Peace: What it is

“Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”—John xiv. 27.

The passage: Jesus says to his disciples: “I leave peace with you; I give you my peace. I do not give it as the world gives.”

These words were spoken to the Apostles on the night of our Lord’s betrayal. A few hours after receiving this gift of peace, their souls were more disturbed than ever before. They saw the One in whom they trusted to redeem Israel handed over to the heathen. Their own rulers condemned Him, no hosts of Angels came to rescue Him, and soon they themselves forsook Him and fled. That last act must have added the sharpest stings of conscience to all their other sorrows. They had lost not only Him but themselves. The Cross and the grave did not separate Him from them so much as the memory that they had been false to Him.

How strangely the thought “He said, I leave you peace, I give you peace” must have mingled with these confusions! What peace had He bequeathed? Where was it? How could they claim it? Nothing seemed further from them. And there was something more fearful still: the One who gave them peace seemed to have lost it Himself. They had seen Him in the Agony of the Garden and heard His cry on the Cross. Was that not conflict and anguish? Did it not seem as if the whole world were at war with Him, and His Father had forsaken Him?

Yet, brethren, these were the very hours that interpreted to the Disciples the words they had heard without understanding at the Last Supper. They must have turned back to these hours all their later lives when they considered the nature, reality and fullness of the blessing He had assured to them.

I. “Peace I leave with you.” Peace with the people around them, with the rulers of the synagogue, with proconsuls or emperors? In this same discourse He warned them that all these would wage continual war on them. He had come into the world with a sword, and His Gospel would divide men in the same nation and the same household. He told them so that they might not be offended. It was strange that preaching mercy and goodwill should stir up rage and hatred, but He said it would, and it did. So the peace He spoke of must be something other than outward ease and quiet. “In the world ye shall have tribulation” was part of His legacy. Did it then mean peace within their own circle, though there was war in the world? For a few weeks or months after Pentecost they might have thought so. They had all things in common and ate their bread with joy and singleness of heart. But soon there arose in that infant community heartburnings and hypocrisies: widows of Greek proselytes murmuring against the Hebrews because they were neglected in the daily ministration; men and women boasting that they had laid the whole price of their possessions at the Apostles’ feet when they had kept back a part. Soon there were debates about circumcision, Apostles separating because the contention between them was so sharp, and St. Paul withstanding St. Peter to the face because he was to be blamed. In giving peace, our Lord could not have meant that all would be quiet within the chosen body, any more than in the world outside.

Did it mean, then, freedom from inner conflict, from fierce temptations to pride, self-glorification, lust, covetousness, open sin, unbelief, apostasy? St. Paul plainly did not take it so: “We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, with the rulers of the darkness of this world, with spiritual wickedness in high places.” Could any battle be described more terribly? It is a battle with inward spiritual enemies, and Apostles had to fight it as much as their converts. The peace Christ spoke of must be something else, or it was not really left or given, whatever the words seemed to say.

II. But what light lies in the clause “My peace I give unto you”! It is as if He said: “You have seen that I was not exempt from the world’s contradiction; it hated Me before it hated you. Your own hearts tell you I was not exempt from the hardness and ingratitude of disciples, true and false. I endured misunderstanding, perversity, desertion and betrayal before you did. While you slept I wrestled with unseen enemies and dreadful temptations. Before you knew such warfare, I had resisted unto blood. My peace, then, is not exemption from any of these trials, and if you want one, you cannot have the other. It is that by which I was enabled to pass through them: to bear the opposition of sinners, not to be crushed by the unkindness of friends, to drink the cup to the dregs. That is My peace. It can live on in an element of strife, sorrow, helplessness, even hopelessness; it can sustain them and rise out of them, proving mightier. It was the peace I had in the Father, My filial union with Him and trust in Him. The darkness of all things around Me, of Nature, of human creatures, of My own senses and understanding given up to death, could not extinguish it. It survived when My Will could feel only anguish and desertion, first saying, Not Mine, but Thine, and then giving up the spirit into the Father’s hands. My peace I give unto you: this filial union and trust toward Him who has revealed Himself to you in Me, and whose love for you is what I have shown in My life and death.”

