The Gospel reading from John’s Gospel
that we hear today is part of Jesus’ farewell discourse that he shares with his
apostles as they are gathered for the Last Supper. Jesus is getting them ready for the time when
he will no longer be with them. Yet, he
tells them that they will not be alone in living out their life of
discipleship. Jesus tells them that He
and the Father will dwell with them, that the Holy Spirit will be with them as
an Advocate, and that Jesus’ peace will be with them.
When I thought about today’s reading
from John, I was taken back to the very beginning of John’s Gospel, a reading
we heard back on Christmas Day. The
Gospel of John starts not with the birth of the baby Jesus in a manger, but
back to the beginning of creation: “In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. He was in the beginning with
God. All things came into being through
him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in
him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” We are called to bearers of Christ’s peace to
the world, we are called to be models of this peace for the world, the same
peace that Jesus brought to his Apostles in the Upper Room at the Last Supper.
As a priest, something I often hear
people struggling with is their anger.
We live in a modern world where we want everything in an instant. We want to send a text message immediately
and we want to get the response to that text right away. We want to go to a restaurant and be served
immediately, without having to wait a long time. It is so easy to get impatient or angry or
frustrated in our fast paced modern world.
We can easily get impatient at our family members or friends. And just look at the road rage we see on the
streets when driving around town. How do
we find peace in the midst of all of this?
The peace of Christ is not something we
generate or create for ourselves, but rather it is a peace that is passed down
to us from Christ himself. And this peace
is not something that came into being in the Upper Room at the Last Supper, but
is rather rooted in the Eternal Word of God and in act of love and goodness in
which God created the world. We receive
this peace as a gift from God, from God’s mercy and compassion. We are to exemplify this peace in our
lives. We are to live out this peace and
to feel it in our hearts.
I taught high school in the Mississippi
Delta for four years in the city of Greenville.
You can just imagine how some days the peace of Christ felt as far away
as the Man in the Moon. But I had to
remind myself that in the midst of the chaos and turmoil of that experience of
trying to teach these young people, I had to be very creative and disciplined
in my approach. I remember that I had 2
students – twins actually – that loved getting on my last nerve and making my
role as a teacher as miserable as possible.
I endured one semester with them, and when I saw them assigned for me
for one more semester, I tried to think of another way I could approach the
situation. So, rather than being on the
defensive and reacting to how they were treating me, I decided to go on the
offensive and smother them with absolute kindness. They were really caught off-guard, and that
approach seemed to really work at that situation.
We see how an argument is resolved in
the early Church in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Some followers of
Jesus from Judea came to the newly formed faith community in Antioch, insisting
on certain stringent requirements for salvation, including circumcision. However, Paul and Barnabas appeal to
Jerusalem for assistance, with a settlement reached. Barnabas and Paul decided to go to Jerusalem
to resolve the disagreement – sometimes peace requires confrontation and
resolution. Both sides could have had a
stand-off or could have gone their separate ways. The peace that Christ gives us requires
courage and persistence.
We could ask ourselves the following
question when we look out at the world and see all that is going on: Where is
the peace of Christ in the midst of the violence, uncertainty, and suffering in
our world? Perhaps that is not the right question we are asking. Perhaps it is better to
ask: What am I doing to bring the peace of Christ into my own life and into the
world? How is the Spirit moving in me to
be a bearer of that peace?
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