We all have our personal definitions of peace. Let me be disruptive of your thinking by suggesting a different definition:
Peace is completeness.The traditional reading of a line in Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount’ is, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48 NRSV). As a rule, perfect means without a flaw, having no imperfections, unable to be improved upon. Our sanctuary Bible translation, The Common English Bible, uses the word “complete” for the word perfect. Yes, grammarians, that may be a slim nuance of meaning but the change of word is insightful. If something is complete, then it is lacking nothing, and nothing additional is needed, Hence, I suggest that peace is completeness. The peace of God lacks nothing. There is nothing additional required. God’s peace is whole in and of itself.
Completeness is the order of creation as God intended it. In the Genesis 1 story of creation, at the completion of each step of creation, God declared it was good. At the close of the sixth and last day of creation “God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good” (Genesis 1:31). In the Genesis 2 story of creation, which explores more deeply the creation of human beings, God determines, “It’s not good that the human is alone. I will make him a helper that is perfect for him” (Genesis 2:18). The initial human being is incomplete without the partner who is “perfect” that is the completion of the other.
The psalmist in Psalm 119, the longest of the psalms, waxes eloquent in line after line praising the perfection, the wholeness, the completeness of the law.
Even the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews uses the notion of perfection and completeness in talking about Jesus:
It was appropriate for God, for whom and through whom everything exists, to use experiences of suffering to make perfect the pioneer of salvation. (Hebrews 2:10)Jesus is complete. Jesus is perfect. Jesus is whole. Jesus lacks nothing. He has completely, utterly, totally, experienced everything that life encounters. He did not shy away from the things we do, the things that hurt, the things that rip us apart. He allowed himself to be vulnerable to everything. There is no human pain that he did not include in the human suffering that he bore on the cross. Jesus was complete in his humanity as well as his divinity.
When we say to each other, “The peace of the Lord be with you; and also with you,” we are seeking the wholeness, the perfection, the completeness of Christ for each of us.
Yet we are resistant to that peace. Christ’s peace disrupts the fragile framework of our lives. We do work-arounds for the gaps in our lives. We fool ourselves into thinking that things are all right when that isn’t the case. We are used to being incomplete. However miserable we might be, we are unconsciously happy with being the way we are. We settle for our incompleteness and accept it as completeness. We take our vastly imperfect peace and assume that’s all there is.
Christ’s peace is disruptive. That seems inconceivable. Peace is supposed to put everything at rest. Peace is supposed to smooth everything out. But since we have come to accept an imperfect peace as all there is, when Christ’s peace comes near to us and dares to address our imperfection, our incompleteness, we are thrown into a tizzy. Our thoughts are upended, our knowledge of reality is undermined. Our spirits start to churn like a bad case of indigestion. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, I have come instead to bring division” (Luke 12:51). Christ’s peace divides us from all that is false within us
The Pharisees were disrupted as they tried enforce their view of life on Jesus. His teaching, his presence, his demeanor, his perfection, his completeness erupted in them. They couldn’t stand that he was complete, whole, perfect, and they weren’t. The peace that he brought wherever he went negated all the incomplete and false peace that had become so ingrained in the lives of God’s people.
We reject the very thing we desire, the absolute thing we need. Christ’s peace disrupts our selfish, ingrown worlds. It doesn’t matter what the subject is: marriage, divorce, women’s reproductive rights, irresponsible gun violence, spousal abuse, affordable health care, child rearing, pornography, addiction, arrogant ignorance. Christ’s peace disrupts it all and we won’t take it.
Yet as long as our hearts are unyielding, as long as we repel the peace of Christ, as long as we refuse to let Christ disrupt our imitation peace, we will be incomplete, imperfect, and in no way filled with the peace that Christ seeks to bring us.
That’s why it is so significant that Jesus tells the disciples that “whoever doesn’t welcome God’s kingdom like a child will never enter it.” The youngest children have not yet bought into the false peace that years of living have weighted us down with. They haven’t lived long enough to learn racism, hatred, narrow-mindedness. They aren’t complete by any sense of the word. They are often self-centered, greedy, gullible. Nevertheless they are often unswerving in faith and loyalty. They are open to the fullness, the perfection, the wonder, the completeness of life that Jesus lives, teaches, gives.
This table is an opportunity to become like a child again, to welcome the peace, to receive the completeness that Christ offers. For Christ is complete here. He is totally here for us – his body, his blood, his unrestricted offering of himself for us. Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim Christ’s saving death until he comes again in glory, until he comes in the fullness, the perfection, the completeness that God has intended from before creation began. We come to this table to shed our false peace and taste freshly the peace which is Christ. And every time we taste the bread and sip the cup we have the opportunity to be infused more with Christ’s peace for our lives, the lives of all God’s people, and the life of creation itself. This ongoing disruption will one day rid us all that separates us from Christ so that we may share his complete peace.
The peace of Christ be with you all. Thanks be to God.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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