“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I give to you not as the world gives. Don’t be troubled or afraid.” (John 14:27)

Yesterday I talked about how acceptance leads to equanimity, a place where we can experience deep feelings from ourselves and others without overwhelm or minimizing. Acceptance and equanimity are close cousins of peace.

“Peace” is usually thought of as freedom from conflict or trouble, but the Bible often talks about a peace that passes understanding that can be present in the midst of conflict. Jesus says he gives his peace “not as the world gives.” This peace somehow transcends the circumstances of the moment and connects us to something deeper and more eternal. We live with one foot standing in the turbulent present and another foot standing in the peaceable kingdom.

I think of the nativity scenes we create in miniature all over the world in many different styles: a baby in a manger surrounded by loving parents, working-class shepherds, high-falutin’ foreign astrologers, divine beings (angels), and livestock. It’s a snapshot, a diorama, of a peaceable kingdom. We know from the story in Matthew that just out of the dioarama lurks the paranoid King Herod and soldiers who will commit genocide in this tiny Palestinian village. But for the moment: peace.

Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded the American church that “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” The nativity scenes we create at Christmas do not stick too closely to the gospel in either Matthew or Luke because they reflect an idealized version of the presence of justice, where rich people give away their wealth and workers are welcomed as prophets, where animals and divine beings share space in giving glory to God. Like the peace that Jesus gives, this is not a peace without tension. 

Christians tend to talk about a “peace that passes understanding” that we can have in our hearts as a different kind of thing from the socially just peace described by the prophets, but I think that’s where we go wrong. We cannot separate the interior state from the outer, as though Christ’s peace is something I just hold and nurture in my heart for my illusory self. The peace we have within demands expression in action and words. It bubbles up, like a spring of water, and overflows out of us.

I think one of the reasons the socially just peace is so elusive is that too many people try to hold peace inside of themselves, as if it were an individualistic gift. But Jesus does not give peace as the world gives. This is a gift that must be shared.

Prayer: Holy Spirit of Peace, give us a contagious peace that passes understanding. Amen.