A Different Kind of Peace

6th Sunday of Easter - May 25, 2025

Rev Sarah Colvin

You can find this week's readings here.

May God be merciful to us and bless us, *

show us the light of his countenance and come to us.

2 Let your ways be known upon earth, *

your saving health among all nations.

The Gospel this week has a choice of two readings. If you don’t like the one that I chose, you can read the other one about the man who doesn’t have the means to get into the stirred-up water to be made well, and so Jesus summarily heals him … on the Sabbath, and that’s the problem.

I gave some not insignificant thought in my choice for the Gospel. The main reason that I didn’t want to go with the Gospel reading that I chose is that for the next several weeks, to include Pentecost and Trinity Sunday we get a lot about the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, and I didn’t really want to leave Easter just yet. And yes, I know that Easter Day was over a month ago, but Easter is so important that we linger over for 50 days, the great 50 days, it is known as the Sabbath of the year. And still, we make a gradual turn, because Pentecost is June 8th and a curve is better than running straight into it.

Now a little bit of self-divulging about priests in general. Priests, almost always, preach the sermon that they need to hear. This is true whether a supply priest, priest in charge or rector. So, with that preamble, what I couldn’t turn away from is the following concept of “peace I give to you, my own peace I leave with you.”

I don’t need to tell you, this passage is consoling, this is inherently non-problematic, so what made me gravitate towards it? Well, I think we are in need of peace—a different kind of peace.

“Peace, I give you, my own peace I leave with you.” The Gospel passage is from the long farewell discourse in John. The disciples have been asking clarifying questions about Jesus and the Father. And Jesus has been his normal Gospel of John obfuscating self---giving answers without giving answers-- AND YET, there are still answers to be had.

Jesus refers to the divine presence as something real, and even visible, but not quite an external or public spectacle like a theophany at Sinai, or a magnificent Temple. The divine presence is seen as the community in which Jesus and the Father will live, through the love we bear for each other by keeping God’s word. This really is a revelation to the world because divine revelation is not a spectacle, but a practice; it is a practice of love.

While it is a practice, it is not one that the disciples create or perform. Jesus does not make divinity their task, as though the love to which they are called were some massive, noble effort or proect. It is an organic part of a continuing relationship with Jesus himself, and with the Father, that the Spirit enables; it is a parting gift.

To revisit the peace bit. It is not obvious in the English, but Jesus is referring to a standard way of bidding farewell. The well-known function of the phrase as a farewell greeting helps us here. Jesus has been talking all this time about his departure; so, given that an ancient person leaving (or arriving) might well say “peace be with you,” we could rephrase Jesus’s second sentence: “This is not the usual kind of farewell.” And indeed, it isn’t. To summarize Jesus is going away, but nevertheless will be present with them and with us. While his presence will have a different form from his familiar friendship, the coming of the Spirit and the dwelling of the Father, and of Jesus himself in the disciples and in us, are not a weak second best but instead the fulfillment of a promise.

And this fulfillment is the same as that peace. The “peace” is distinctive. Peace is not just absence of conflict, and peace includes inner as well as social well-being. Early Christian epitaphs often described the state of blessedness for the departed as “peace,” faithfully claiming that the peace Jesus offered is future hope as well as current state. As Jesus seems to say here of himself, ‘My absence is not all it appears to be.’

Parts of this discourse have often been read to remind those who have experienced loss and grief about presence and absence; to remind them that those no longer in our midst remain in that peace, which in turn reassures and reestablishes that peace in us. The more immediate point though is about Jesus’ own presence. Modern readers have not experienced the loss of his personal friendship, but all are assured that the presence of Jesus through the Paraclete (aka the Spirit) offers a peace which is more than well-being. Those who receive this peace—that is, who accept his farewell— are participants in a love that is the fulfillment not just of our own hopes but of God’s. And this practice of love, his remaining peace, is now the way Jesus shows himself to the world.

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, *

for you judge the peoples with equity

and guide all the nations upon earth.

This is how we are all called to be like Lydia, to embrace the Gospel as brought by Paul; she listened eagerly and when baptized, like her, if we have been judged faithful to the Lord, our work of hospitality, and love begins. It begins each and every day.

And it is days like this very day, when the readings we have today, are not just consoling, but help us to delineate whose we are, and therefore what we are doing each and every day. The Revelation to John (with the usual caveat that, yes, it is strange, but remember it is not a predictor of end times), gives us language that we need to know who we follow.

We all need reminding that ever since Christianity began, more churches have closed than are open now---we are not at the end of Christianity, regardless of what our nation is doing. It is the weird text of Revelation to John that speaks in glowing terms of a temple-less Temple, the Jerusalem that is not tied to place, but instead is where all believers of God in Christ are resident. This by far surpasses our feeble explanation of nation-states, and how any of us might feel about our country now.

Instead, we are connected by something much more resilient, deeper, and truer; we are connected by the love of God, the peace that Jesus leaves, connected by the Spirit/ the comforter who comes to us to make sure we do not despair in our following Christ, so that we can be Christ in the world.

May God give us his blessing, *

and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him.

---

IMAGE ATTRIBUTION: Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57820 [retrieved June 10, 2025]. Original source: Trey Everett, https://www.treyeverettcreates.com/.