Mass readings for the 6th Sunday in Easter:
Acts 15.1-2, 22-29 Psalm 67.1-2, 4-7 Revelation 21.10-14, 22-23 John 14.23-29
At every mass, at the communion rite, we hear the celebrant priest quote our Lord to the congregation, “Peace, I leave you, my peace I give you.” This is, of course, drawn from the gospel passage we just heard. So, on this occasion we should take the opportunity to understand what it is that we’re to take away from these words of Jesus since we hear them not just today as part of the three-year cycle of readings, but we hear them every time the mass is celebrated.
We need to remember the context for his words, what this peace is in very particular circumstances, that it is not just some generalized state of equanimity.
Jesus speaks these words scarce hours before his arrest; the peace he is experiencing is a calm resolve to face his imminent humiliation, torture and execution. And lest we diminish this peace by saying of it, “well, he is God after all…” Let us remember our confession: Jesus is fully God, and fully man – his humanity prompts him to experience the very real fear any feeling individual would have in that situation.
These are words of encouragement for us – take them as you will – just as Jesus faced apparent abandonment, and defeat, we need to understand that in our dark hours in which we may lose a sense of the presence of God, when we look about and only see evidence of failure and our ruin, that in our faithfulness a victory is assured. If we can believe that, then there is peace in that. In the face of evil, God by His grace gives us hope, light in the darkness, joy despite the gloom.
This is certainly not how the world gives. We understand this world as ruled by the accuser, the deceiver, Satan, for this is who Jesus tells us is the ruler of the world. In the face of difficulty, the diabolos pushes us to surrender to fear, give into doubt, to grasp at his solution to our problems which is to seek power: the power to compel, frighten, intimidate, seduce, undermine, destroy.
Well, the world is about power. We have evidence enough of that. Those who have now spent decades undermining our institutions bring this understanding to their diabolical work. They grasp at power so as to force their vision of humanity on us; they subvert family, faith, those things that lend to social cohesion and personal integrity so as to leave us isolated, seemingly helpless, fearful, and looking to them to tell us what to do. Yet even among those who perceive the manipulation, absent God’s grace, we are apt to cave to their demands anyway, afraid of the consequences of not going along with the lies, ignoring the corruption, looking away from the harm being done.
They have looked at our imperfect institutions with contempt. They’ve told us these are chains, shackles that have kept us from our natural freedom. Imperfect as they are, our schools, universities, governments, associations and societies, and especially those of the Church, were created very much to contain power and minimize its influence; and to see that in those instances where it is used, that it is used in a measured, very careful manner: for the defense of the innocent, for the thwarting of evil.
Ideally, we have police to keep the peace and maintain order. That is, to contain the chaos that comes from criminal activity, to assure people of an essential safety that allows them to go about their business, raise their families, pursue their ventures without fear of harm from those who have fallen into vice, reject virtue, having been seduced into that diabolical mindset that sees power as the means to success in life.
As a nation with at least some vestige of Christian understanding of just war, of what is a righteous cause, we maintain an army and a navy for the sake of defending the good of our nation from foreign threat, but also to come to the aid of those unjustly the object of conquest, doing so with much discretion, and careful discernment lest we compound the evil we wish to fight.
As we have heard on many an occasion, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” the nature of that corruption is in the irony of using power to solve our problems, to provide for us security.
Power is like an addictive drug, like morphine to treat pain. It can be used with discretion to great effect, but if it’s resorted to with every ache and pain, there is soon dependency, addiction, one can’t live without it; and as well, there grows an increasing hunger for it, in ever larger doses that usually leads to death unless the addict can have the supply of it cut off.
Power might be used with discretion in limited circumstances, but what will give us health, and peace, is not this, but what Jesus speaks of: love.
And again, it bears repeating, the love he speaks of is the divine self-giving love that works for the good of others unselfishly.
I spoke about this at last week’s school mass with the children, asking that question, “what is love?” But at one point asked, “if everyone lived their lives with the object of making other people’s lives better, of bringing good to others, what kind of world would result?”
Now, of course, we get back to the old problem of knowing what is good, but if we understand love to be a rejection of power, then we know one thing we can’t do: we can’t make people change, we can’t make them choose what is good. We can only invite them to do so.
Heavens, that is what God does, that is what we see in Jesus. Pope Francis in an Angelus address in 2013 reminds us that,
“Jesus never imposes, Jesus is humble, Jesus invites. If you want to, come. The humility of Jesus is like this: he is always inviting but never imposing. All of this gives us food for thought. It tells us, for example, of the importance which the conscience had for Jesus too: listening in his heart to the Father’s voice and following it.”
Indeed, we need to listen, as difficult as it is to do so, for the Lord’s voice.
In his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis (1979) Saint John Paul II quotes Christ, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” He added: “These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world.”
This means we must be thinking people; unafraid of the truth, living in the truth, defending that truth, and doing so fearlessly.
The devil doesn’t want you doing that; the world doesn’t want you freed by truth, empowered by divine love. They want to you afraid and selfish; self-centred and dependent on the powerful.
Imagine the disciples, two thousand years ago, recollecting the words of Jesus as they themselves set out to proclaim the good news, to set free a world captive to earthly power by the greater power that is the love of God known in Jesus Christ. They lived in a day when the powerful had absolutely no compunction about using deadly force to silence their opponents; and yet, the apostles went forth in the peace of Christ and calmly faced their trials.
We today might face efforts to embarrass us, we might get “cancelled” from social media; we might have our woke neighbors stop talking to us. For some, faithfulness to truth and love might mean changing jobs, moving house; it might mean offering resistance, demanding explanations as to just what is going on in our schools, in government, in the corporate boardrooms that is prompting so much chaos and harm, deceitfulness and denial of the truth of things.
We are, like the ancient disciples, called to keep his words, not deny them, and to share all that Jesus taught because in that lies hope for humanity. It will never be easy, he told us so. But we are not sent out with nothing, we have his peace, we have his truth, we have the Holy Spirit, and so we are free.
Amen.