Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine but is from the Father who sent me.
“I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you. 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. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur you may believe (John 14:23-29).
Places of Peace
During the 10:00 a.m. service the Sunday before last, my wife, Wanda, was not here to play the organ. Blame her husband: He swept her away to places of peace for a week. First we did our semi-annual semi-silent retreat at Green Bough House of Prayer in rural south Georgia where pilgrims like us gather for prayer, silent meals with hospitable hosts, walks in gardens, woods, and labyrinth, journaling, soul-searching, and listening for a word from God. Everyone meets for spiritual direction with Fay Key, a wise and affirming saint who founded Green Bough shortly after starting Hospitality House in a place called Rome, Georgia. With my phone greeting telling all callers I’m out of pocket and no piano keyboard in sight for Wanda, we found peace.
And that was not all. From there we traveled another couple of hours east to Jekyll Island where we communed with great, moss-mained wild oaks and the wide open sea. We biked the island and parked our chairs in the shade of palms and driftwood where we watched pelicans hunt and the sun set. Far from the traffic and bills back home, we found more peace.
Peace As Absence Of Conflict
Yet, almost two millennia before our birth, peace found us, at least insofar as we are disciples of Jesus Christ. To his perplexed and frightened disciples in the upper room, Jesus said, “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 14:27). They were perplexed because he kept alluding to his death and departure in one breath, and then in another, the ever available presence of his spirit who would companion and guide them. They were frightened because they could only imagine themselves sorrowful and lost without him. Moreover, he insinuated that the world would be as hostile to them as it was to him.
Hearing, “Peace I leave with you,” likely did not help them feel better because it means goodbye. But especially in John, Jesus’s words and deeds had multiple layers of meaning. A clue to finding layers in his word of farewell lies in a closer look at the meaning of the word, “peace.” Just a little deeper than hello or goodbye, peace means the absence of conflict. From this perspective, Wanda and I enjoyed a week of peace because we drove far from the demands of work and keeping up the house, from the problems of others and of our own to places that made it easy to forget those things and do what we want. We avoided pain and upgraded pleasure. Fair enough.
Who would not wish such peace for friends? Surely Jesus did. God certainly wishes it for us. Otherwise, God would not have commanded us to take sabbath time away from work to live gratefully in the garden of God’s blessings. But I doubt that Jesus meant to say to his disciples nothing more than, “Hey, the going will be rough, but someday we’ll get you a few days of retreat to shake it off, then a few more to chill out on Driftwood Beach.” Jesus promised a peace available in the fray.
Peace As Presence Of Wholeness
Going deeper than mere absence of conflict, “peace” involves presence of the good, the just and whole. That takes us into the world, not out of it. The Hebrew, shalom, refers to life abundant for all, including a moral order to conserve the freedom God granted with liberation from slavery in Egypt. In God’s just order, all share God’s blessings, no exceptions, no distinction between insiders and outsiders. No one holds others in permanent servitude.
In this positive peace, all things come together. At the personal level, fragmented souls and anxious minds regain grounding by receiving God’s love and responding with love. Jesus’s healings always put on display that wholeness, that dimension of positive peace. At the social level, God carves out doors in every wall and builds bridges over every divide.
The Epistle Lesson in Revelation 21:10, 22-5, portrays that social peace accomplished in Christ as the New Jerusalem. There all is sacred, no need for dividing sacred from profane space. All is safe and clear, with no more night, only day. The river of life runs through it, watering the tree of life that keeps violence and affliction out not by force but by healing. Indeed, the gates hang always open to people of all nations to worship God and abide in wholeness. This fulfills the vocation of Israel and the church as light of the world (Is 49:6; Mt 5:14-16). In purity of heart, all worship and know God intimately, seeing the face of God who marks everyone as God’s own (22:3-5; cf. Mt 5:8).
Power Prefers Negative Peace
Yet, Jesus’s efforts to prepare the way for this peace got him in good trouble and contributed in no small part to his passion and death. For he saw through the ways religious authorities used laws intended for purity to put down the poor and the alien despite God’s call in the law to treat them with dignity and hospitality. He saw through the Pax Romana, the Roman so-called peace based on suppression of conflict through threats of crucifixion.
This left the Roman occupiers and their local minions unbothered under the lordship of Caesar. All was well as long as the little people kept in their places. So Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath, conversing with women, and extending peace to Samaritans and Gentiles stirred up violence against him because he crossed boundaries both local and Roman authorities insisted upon for their artificial peace.
More generally, worldly power prefers a culture that emphasizes absence of conflict over presence of personal wholeness and social unity. Promoting fear and numbness is far easier and more efficient than really listening and finding win-win solutions. Better to build walls, keep the insiders free from aliens and let the outsiders figure out a separate peace. Power likes walls with no doors, moats with bridges drawn, a far cry from New Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Jesus awakened the masses with his healings and words of radical grace and inclusion. He drew crowds from outside the walls and castles. The appeal of Jesus’s positive peace threatened the negative peace that people of power guard. That too led to his execution.
“Peace be with you, my peace I give to you,” Jesus said. “I do not give as the world gives,” a world of power that gives transactionally at best. The world gives without grace, at a cost, with quid pro quo, without love. Nothing personal; it’s a business decision. ‘Tis human to forget that everything we have came as gifts from God who called us as stewards of the wholeness and well-being of all. Worldly power and wealth magnify that forgetfulness. So the rich and powerful are prone to disregard shalom, positive peace, in the high-pressure, full-time job of building and maintaining walls and castles.
Positive Peace and the Help Of the Holy Spirit
Although the preference for negative peace correlates with how much we have, everyone has a measure of power in the world. Thus, emphasizing negative peace tempts all of us. I suspect none of us can devote our energies to promoting personal wholeness and social justice without help.
“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you,” can comfort us on dark nights, as the phrase has for me many times. But it is also a commission and a charge with a promise of help. Jesus says that even after his body ascends, the Spirit remains with us to use our gifts in our small corners of the world toward care that mends and welcome that opens gates and widens boundaries. That way we prepare the world for the New Jerusalem with intimations of God’s peaceful reign in the meantime.
Wanda and I will return to Green Bough and Jekyll. We give thanks for the Sabbath blessing of those places. But we will not forget that the peace we find in such sacred spaces is not complete until we load up the car and head back through the traffic and heat to home. There we return to whiny cats and dripping faucets and bills, to grieving, fragmented, brave souls in need of a listening ear and to college students and a church in need of musical accompaniment to make a song.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not be afraid,” Jesus said, promising that his friendship and the power of the Spirit will meet us there as at Green Bough and Jekyll, in a deeply troubled world as in heaven. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you,” Jesus says as if to say, “Welcome to my world, and welcome to my work.”
This sermon was delivered at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Rome, Georgia, on Sunday, May 25, 2025. For the YouTube recording, click here.
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Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God (Matthew 5:9).
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