross, and who he
is and will be forever. And so it is a peace that challenges us and
calls us to change. It is not the peace that comes with time, the
natural healing, the gradual forgetting of pain or grief. It is a peace
that can only come in the present moment of encounter with Jesus, and
which stands or falls as we stand or fall before him.
'Peace be with you' is not
just the first thing the Risen Jesus says to his disciples: it is the
second thing as well. Twice he bids them peace. Christian peace is so
rock solid and real, and so far from blind optimism, that it has to be
given twice by the risen Lord.
His first greeting of
peace is followed by his showing them his wounded hands and side. The
first peace is the peace that stills our fear. Every moment in some way
or other we human beings are reckoning with death. It might be in the
way we try to control the people or the environment around us; the
anxiety about the future and for those we love; the aversion to change
or the refusal to settle for the same old thing - the fear of death is
always with us in one form or another. But Jesus has shown us his hands
and his side. He is marked by death, but he lives. Death silenced him on
the cross, but now he speaks to each man and woman.
These wounds of Jesus
bring us the first peace, a peace that stills and calms the storm of
fear within us. His death is a wound for which time is certainly no
healer - the guilt of that sin is upon each sinner as much today as it
was then. But his peace is a healer, as he gives us a
peace that has destroyed death, in a life no longer bounded by death. Do
not be afraid, be still, for in dying I have changed the meaning of
your death, the Lord says to us.
But there is more to our
faith than a calming of fear. The calming merely prepares us for another
gift, as Jesus again says "Peace be with you', and breathes on his
disciples: "Receive the Holy Spirit." The Spirit is not given to us to
calm our nerves, but to enliven and energise. "Those whose sins you
forgive they are forgiven, those whose sins you retain they are
retained."
This second gift of peace
is not an answer to death so much as a entirely new sort of human life,
moving according to the inspirations and energy of the divine life. It
does not just make us recipients of forgiveness and mercy: it inserts
the us into the ongoing mystery of Jesus, real and present in our world
forgiving sin, healing wounds and preaching the mystery of the kingdom.
"Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the
midst of them."
Today we celebrate the
full depth of the peace of Christ, the peace we are part of by belonging
to each other in the Body of Christ. He, Our Lord, is not another
memory from the past, handed on by a forgetful band of devotees. He is
the rock solid, present moment offer of grace to us by the Father in the
Spirit of God. Peace be with you, he says to us today. Receive the Holy
Spirit, so that through us the world will encounter this ever present
mystery of forgiveness and mercy which alone can set it free.(Timothy J. Calvert O.P.torch.op.orghere)
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