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Peace I leave with you
Date: 13th May 2007
Preacher: The Very Revd Keith Jones
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you, I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” John 14 v 27
St John’s Gospel reports that Jesus spoke these words on the night he was betrayed, not long after Judas had left the room. This Gospel writer says that Jesus knew all that was going to happen, was fully aware of the danger and the ordeal in front of him. And yet, he says, his words of farewell are “Peace I leave with you.” But see how he says these words. The words at first are the usual ones, assuring people that between him and his friends there is no shadow, no hostility, no ill will. In the usual world, our courteous words, Goodbye, Farewell, express (if we notice it) the same goodwill, which may or may not be sincerely felt. But Jesus insists that when he says Peace to them, he means it fully.
So when Jesus says Peace, he means it fully, intensely; not as the world usually means such words. And because this word Peace so often turns up in our services, it’s as well to appreciate it. In a church I know, a few years ago, the new vicar who arrived was rather what they call “touch-shy”. So when he found that during the Sunday communion service the congregation ran about shaking each other by the hand he found it a dreadful ordeal. He took the fatal step of suggesting that the custom be discontinued. You can tell what happened next. A few people expressed high praise and hearty thanks that after all their prayers had been heard. They remembered how, when exchanging the peace was new, a member of the choir had met the visiting Bishop who had tried to shake her hand by saying “We don’t have it here!”
And it doesn’t need to be a gushing and sentimental thing. It is a vivid way of acknowledging what is true: that by the time that Jesus came to die, he had created a new way for human beings to live together in harmony that, if it is worked out steadily and fully, will be the best hope for the world. And it is founded on the fact that human life truly derives from the single gift of God, from whom everything flows. Our real life is a life we have in common. That acknowledgement of each other is a statement of what we should not forget.
But that’s just the start. The other thing Jesus is showing them, is that if God is there (as God is), then we should not be afraid. And Jesus shows them what it is like not to fear, as he goes to his dreadful death. Don’t the saints always do that? We see them standing up to tyrants, and going out into places full of disease and of violent, as if they did not mind whether they live or die; they speak up like fools, they speak the truth that nobody dares to utter; they cheerfully overtax their health for others; they don’t mind if people despise them, or misunderstand them. For they live as in the love of God, who gives them life.
To my mind comes the memory of Mr Steven Isserlis, the cellist, performing a sarabande from one of the Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. Bach conveys to us a sense that grace fills everything, that there is no twist and crevice of life into which the light of God cannot penetrate. And this movement, both wrestling with the puzzles of the theme, and yet dancing with the difficulty of it all, at last reaches the right note, the achieved note, the perfected note. And the note said, what Christ meant when he said to his friends Peace I leave with you: God gives you all his life and love. Now that is the Peace God longs to share with us, and through us with his world.