Seeking peace – the peace of God

In last week’s gospel, the novice apostles embarked on their first missionary endeavour. In today’s gospel, we are told how they felt on their return: harassed, hungry, and exhausted. And so, Jesus sensibly recommends rest and time to themselves. The people, however, find out where they’re going and get there ahead of them. We’re not told what the apostles’ reaction was, but we can guess. Jesus, on the other hand, instead of giving them the slip by putting out to sea again, stays with them, because he felt pity for them: they, too, were harassed and anxious, “like sheep without a shepherd”. 

The word Mark uses to express what Jesus felt for the people in hot pursuit is much stronger than ‘pity’: it means, literally, ‘moved in his very depths’. Jesus, in other words, felt, as we might say, gut-wrenching pity for them. 

Jesus’ compassion was not, however, detached sentiment, but compassion with a purpose. And, so, Mark goes on to relate how he doesn’t just teach them but feeds them. The miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, which is next week’s gospel in John’s version, is not just that the loaves and fishes are multiplied but that the anonymous crowd, until now like sheep without a shepherd, are miraculously transformed into a people, united and reconciled. 

And reconciliation is the central theme of St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in the second reading. Paul, a Jew, describes how enemies and strangers – Gentiles and Jews - have been reconciled in and by “the blood of Christ”. The barrier that kept God’s chosen people apart from the Gentile world has been pulled down for ever: peace has been restored by the Cross. 

Paul says all this with a huge dose of rarely noticed humour and irony, referring, for instance, to circumcision as “the work of human hands”, which was, of course, exactly how the idolatrous molten images in Exodus were described. And he refers to the Gentiles as ‘godless’, which was exactly how Christians were described at the time by educated, cultured Romans. But now, Paul says, “by abolishing in his own flesh the rules and decrees of the Law, Christ… is our peace.” 

That theme of peace runs through Paul’s letters (and the gospels) like an antiphon. He makes it clear, time and again, that one of the distinguishing marks of our new life in Christ is peace. But he means God’s peace: “Let the peace of God rule in your hearts”, he tells the Colossians; and our Lord himself says to the disciples, “I leave you peace, my peace I give you”. 

Unlike the peace that we might achieve, however, the peace of God isn’t measured by sensible feelings. It can be present even though our senses or circumstances are disturbed or troubled, rather in the way the ocean remains calm in its depths, however much it rages on the surface. 

But though the peace of God cannot be achieved by human effort, its achievement requires our cooperation. It can take root in us only if we’re prepared to let go of what passes for peace, if we eschew the ‘quick fixes’ that quieten, but only for a while, whatever distresses or discomfits us. And, as Paul made clear in his own intimate and candid personal admissions, it sometimes takes suffering, temptation, and humiliation to detach us from illusory, ersatz peace. God’s peace, as opposed to our own quick fixes, requires that our hearts are, somehow, prised open to receive it; or, in Seamus Heaney’s words, “blown wide open”. 

This, of course, may be painful because the peace of God is inextricably tied to our acceptance of the truth, about ourselves, others, the world and about God. Refusing to live in the truth, on the other hand, is the deadliest destroyer of peace, both within us and between us. Such refusal often takes the form of projecting our own inner (and sometimes) outer conflicts, frustrations, and disappointments onto others. How often does our intolerance of others turn out to be rooted in our refusal to acknowledge in ourselves precisely the same weaknesses and failings? 

The peace of God is, we’re told, a peace the world cannot give. We can neither strive for it nor will it, let alone impose it, either on ourselves or anyone else. It was won for us and has been shared with us. “He is our peace”, St Paul says. Only Christ could bring us the peace of God. 

In his provocatively paradoxical way, the medieval Dominican mystic, Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), once said that the truly spiritual person doesn’t seek peace, because he or she isn’t hampered by the lack of peace. If we are in Christ, we can be at peace, he says, even when we feel no peace.

In the end, God’s peace, like all his attributes, is God himself. So, in sharing his peace with us, God is sharing himself. That’s why his peace “passes all understanding”. He lies beyond the reach of our understanding: only love pierces the “cloud of unknowing”. 

Finally, St Paul says that we are to “have no anxiety about anything”, but rather to cast all our cares on God. He didn’t mean that we should, by an effort of will and determination, suppress, much less repress, our anxieties; but that we can and should commit all our anxieties and worries into God’s hands and thereby rest in the utterly tranquil peace of God, which is God Himself.