Fr. Roger J. Landry
Living in Faith Magazine
India
October 2019
One of the great paradoxes in the Gospel is about peace. On the one hand, Jesus says during the Last Supper, “Peace I leave you. My peace I give you” (Jn 14:27); on the other, when he sends out his 72 disciples, he says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword” and describes that because of him, even families will be divided.
Has he come to bring peace or division, to unite or scatter?
He has clearly come as the “Prince of Peace” (Is 9:5) in order to fulfill what the angels sang the morning he was born, “Peace on earth to people of good will” (Lk 2:14). He took on our nature to ratify in his own flesh the definitive peace treaty between God and the human race. He has come to “guide our feet into path of peace” (Lk 1:79).
But he has left each person free. Not everyone will choose to follow him on the way of peace. Not everyone will believe in or adopt what he describes as peace’s essential conditions. Many will choose, in fact, to do the opposite of what Jesus says — and how much division flows from such a path.
What I would like to do in this article is explore five things Jesus reveals about the path to peace. Jesus said, “Not as the world gives do I give [peace] to you” (Jn 14:27), and so these elements are different than what we would learn in foreign service training. But just as he turned worldly logic right-side-up with regard to happiness in the beatitudes, so Jesus also does so with regard to his peace plan for a world rife with conflict.
The first is to prioritize God. After Jesus describes that he has come “to bring not peace but the sword,” he specifies, “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household.”This is not because Jesus came to divide: he came to gather and to save.
But not everyone will accept his offer. We see the division he foretold in families, for example, in the envy that husbands feel when their wives start spending more time with Jesus in prayer, or the brutal ribbing teenagers will take when they announce to their peers that they think God may be calling them to the priesthood or consecrated life.Those who don’t put God first often won’t like the new priorities. It’s an indirect challenge to them, and often they’ll respond the way most kindergarteners do to the teachers’ pets, simply because the other is good. Those who do not want to prioritize God are often intolerant of those who do.
At a macroscopic level we see how much lack of peace has come from those who do not want to give God his due. Historians tell us that the twentieth century was quantitatively by far the most violent century in the history of humanity, with more people executed than in all previous centuries combined. We know that that abhorrent bloodbath was not unleashed in the name of religion, but under the banner of various secularist, anti-religious, or explicitly atheistic regimes like we’ve seen under Stalin, Hitler, Ataturk, Pol Pot and others. If the perversion of religion has occasionally led to violence, the prevention and persecution of religion has empirically been worse. While religion has not been successful in restraining every believer’s propensity for violence, the absence of religion — living practically as if God doesn’t exist — has been much less successful.
To prioritize God means not just to acknowledge his existence but to pray. In 2011, on the vigil before the 25thanniversary of John Paul II’s famous interreligious Prayer for Peace in Assisi, Pope Benedict said, “The most precious contribution we can make to the cause of peace is that of prayer.” Prayer helps us to become more like the God whom we address. It makes us far more capable of seeing those with whom we might have a conflict not as enemies but as fellow human beings created and loved by God, so that we will treat them not like Cain behaved toward Abel but as Joseph acted toward his brothers in Egypt.
The second thing Jesus reveals is the connection between peace and following his commands. Right before Jesus said, “Peace I leave you. My peace I give you,” he spoke of keeping his word and commandments, before adding, “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love” (Jn 14:21; Jn 15:10). We will never have peace without love, and Jesus stated that all the commandments hang on the two-fold commandment of love of God and neighbor (Mt 22:40). We see this connection very readily in practice. How much more peace there would be if people minimally just kept the Decalogue:there would be no murder, hatred, broken or wounded families, stealing, lying, or envy. There would be intergenerational respect. People would make time to put God first in their lives, and to praise and worship him. These are basic principles for obtaining that peace that the world can’t give or rob.
The third practice is to wish peace. When Jesus sent out the 12 apostles and later the 72 disciples, he told them upon entering a house to wish it peace, promising that if a peaceful person lives there, the peace would remain (Mt 10:13; Lk 10:5). Notice that Jesus didn’t say, “Investigate as to whether peaceful people are there first.” He wanted us to wish peace to everyone, to have a positive prejudice about the people we’d meet. This is the exact opposite of the suspicion that often reigns between people who don’t know each other, or those from different places, ethnicities, races, cultures, or religions. While Jesus sent out his disciples as “lambs in the midst of wolves,” he sent us with no paranoia about everyone’s being wolves. He wanted us to presume the best, that the person could receive peace. He wanted us to be instruments of peace, sowing it so as to reap it.
But he wants us to be far more than “peace wishers.” He calls us to be “peacemakers” (Mt 5:9), saying that peacemakers will be called true children of God. God is a peacemaker and we’re called to be chips off the old divine block. This is the fourth practice. What does it mean to make peace? Jesus describes various conditions. It means loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, doing good to those who do evil. It means responding with the weapons of love, mercy and forgiveness rather than the sword. It means learning from and imitating Jesus, who established peace ultimately through dying for those who were waging war against him, God and others through sin. To be a peacemaker, we must stop the downward spiral of vengeful retaliation. We must never forget the dignity of each person as loved by God, even when the other forgets. We must transcend selfishness, envy, pride, anger and greed and work patiently to build a culture of encounter, solidarity and brotherhood, even when others resist. We must model ourselves on the Lord’s enduring mercy, seeking to reconcile as we have been reconciled seventy times seven times.
This is obviously hard. Some would even say it is impossible for human beings. That brings us to the last practice: Cooperation with the Holy Spirit. On the night Jesus rose from the dead, he entered through the closed doors of the Upper Room and twice wished the frightened apostles “Shalom,” or “Peace be with you.” Then he sought to make them peacemakers. He breathed on them the Holy Spirit and said, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you.” (Jn 20:19-23). Jesus was sending them out with God’s own power to create peace through forgiveness and reconciliation. Pope Francis said in a homily a few years agothat the peace Jesus leaves, gives and breathes is fundamentally the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit abides in us, he helps us to experience what St. Paul lists as the “fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal 5:22). That fruit is not merely subjective, suffusing us with those qualities. It impacts our relations with others and makes it possible for us to prioritize God, keep his commands, wish peace to all, and make peace perseveringly.
In the midst of so much conflict, when the sword of division cuts deep into individuals, families, societies and the world, Jesus’ perennial peace plan is needed now more than ever. Now is the time to follow him on the path of peace he has revealed and to draw others with us onto that way.
The peace of the Lord be with you always!
