Rest In Peace (Divine Mercy)

John 20:19
Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

The grace and peace of God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you…Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth…Grant us your peace in this life…Deliver us, Lord, from every evil and grant us peace in our day… 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…The peace of the Lord be with you always… let us offer each other a sign of peace…Go in peace to love and serve the Lord… and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus…Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

O.K. Hands up: How many of you have stood in the midst of the chaos of your life and desperately wondered where this peace is that Jesus is supposed to have given to you? Do you feel that 'peaceful' is pretty much the last thing you feel most of the time? How many of you have decided that the gift of peace has not been given to you because you’re doing something wrong? You don’t exactly know what it is you’re doing wrong but it must be your fault that this peace that Christ promised his followers is so elusive or generally unattainable.

All right, we can all put our hands down now. I doubt if there are too many Christian people who have never felt the sting of a lack of peace in their lives or felt like they would never be able to achieve a spirituality so virtuous that peace would never again storm off, banging the door on its way out. When we think of peace we think of and yearn for a state of absolute calm where nothing rocks the inner boat and nothing causes anxiety, stress, fear or tension. The problem is, when it comes to the peace of Christ, that’s the wrong definition. 

In a previous reflection called ‘Mission: Completed’ (Feb. 15, 2011), I offered another meaning for the word perfection. It was ‘complete’.  “Be complete even as your heavenly Father is complete.” In the reflection I wrote for last Easter Sunday (Standing Empty at the Tomb), I suggested that Mary was not allowed to cling to Jesus because he still had to ascend to the Father; his mission had not yet been completed and therefore her understanding of him and of her relationship to him was incomplete. In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus says, not once but twice, “Peace be with you.” Guess what the Hebrew word for peace (shalom) means.

The verb shalam literally means to make whole or complete. The noun shalom has the more literal meaning of being in a state of wholeness or with no deficiency. (Ancient Hebrew Word Meanings. Peace ~ shalom. Jeff A. Benner)

The definition also says: The verb form of the root word is shalam, usually used in the context of making restitution. When a person has caused another to become deficient in some way, it is the responsibility of the person who created the deficiency to restore what has been taken, lost or stolen.

When Jesus said, Peace be with you,” to his disciples, he was saying, “Don’t be afraid; everything is all right. I have accomplished what I came to accomplish. By my death and resurrection, I took the burden of your responsibility and I made full payment, cleared the debt and completed the transaction. I have restored you to the Father. Be at peace.”

If we define the peace of Christ as a state of undisturbed serenity and spend our energy looking for it and yearning for it, it’s the same as searching through a big loaf of bread for grains of yeast and when we can’t find the yeast, saying, “I have no yeast. There is no yeast. It must be my fault that I have lost the yeast.” Peace is the yeast of our bread. Christian peace is not one thing nor is it a simple state of being without stress or anxiety although it can manifest itself that way at times. Peace is the medium in which we live move and have our being. Peace is Christ and we cannot reduce Christ into any one simple thing or state because he is a whole and complex person – far deeper and far more complex than any human being. In the kingdom life, if you say, “I have peace,” what you are really saying is, “I have Jesus and everything that he is.” If you pray for peacefulness, you will be shown Christ who became the restitution for your brokenness and your exemption from the crippling and impossible responsibility of paying for all the damage the world, the flesh and devil has ever tried or will try to do to God.

Peace is the water of life in which you were baptized and in which you swim daily by the utter grace of God. Peace is the strong foundation of your faith. Peace is the spiritual air you breathe even when you’re not thinking about breathing it. I’m quite aware that I’m mixing my metaphors all over the place here but my point is that Jesus is our All in All and if we used every metaphor the world has to offer, we couldn’t even begin to give any sort of an idea of all that he is for us or all that he did for us. We just need to be so chuffed that he is OURS! He gave himself to us and he gave himself for us thereby creating peace between the Father and us. We are blessed beyond blessed. The angels are in awe of what we have been given. 

If you really had no peace, it would mean you had irrevocably lost Christ and were completely dead to God. If you had really lost your peace, you would know it. It would be the despair to end all despair. I don’t think any of us could survive a moment of truly lost kingdom peace.

The disciples genuinely thought they had lost their peace. They thought Jesus was dead and gone, vanished forever and they were feeling the edges of real despair. Jesus had been with them for three years and I’m sure they were in agony as they considered that they had squandered, wasted and betrayed a treasure beyond all treasures, the Pearl of Great Price. They were lost in the torment of knowing their actions had incurred a debt so impossibly huge that they could understand the despair that caused Judas to hang himself.

Jesus walked right through the closed doors of despair and entered that room full of crushed and hopeless men and women. Jesus, who had the full right to condemn, immediately and lovingly ministered to their pain. “Peace be with you,” he said. “Peace is with you. See? I am here with you. Look at my wounds. They are the new covenant signed in blood, a covenant that says your debts have been paid in full so that you can have complete and free access to our Father. My peace isn’t easily understood with the mind; it surpasses understanding. It is the peace that comes from having lost everything and then having it all restored to you better than it was before. The world does not understand this kind of peace and has no ability to attain it. But you have it because you have me. I paid the price and I did it because I love you so much.”

Isaiah 53:5 says, “But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.” 

Peace is with you. Always has been and always will be because he is with you and he will never leave you or abandon you. Because of the cross, you are safe. You are loved.

Shalom.