So, where are you, Lord?
A new month! A new season! A renewed celebration of the Resurrection of the Lord has begun! We celebrate the fact that the Lord in his risen body is now free to bring the gift of his peace everywhere, to whomever he may wish, and to as many as he may choose to bring it.
So, where are you, Lord? Our world and these times are in desperate need of peace, for we have gotten ourselves into a real tangle of a mess. In the Church, division and confusion. In nation after nation — conflicts, wars, ethnic hatred. In families, loss of understanding about what a family even is. In our schools, close-minded ideologies totally hostile to one another.
How we need your power, Lord, your victory over the forces of evil and death! Above all, we are in desperate need of that peace which you breathed on your disciples at Easter.
They, too, felt lost after your horrible death on the cross. Ashamed at running away. At a loss about what to do next. Scared to death of the Jewish authorities on the prowl. Locked away in some upper room, dreading what might happen next after all their hopes and dreams about you had vanished.
While they were still speaking about all this, he stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you” (Luke 24:36). On the evening of the first day of the week, when the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19).
After showing them his hands and his side, he repeats the wish of peace. And he will do so a week later, in the same place and to the same group, but this time with Thomas present.
This is in contrast to angels, who, in announcing the Good News of the resurrection of the Lord, are never depicted as wishing peace to those to whom they appear.
Rather they tend to ask questions, the summary of which may be paraphrased as follows: “What are you doing here at the tomb? Tombs are only for dead people, and the one you think is dead isn’t! So, move on to Galilee where you will see him.”
When not asking questions, they are urging those to whom they speak to not be afraid (a hazard angels, apparently, often run into when bringing messages to human beings).
Their message is filled with joy and promise, but there is no offer of peace. Only the risen Lord Jesus brings peace. That is his special gift to us at Easter.
And the way he goes about doing this (apart from going through walls into locked rooms) is very different from most human efforts to bring peace to our world.
In human negotiations, peace is the goal that we hope to attain after a long process. There may be a cease-fire now and again, but real peace is the fruit of hard-fought bargaining, meetings running through the night, and often many starts and stops.
With the Lord, on the other hand, peace is not simply an outcome or a distant but hoped-for goal, but rather the starting point, the pure gift lavished on us from the beginning.
Jesus has already completed all the preliminaries of this gift. It is now ours for the taking and the starting point of all we are and do. His peace is the sort that sustains from beginning to end, never diminishing, never running out, and constantly replenishing itself from within.
What does such a peace consist of? First, it is his peace, the one he brought to Calvary in the face of all evil and the one he offered to his disciples needing forgiveness for their lack of fidelity during his passion.
It is the peace of which he spoke at the Last Supper, Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you (John 14: 27). Not a passing peace based on tenuous negotiations and strictly agreed upon conditions always subject to change. Not a peace based on my life being a success story and all my plans working out in my favor or my health being good and my teeth needing no fillings this year.
Secondly, his peace is greater than all earthly troubles. This is because on the Cross he has already overcome the interior reality of every conceivable disturbance of darkness and been declared sovereign over them all in his resurrection and ascension.
The miracle, or rather the even greater miracle, along with the above, is that he offers that very gift of peace to us. We can have the peace of Jesus in the face of all kinds of chaos in this world, because, as Jesus says, I have told you this (about his disciples being scattered, leaving Christ alone) so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have trouble. But take courage. I have conquered the world (Jn 16:33).
So let us ask for this gift of peace this Easter. It will not only sustain us in our weakness but enable us to discern with greater clarity what paths need to be taken to negotiate the troubled waters of our times.
We need to pray much to be able to access this wonderful Easter gift of the Lord. There is a wellspring within us of the Holy Spirit, who bears this gift to us and sees that it does not fail us. But it is prayer that conveys it to the substance of our daily lives and makes it effective there.
On a natural level we may have to deal with fears and anxieties of all kinds, for such is the world in which we live. But Easter assures us that although these troubles are real, they are passing in light of what happened on Easter morning and which awaits our faith to bring its saving fire, yes, even to our times.
