Blessed are the Peacemakers (Part II)
As we come to terms with how we’ve attempted to create false peace, we begin to yearn for the true thing. Shalom, true peace, is the creation of God, the quality of life known by all things that walk in step with His will. We cannot make peace for ourselves. It is given, and we must receive it by the terms that it is given. We must enter into it and participate in it with a sense of humility and wonder.
From the beginning, humanity’s participation in God’s peace was destined to be the fruit of faithfully passing what the Scriptures sometimes call “the test.” It is commonly held that in their creation, Adam and Eve were made perfectly. This is a way we try to say that they were free from the afflictions of sin and death, but the term ‘perfect’ unhelpfully suggests to us that there was nothing remaining into which our first parents needed to grow or mature. Traditionally, and more helpfully, Adam and Eve are regarded as being created innocent. This leaves room for what comes next–the command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and then the test of whether they would obey the word of the Lord and resist the Tempter. We know how that story ends, and so humanity failed its test and did not enter into the Lord’s rest. In experience, they did not make it to their share of the seventh day and its attending peace, remaining suspended in the waning light of the sixth day. And even though time went on, something about our whole nature got stuck at the point of that failed test.
This perspective helps us to make sense of the trials of Israel in the wilderness. Having been brought through and out of the waters of the Red Sea (always a Biblical image of new creation), the Israelites processed into the wilderness to face their test. In the pattern of Adam and Eve, their first test came in the form of food. Resentful of the manna that God provided them in the wilderness, the Israelites required God to feed them as they would be fed. They then murmured against God and demanded that He prove Himself by providing them water in the desert. And lastly they despaired of God’s presence among them, taking it upon themselves to make golden gods for themselves. Their failure in the wilderness test resulted in the punishment of the entire generation (save Joshua and Caleb). As the psalmist recounts, from the perspective of God, in Psalm 95 “forty years long was I grieved with this generation and said: ‘It is a people that do err in their hearts for they have not known my ways, unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter in my rest.” Once again, the people God had made failed to attain His peace.
So when Jesus goes forth from His Baptism in the Jordan, coming up from the waters and following the Holy Spirit into the wilderness, we have to see Him as taking on His shoulders the history of humanity and His own people of Israel. He goes, like they went, to confront the test. But in the Temptation, Christ shows us a very different outcome as He resists the devil and passes the test. He shows us the quality of the humanity He comes to offer us, a strong humanity that is united once more to the life of God, a humanity that walks in the way of the Lord through all tests and, by that faithfulness, enters into the blessing of the Lord’s peace. His success in the test is an indictment of all human effort because His faithfulness reveals the compromise and faithlessness of every other attempt to do what He alone can do.
The fulness of Christ’s faithfulness to the Father, His will to pass the test for our sake, is revealed to us in the Passion. St. Paul says to the Colossians that “all things hold together through Him” being as He is the invisible God made manifest. But the activity of this holder-together of all things was, through His offering up of Himself once for all, a true atonement on behalf of humanity to God, a representative renunciation of humanity’s fallen tendencies to grasp for power and to abdicate its vocation in God’s good world. Faced with the horror of the Crucifixion, Christ willingly assents to submit Himself to humiliation and death so as to do the will of the Father. As He says in the Garden of Gethsemane (note: a Garden test): “not my will but Yours be done.” The Passion and Death of Christ are the revelation of the perfect harmony of the will of the Son to the will of the Father in the fellowship of the Spirit. His submission to the Cross, the Tree of the Curse, shatters the curse of our failed test and makes the Tree of Death into the Tree of Life.
The fruit of this harmony and obedience to the Father is the Resurrection, the vindication of the Son as He is raised by the Father through the Spirit from death. The Resurrected Jesus is the home of resurrected life for the Creation. Jesus’ resurrected humanity, and its integral relationship to the rest of the cosmos, is now charged with risen life wrought by the Spirit, the One who gives life from the Father through the Son. The Spirit takes of what is the Son’s and gives it to those who are made to share the life of the Son, to be coinheritors of the Father’s peace, known in Him. In Him is now life that overcomes death, obedience that overcomes rebellion, and the creative word that dispels chaos. Thus, St. Paul declares victoriously: “For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.”
Jesus is the person in whose life we have been granted access to the peace of God. In the Eucharist, we receive Christ by the Spirit from the Father. His life becomes our life and our life is made like His life. When we receive, the objective presence of Christ is within us. When we receive with an openness of heart and with faithfulness to Him, that objective life remains with us always. If we receive unworthily, the presence of Christ extended in the Spirit challenges all that is within us and, like we see in the Gospels, will permit us to reject them and send them away to our peril and destruction. It is why the Liturgy leads us gently but firmly to the end of receiving Him in such a way that we do not depart from Him. In every Mass, we have the privilege of returning to the life that humanity has sought in every corner of the world since the Fall. It is given to us.
This is why each Mass ends with the blessing of peace. Having been filled with the life of the obedient, peace-bestowing Son and garlanded with the Spirit, the peace-gifter, we are commissioned to go out in that peace as emissaries of that peace to the world. The transformation we experience in our work of worship makes us peace-makers, or rather peace-givers. As the Son looked upon His disciples and said “peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” so we go out and give that which we have received. As we are conformed to this vocation to proclaim the peace of God that passes all the world’s understanding, we become little Christs in the world--as He is among us, so are we among the world. In this, the Father of our Lord Jesus becomes our Father, we are children like He is as the Son of the Father, and we are united in one bond of peace and a harmony of new life--a renewal of shalom--by the animating power of the Spirit who binds us to the life of the triune God.
As our Lord promised in His Sermon on the Mount: “God blesses those who make peace, for they shall be called the children of God.”