Scripture
With my voice to God I cry aloud,
with my voice to God, that she may hear me.
In the day of my trouble the Holy One I seek,
my hand at night is stretched out without rest;
my soul refuses to be comforted.
I contemplate God, and I groan;
I meditate, and my spirit faints. Selah
You hold my eyelids open;
I am distraught and cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
and remember the years of time past.
I contemplate my song in the night with my heart;
I meditate and search my spirit.
Will the Holy One reject for all time,
and never again show favor?
Has her faithful love ceased for all time?
Has her promise ceased to pass from generation to generation?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has she in anger closed off her mother-love? Selah
And I say, “This is what ails me,
that the right hand of the Most High has changed.”
I will contemplate the deeds of the Ageless God;
I will remember your wonders of old.
I will meditate on all your work,
and reflect on your deeds.
In the sea was your way, and your paths in the many waters,
yet your footsteps were not seen.
You led your people like a flock,
by the hand of Miriam, Aaron, and Moses.
~Psalm 77:1-12, 19-20
“These things I have said to you while I am still with you all. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Most High will send in my name, She will teach you all things, and She will remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you all. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, nor let them fear. You have heard me say to you all, ‘I am going away and I am coming to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Creator, because the Almighty is greater than I. And now, I have told you this before it happens, so when it happens, you all might believe. I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming and has nothing in me. Rather, that the world may know that I love the Creator of All, just as the Sovereign God commands me, so I do. Rise now, let us leave this place.”
~John 14:25=31
Meditation
Jesus offers us peace in this morning’s gospel lesson, but as members of the church, the body of Christ, sometimes that peace feels elusive. Sometimes it is life in church that feels as if it’s the source of chaos, and division, and anything but peace.
A minister friend told me of a conversation they had with a beloved church member, the kind of person we call “a pillar” of the church, who was frustrated and upset by changes. (This was long before Covid-time.) “Don’t I have the right to have this church be the way I want it to be?”
That’s a great question, and one I think we can find clues to the answer to in this passage from John’s gospel.
Taken together, our two passages, psalm and gospel, tell a story. The story begins with fear and anxiety. Probably some anticipatory grief—that cold clench you get in your gut when you know this beloved person is going away, or dying or changing in ways that make them unrecognizable to you. The psalm is all about that feeling, distilled into a desperate wail of agony: God, are you there? Have you left me? Won’t you fix this?
Then we come to our passage, John’s gospel. If it sounds familiar, that may be because I preached a different set of verses from this chapter the last Sunday in May.
This is the night of the last supper. Jesus has washed everyone’s feet, and the supper has already been eaten. Judas has left, on his way to bring the soldiers. The disciples hear Jesus talking about his imminent arrest and crucifixion—I am going away, and where I go, you can’t follow. They are hearing all this, and they want none of it. Their reactions are a combination of “La la la la I can’t hear you” and “You’re going to WHAT?”
Jesus is trying to offer some comfort.
The comfort the disciples want, to be clear, is something like: We get swords. We fight back. We start a revolution, and then you get to be king. Or, maybe, We run and hide. We take to the desert, maybe those Essene people will give us sanctuary. Then we build an army and… lather, rinse, repeat.
Jesus does not offer them this kind of comfort. He offers them something that sounds airy-fairy, promises of the presence of the very Spirit of God, which will happen later, and what does that mean anyway? And what they want is some large intervention into what is happening now.
Does any of this sound familiar?
I think this is a little like the situation we are in. I think this is a time of fear and anxiety. For some of us it may even be a time of anticipatory grief: that cold clench you get in your gut when you know something beloved is going away, changing in ways that make them unrecognizable to you, maybe dying. That’s a really good description of our world right now. From the ongoing death toll of Covid, to the upending of women’s right to bodily autonomy by the Supreme Court to life in our beloved church… our world has changed. We would love a huge, divine-style intervention in all this—something for which I pray many times each day. But that is not what God is offering right now. Going back is not an option. The only way through this is to move forward, into something entirely new.
In a long address that is a lot like a spiritual last will-and-testament, Jesus offers his friends—and us—three things:
First, Jesus offers the Spirit, whom he calls “The Advocate.” I talked about the many meanings of this in May, but just as a refresher: here are all the different ways that word is translated in all different versions of the Bible:
Advocate, Comforter, Companion, Consoler, Counselor, Friend, Guide, Intercessor, Helper, Paraclete, Spirit of Truth, Strengthener, Standby… all these different understandings of the role the Spirit will play in the disciples’ lives, in the life of the early church, and in our lives, too.
