Peace can't be just a word you press into service for whatever your cause, be it making war or resisting war in the making. Peace needs to have substance and affect, a real affect, to be its own reality in the midst of everything else that is real. So Jesus offers peace to his disciples (John 14:18-27). While they stand on the threshold of events they will not understand, events that will throw them into unbelievable turmoil, Jesus gives them peace in the midst of it all, a peace that will carry them through all the anxiety & fear, all the grief & despair. What he gives them is not an empty word packaged in wishful thinking. What he gives them is himself!
Read Ephesians 2:11-22. Paul knows it well in the midst of his struggles & turmoil. "He is our peace." Christ is our peace. Paul is speaking out of the initial crisis of the early church. For whom is this gospel intended? And how shall we be joined together in the community of faith, Jews & Gentiles? You feel Paul reaching, straining to find images adequate to express what God is up to in Christ Jesus. Surely God is doing a new thing in Jesus, the Messiah.
It's as if the cross of Christ is a bridge across the yawning chasm of hatred & hostility between Jews & Gentiles, bridging the alienation & intolerance. Good image, but there is more. The cross is not just the bridge opening access to Israel's God-given treasures; for God is doing something quite new in Christ: a new covenant, a new commandment, a Messiah different and beyond every expectation. So Paul seeks another image.
Now he pictures the Creator God of the creation story stooping in the dust of the earth, molding a figure of clay, but this time two figures. Then, choosing to work the clay together, god fashions a single one, one new man in place of the two, so thoroughly joined you can no longer talk of two, so making peace. Christ is our peace. Ah! That's getting there, but yet another image comes to mind.
Now the cross of Christ is pictured, not as an intersection where people meet, cross over and continue on their divergent ways, but as a converging of two vast streams of people drawn together and intermingling in a single direction, streaming into the "oikos," the household of God, (the word from which we get "ecumenical"). Christ is our peace.
Then household brings to mind one final image, the building that houses the household, a temple or perhaps a cathedral built in the shape of the cross as all the great cathedrals have been. It's built on a solid foundation of apostles & prophets, Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, giving orientation & direction to the whole building, and all of us built into it as living stones, carefully placed, joined together. Christ is our peace.
There is substance & affect, a new reality in the midst of all else we must face. All those images, but one compelling reality, Christ himself is our peace!
Page Last Updated: March 31, 2003
