Home > Articles > 2004 >

My peace I give to you

Text of the address given by the Rev Douglas Scrimgeour of the United Free Church of Scotland at at the Glasgow Churches Together service to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity at St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Glasgow, on Sunday 18 January, 2003

My peace I give to you ...

It is these frequently quoted and memorable words of Jesus that provide the theme for our service this afternoon, and, indeed, for this entire week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

“See you later!” How often, I wonder, have you parted company from someone recently with these words ringing in your ears. It seems these days to have become the most popular form of leave-taking in the English language. But you know, I know that half the time - perhaps 90% of the time - it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s a phrase that trips easily off the tongue - it sounds good - but most of the time it trips of the tongues of people who would get the shock of their lives if they ever clapped eyes on us again! And I suppose conventional greetings and farewells have always been a bit like that - even the rather cursory ‘Yours sincerely’ with swhich we habitually sign off our letters.

And I suspect it wasn’t all that different in the days when Jew met Jew in 1st century Palestine and exchanged their ‘shaloms’ - the conventional greeting of ‘Peace!’

But sometimes - just sometimes - these words which we can so easily dismiss as conventional verbal niceties may be profoundly meaningful.

And when Jesus - Jesus who always had a quite amazing capacity to transform the mundane and the commonplace into something special - when Jesus said to his closest friends that last night in Jerusalem, “My peace - my Shalom - I give to you” you can be sure it was no throw-away remark, no conventional farewell - he was in deadly earnest - making them an offer they would ignore at their peril, an offer which realistically they dared not refuse. It was to be his final legacy to them and to all who would follow in their footsteps.

Jesus was no fool. He knew what was in man. He knew his men and the people to which they belonged better even than they knew themselves. He knew he was dealing with people who had had more than their fair share of false prophets - men who had told them what they wanted to hear, who had promised them peace when there was no peace. Only days before he had been moved to tears at the sight of a bewildered city with a magnificent temple at its heart - a centre of religious excellence, I suppose we would call it nowadays - but whose people did not have a clue about the things that had to do with their peace.

But, more importantly, he had had the opportunity to observe these men who for the past three years had been his closest companions. He had looked on in amazement on that day on the lake when, angst-ridden and panic-stricken, they had pleaded with him to wake up and still the storm that threatened to engulf their boat. With a sore heart he had witnessed their deep distress when, fresh from the spiritually uplifting experience they had shared on the Mount of Transfiguration, they were suddenly confronted by their total inability to respond effectively to the impassioned plea of a distraught father seeking healing for his ailing child.

He had stood by in bitter disappointment and disbelief as these same men openly and selfishly vied with one another in a bid to secure the most prominent positions in the coming kingdom.

Is it any wonder then, as he reflected on these things and pondered the uncertainties that lay ahead, is it any wonder that he should have seen their peace not as some optional extra but as a first priority - essential not only for their personal well-being and the quality of their relationship with one another, but, most important of all, for the future of the work he was so soon to be entrusting to them - a work whose effectiveness would depend upon their being able to share and enjoy that unity of purpose which he himself had so consistently enjoyed with his Father.

The longing for peace, however it is conceived, is a craving that is deeply rooted in the human psyche, and it’s a craving which different people have understood and sought to satisfy in a host of different ways.

They have sought it - and many would claim to have found it - by way of isolation: by cutting themselves off, by disengaging from the disturbingly distracting demands of the outside world and erecting ever-higher defensive walls against their encroachment.

For others, the answer is to be found in ignorance - the ignorance which, we say, is bliss - the ignorance of the closed mind - the ‘don’t want to know attitude’ - the ignorance that is proverbially exemplified by the ostrich with its enviable capacity for burying its head in the sand.

Or again, there is the peace of death. It too has had its appeal - the peace of the graveyard - the peace that is believed to exist where nothing stirs - the peace of inactivity - where nothing is allowed to disturb our rest.