The Spirit will teach you all things, Jesus says, and She will remind you of all that I have said to you. So the Spirit is there to help with remembering and with going forward—the past, the present, and the future are all in her capable hands.
Jesus offers this presence of the Spirit to the disciples. Jesus offers this presence of the Spirit to us, today. That’s the first thing.
Second, Peace. Now imagine, the person you love and admire most in the world, the one for whom you left your family so that you could follow him—he’s going to be brutally executed by the state, and the night before he says, “I’m leaving you my peace. And by the way—it’s nothing like the peace the world has on offer.”
Jesus is making a very big dig at the Roman Empire here. When Jesus was with his disciples on that Thursday night, and even 50, 60, 70 years later, when the gospel of John was being written, the world was in the midst of something everyone knew as the Pax Romana, the peace of the Roman Empire. And it’s true, that for the vast territories of Rome, beginning with Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, there was a period of more amity, more international friendliness, and less bloodshed than the period that came before. The Caesars were maintaining peace, from what we now call England, to Morocco, to the Middle East, by the presence of well-trained, well-armed legions of soldiers. They were maintaining peace by the continual use of crucifixion as the punishment for sedition, for insurrection, which is the charge that will send Jesus to the cross in about twelve hours from this moment. So, there was some war. There was some bloodshed. In the middle of the Pax Romana, the Temple was destroyed and the streets of Jerusalem ran with blood. But over all, believe it or not, the prevailing narrative was that things were still better than they had been before.
This, the Roman Peace, a brutal peace held by intimidation and oppression, this is the peace that the world gives. I’m giving you something else entirely, Jesus says. Whatever it is, it’s not that. It’s the opposite of that—the opposite of brutality, of things held together by swords and shields and guns and bombs and merciless capital punishment.
So, what is that peace? Jesus doesn’t spell it out. But the word he is using with his friends when he says peace—shalom—says volumes. We translate the word “peace,” but in Hebrew and Aramaic is means so much more. It means: to make it good, to make restitution, to fully repay, to make it whole.
And there is another use for this word: It also carries the meaning of well-being, wellness, good health—but not just physical health. Health of the heart and soul.
All these understandings taken together, shalom means completeness, and tranquility.
Jesus is promising wholeness to his friends—and, since we’re his friends, he’s promising it to us, too. This is the kind of peace we can learn to find whether the world is falling apart or not. It is the kind of peace we can have when we understand that our God is the fount of every blessing, and that this same God will lead us through any barren land we find ourselves in. Jesus is offering us God’s perfect shalom. That’s the second thing.
The third thing Jesus offers us is something that’s more subtle in the text. Because we’re English speakers, the second person singular pronoun is the same as the second person plural: you. In most other languages, that’s not the case. Unlike other translators, Dr. Gafney decided to make clear that Jesus is not speaking to a single person, but rather, to a group of people. So throughout the passage, we can hear Jesus say, “you all.” He says, I am still with you all… my peace I give to you all. You have heard me say to you all…
Jesus gives us the gift of one another. There is something about anxiety and grief that can make us forget to reach out to the other people in our world, that can make us hunker down in our hidey-holes, and wait until it seems safe to poke our heads out.
We have been given a calling: Our calling is to listen for the guidance of the Holy Spirit together. It is to let God lead the way. It is to receive that peace that passes all understanding, but that can give us an unshakeable sense of wholeness, tranquility, and well-being.
So, what would you say to that anxious, grieving pillar of the church? I would say, the church does not belong to us. It does not belong to the pastor, or the session, or the pillars, or the deacons, or the committees. It is the church of Jesus Christ. But Jesus invites us in, and gives us the incredible privilege of discerning how God wants the church to be, together, in community, guided by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus offers us the gift of peace, and this is the context: It is the peace that the world doesn’t know how to give—we’ve seen what that “peace” looks like. It is the peace that comes from listening, hard, for the Spirit’s guidance. It is the peace that comes from doing that work in community, as part of the body of Christ. And when we do that, we are on the path to that unshakeable, unshakeable shalom..
Thanks be to God. Amen.