Peace I Leave with You

When the angels sang over Bethlehem, they sang of peace on earth. More than thirty years later, on the darkest night of his life, the baby they sang about gives that peace away.

It is Passover in Jerusalem, and Jesus is sharing a last supper with his disciples in an upstairs room. Lamps flicker on the walls. He has washed their feet like a servant. He has told them that one of them will betray him, and that Peter will deny him. And he has told them he is going away, to a place where they cannot yet follow. Their hearts are pounding. Thomas asks, Lord, we don't know where you are going, how can we know the way? Philip asks to see the Father. They are confused and afraid. And Jesus keeps speaking, gently, into their fear.

These things I have spoken unto you, Jesus says, while I am still with you. But I will not leave you alone. The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance everything I have said to you. Think how much that promise meant later. Years afterwards, when John and the others wrote down Jesus' words, they remembered. The Spirit had kept his promise.

Then Jesus gives them something, almost like a parent handing over a precious keepsake before a long journey. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” In Jesus' language, peace was shalom. It was the everyday greeting and the everyday goodbye. But Jesus means far more than a polite farewell. Shalom means wholeness, everything as it should be, a heart at rest with God. And this peace is his own. My peace. The same peace that let him sleep in a boat during a storm.

Not as the world gives, Jesus says. The world's peace depends on things going well: no enemies, no trouble, nothing to fear. Jesus' peace does not. In a few hours he will be arrested in a garden. His friends will run. By the next afternoon he will be on a cross. And still he says: Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. His peace is not the absence of storms. It is his presence in them. Three days later, when he stands among them again, risen from the dead, his first word will be: Peace be unto you.

The world Jesus spoke into had its own famous peace. The emperor Augustus boasted of the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, won by conquest. In his own record of his achievements, Augustus wrote that the Senate voted an Altar of Augustan Peace to be built in Rome to honour his return. Rome's peace was kept by legions and the sword. Jesus offered a different kind.

Peace I Leave with You. You'll find it in John chapter fourteen, verses twenty-five to twenty-seven. At Christmas we sing about peace on earth; here Jesus tells us what that peace really is, and how to receive it. So here is a question to carry with you. What is troubling your heart right now, and can you hand it to Jesus and receive his peace instead?