III. So the events after the Passover night, which seemed to refute the words spoken on it, at last made them clear. But there was another way too. The disciples’ sin on that night, which banished peace from their minds more than anything they saw, told them what they needed and where to seek it. They had trusted in themselves and found themselves fools. They had thought they loved their Master, and when love should have flowed, it was dry. Then came bitter shame and separation; they were alone. But the Lord turned and looked on them. The memory of His love came upon them as never before, and the sense of having slighted it overcame the sense of having dishonoured themselves. Peter’s tears took the place of Judas’s remorse. Then they knew the peace had been left to them, though until then they had not found it. The love that had been with them so long had not deserted them. It had crushed them, broken their pride and called out their sorrow, so even if it was dead, it had might in death. What they loved was in the grave, but the love was among them more than before, giving them a vision of peace though all around and within them seemed at war, and a stronger hope than they could grasp when He Himself told them He would rise. This love, peace and hope could not be their own; all that was their own they had cast away. This was their preparation for the evening when He stood among them again, said “Peace be unto you,” and showed them His hands and side. They were old words, perhaps His morning greeting, the one they were to bestow on every house they entered. They had sounded solemn and strange the night before the Crucifixion; their savour had been kept through the hour of travail; and now they met the disciples as they felt a new man born into the world. He vanished from their sight, but the gift did not depend on seeing Him. He had left it with them. It was a store to turn to not in sunny hours, when all was cheerful without and within, but in weariness and desolation. It was a store for their hearts to feed on, not for their eyes; they could not appropriate it, for it was His peace, not theirs. Yet as He had said, “I will be with you,” they knew the Peace was with them. It might be hidden because He was hidden, but in seeking Him they sought it, and in finding Him they found it. He had not given as the world gives. The world’s gifts are palpable and tangible, yet we cannot bring them near to ourselves; we may have them and still want them. The heart may be unable to enjoy them though the hand grasps them. This has always been the complaint against the world’s gifts: they are good for nothing except as we make them good. “Ours is their wedding garment, ours their shroud.” They delight or disgust us according to the state we are in, but cannot change that state. They need a light from within to show their colours; the colours do not bring the light, and too often find none. So men say, “These things were so different when we were young. How bright they looked once! How they have faded!” We all know it is the eye that has grown dim, and the things are as they were. Perhaps they never seemed much brighter; in youth there may have been other shadows we have forgotten. Only the heart is certain that it ought and is meant to enjoy, and so persuades itself that it once did. It has a witness in itself that there is another kind of gift, given directly to the heart and not through the eye. This gift does not require a particular state of mind to receive it but makes that state. It brings the light by which it is seen and then lights everything around. It depends on no accidents but compels them to obey it, drawing nourishment from what seems most contrary to it. This gift, which all men know they want, is what Christ gave His disciples. It was not something precious if only they had peace of mind to welcome it, but peace of mind itself. It is not a peace of mind that must be kept up by regulating its surroundings, but one that can safely face all heats and chills, and is most aware of its power when suffering most from them. It is not a peace we are to keep, but one that keeps us in the knowledge and love of God and of Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is the mystery of the gift, and the sign that He gives not as the world gives. He is Lord of man’s inner being, not only of his circumstances, though He is Lord of these too and orders them all as instruments for showing Himself and for redeeming the creature made in His image.

IV. Therefore, brethren, though it was fitting to consider these words first as they applied to those who first heard them, and though the Apostles’ history illustrates them as nothing else could, they must be ours or they could not have been theirs. All the gifts given them at the Passover are still ours. If He gave them the bread and said “Take, eat: this is My flesh,” and poured the wine and said “This is the blood of the New Testament,” He gave these treasures through them to all generations and endowed us in their names. As I have shown, the gift of peace had no special application to the Apostles merely because the giver sat visibly before them. They knew what they had been given only when He became invisible and they received it as an invisible blessing. Nor was it theirs because they were stronger or better than others; they entered into possession only when they knew they were as weak and evil as anyone. He chose them as heralds of His Grace and Peace to mankind, and if they had claimed these gifts in their own right and not as stewards, the gifts would not have been realized. To us, then, as truly as to them, and on the same conditions, He says, “Peace I leave with you: My peace I give unto you.” Far off as it may seem, this peace is near to every one of us. We think we pursue it hither and thither, and it always stays ahead of us. But what we pursue is only a shadow; the substance that casts it is within. The heart cannot find it abroad. At home the treasure is laid up, though it may be in a chamber we have never visited, or have shunned because we fancy it haunted with strange spectres. Haunted it is, and the spectres will greatly scare us when we first venture in. The Disciples were startled to find such heartlessness and cowardice in themselves, though they had thought themselves ready to die for Him. Many a man has felt such anguish when the secret passages of his spirit were suddenly laid open to him. He cannot escape the discovery; it often comes on a sick-bed, when he is least able to face the terrors. But they may be faced, and there is a reward for everyone who does not flee from the truth. If he will be humbled by the sight of the dark spectres in the chambers of his soul, he will find there what is not dark and spectral. He will find the Love that the evil in him has been fighting: a perfect form of brightness and purity which the evil spirits mock, and which can bid them depart. If he will confess this Presence too, saying not only “I have sinned” but “Against Thee have I sinned, against Thee who hast cared for me, sought me, striven with me,” a new light will burst upon him. In renouncing all his own pretensions to be or have anything, he gains what is truly his, an inalienable possession, a treasure in Heaven that thief cannot seize nor moth corrupt. If all our evil lies in resisting a Righteous Being who rules over us, then all good must be submission to Him. This is Peace: peace depending on One worthy of our dependence, peace in not seeking from outward things what they cannot give, nor from our own nature what is not in it. The Peace is there in our hearts, but it is there while the heart seeks its delight in another and forgets itself. When it finds its object it is at peace, and cannot be till then. Therefore Christ left this dowry to all human hearts when He revealed Himself to them as their proper and ever-present object: in them and above them, united with them yet always distinct, blending with them as the sky seems to blend with the sea at the far horizon, as the setting sun seems to share its glory between them. This peace is given to men, yet He gives it afresh each time. They have it only while content to receive it; the moment they take it as their property, it is gone. He does not give as the world gives. The world teaches us to claim each thing as our own and says nothing is ours until we can secure it against other men. We hold this peace on the opposite tenure: we have it only while we care to distribute it and want everyone to share it with us. It is theirs and ours because it is His who died for all and lives for all.

And as this peace was first realized as deliverance from strife without and within, so it must be held fast in the midst of the same strife. If ease and sunshine come, it is well, but we are not to look for them. If joyful sensations are given, if our spirits have an unusual buoyancy and freedom, we should be thankful, but tomorrow all this may change. If we are provoking no hostility, let us ask how that happens, for the Author of this Peace was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, and was called a friend of publicans and sinners, and a blasphemer.

This Peace was given the night before His crucifixion. When He rose, the pledges of it were His wounded hands and side, and they are always its pledges. In the communion of His body and blood we are to learn what it is for ourselves and for mankind. As we partake of it, we confess that it is for the most wretched sons of earth, because it is fixed and eternal in the Heavens.