And there are those for whom peace has to do with insensitivity - and the way of achieving it lies in the cultivation of that state of apathy or unfeeling that was enjoyed by the ancient gods of the Greeks - that state of existence that is achieved by steeling ourselves in such a way as to ensure that we are untouched and unaffected by the pain and suffering of the world out there. It is the peace of unresponsiveness and inactivity; the peace of disengagement; the peace that is so graphically depicted by Tennyson in the impassioned plea of the Lotus Eaters:

“Let us alone, what pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

Give us long rest or death, dark death or dreamful ease”

But is that the kind of peace that is on offer to you and me from Jesus? Was that the kind of peace Jesus was offering these men as together they were about to embark on an enterprise of hitherto unimaginable proportions?

I am reminded of the story of the rather eccentric Oxford don who encountered the son of a former colleague on the street one day, and grabbing him by the lapels said: “Tell your father that one of the great evils of our time is the worship of detached ideas.”

Jesus was no starry-eyed idealist, pedalling detached ideas or making promises he could not fulfil. The peace that he was offering these men - and us - was highly personalized and securely earthed. It was, he said, my peace. And what a wealth of meaning is contained in that little two-letter word.

Glasgow folk used to have a habit of refernng to the wife - but what a difference it makes when it is my wife, my husband, my son, my daughter, my home, my country, yes, and my church.

“My peace,” said Jesus, “I give to you.” It was to be the peace that he enjoyed; the peace that he so consistently displayed; the peace that was so uniquely his. It was to be the peace that had permeated all his activities and relationships. It was to be the peace that had enabled him to withstand the attacks of his enemies and the defection of his friends. It was to be the peace that would give him the strength he needed to contemplate his ultimate rejection and self-sacrifice, and to endure the awful anguish of the cross. It was to be the peace that grew out of his deep and enduring relationship with his Heavenly Father and the confidence that that inspired - the confidence that all his activities were securely rooted and grounded in his eternal plan and purpose and would contribute to their fulfilment.

What image, I wonder, does that word peace conjure up in your mind? I am no engineer but, like many others, I am fascinated by big engines and the way they operate, and there is, I believe, a certain dynamism about the word and the concept it encapsulates which suggests to me the picture of a well-tuned engine - or, if you like, a perfectly coordinated body - an engine from which all possible sources of friction and jarring have been effectively eliminated, and in which all the 100 or more moving parts are perfectly synchronised so that the whole machine or body works together as a single unit – with an ease and a dynamism that enables it to operate smoothly and to fulfill the function for which it was designed.

I am sure you, like me, must have found it significant that our theme this year should have been chosen by the Christian churches in Aleppo - by people who have lived too long in a seething cauldron of turmoil and conflict - people who have witnessed and experienced at first hand the disruptive and debilitating effect those jarring influences have had upon their lives and upon their witness - people for whom peace is not an optional extra - the icing on the cake, so to speak - but a basic necessity - an essential ingredient that has to be sought, cultivated and preserved as a matter of urgency.

They would want to remind us , I am sure, that, as Christian people, we are not called as the Lotus Eaters to a life of dreamful ease - that we are called to take up our cross daily, and, at this time in particular, we are called to respond with a fresh sense of urgency to the challenge to explore, express and promote that unity, that oneness which Jesus prayed for for his people. It is a challenge that will commit us to climbing up that wave that is for ever threatening to overwhelm us -a challenge that will commit us and the Churches we represent to go on giving and not to count the cost; to go on fighting and not to heed the wounds; to go on toiling and not to seek for rest; to go on labouring and not to ask for any reward.

But it is by grasping the nettle of our divided state and by responding to the challenge it represents that together we will come to discover and to harness the dynamism of that peace which Jesus has to offer - the peace that comes from knowing that, however falteringly, we are fellow-travellers, walking in step with God, working with him and for him in furthering his great and glorious master-plan of reconciling and reuniting a broken and divided world in Christ.

As today and throughout this week we respond to the invitation to pray for our Christian unity and to renew our commitment to make that wonderful vision more of a reality not just in our own experience but in the eyes of the world, we need to lay claim to our inheritance - that special kind of lively, purposeful, engaging, dynamic peace which has the authentic stamp of Jesus upon it, that peace which must ultimately depend upon the quality of our relationship with him.