Fourth Sunday After Trinity
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Like many passages of the prophets, our Old Testament reading from Zechariah sets out a vision of the future, defined by peace. From Zion, a righteous king shall reign, ‘and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.’ This king will abolish the weapons of war — the ‘chariot’ and ‘war horse’ and ‘battle bow’.
But what is this peace? It is not just the absence of hostilities. Someone may have told you once that the Hebrew word for peace, shalom, is expansive in its connotations. Peace means prosperity; peace means justice in the public sphere; peace means everyone settled in a good home, in a good land, with enough to eat, with family and friends all around, with the freedom to worship God and rejoice in song and dance. True peace requires equity and justice.
So, as protestors around the world say, “No justice; no peace.” Or as St Augustine put it in his great work The City of God (19.13): peace and justice consist in ‘properly ordered harmony’ between families and neighbours and cities, between the peoples of earth and God’s fellowship in heaven, so that in all creation everyone has a place and everyone has what is due to them.
Peace is something internal, too, consisting in individuals, in right thinking and an accord between ‘thought and action’, in the right ordering of desires and their satisfaction — in short, peace consists in the ‘properly ordered life and wellbeing of [every] living creature’. There is no competition between internal and external peace. Total peace requires right order everywhere, in every community and in every person.
There is an obvious reason Scripture holds forth this vision as something for the future. If we look around at the world, we don’t see such peace. Look at our own home.
In this United Kingdom, one of the richest countries ever to exist, over 14 million people live in poverty in normal times.
Over the past few months, 7.7 million adults could not feed themselves or their families regularly, and food bank use has leapt by 1500% in some places. And this is just ‘the lull before the storm’ of economic turmoil soon to come this autumn. Is that peace, properly ordered harmony?
Can we call this society a peaceful one when it does everything it can to make the environment ‘hostile’ for immigrants, on whom we now realise our daily life depends: care workers, nurses, doctors, taxi drivers, pickers of produce and packers of meat, kitchen crews, house cleaners, even priests, imams, rabbis, and other community and religious leaders?
We could go on. And we should. Is the United Kingdom a place of peace, when the sting of poverty and unfreedom and hostility is sharpest along ethnic lines?
When an injured black boy named Gerard can ask a police officer for help in London, because he was attacked by a far-right demonstrator, but instead of receiving the helping hand of a neighbour, he gets treated like an enemy, searched for weapons, and sent away to help himself?
That happened two weeks ago. So let us not kid ourselves. This is not ‘properly ordered harmony’. It is disorder.
Having recognised this, we might be forgiven for wishing that the problem was outside ourselves, and that we were not culpable. But the Christian tradition has little patience for such avoiding the blame. We are all tangled up internally, and our disordered thoughts issue forth in perverse action or inaction. As St Paul says in his letter to the Romans (7:15, 19):
‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’
There is an internal battle going on, just as there is external strife. No wonder Paul goes on to say: ‘Who will deliver me from this body of death?’
Who, indeed? We seek a king, ‘triumphant and victorious’, that can ‘command peace to the nations’ and peace among neighbours and peace to the body and the soul. That would be no common king. We seek a ruler with a universal dominion, stretching ‘from sea to sea’ and breaking every yoke that binds. We are ‘prisoners of hope’, and we will not be satisfied until that promised deliverance comes. No earthly king may save us. No — we await and pray for and work towards the hastening of the kingdom of God. Only such a king may save us. ‘Thy kingdom come’, we pray, ‘thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’. Bring your help, O God, for we cannot do it alone.
‘Thanks be to God’, then, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ God has acted. In Christ’s life and death and resurrection we have the surety of salvation, the help we need, and we know that in him every dividing wall of hostility has been broken down (Eph. 2:14). He now summons people everywhere to be ambassadors of peace and ministers of reconciliation, heralds of good tidings, who proclaim: ‘good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind’, who ‘set the oppressed free’ and ‘proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18-19, citing Isaiah).
What does this mean for us at St Bene’t’s? If we let our hearts be set aflame by the vision of peace, God’s peace, we will never stop looking for ways to set the world and ourselves aright, to bring justice to our neighbour, to live in ‘properly ordered harmony’ with all. We will not rest content in our comforts, while so many go without. We will not let any prejudice or bitterness take root; we will battle such things.
We will place ourselves into the terrifying hands of Almighty God, and be so bold as to say: ‘Show us your will.’ Or, in the immortal words of St Francis, we might say:
‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope…
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.’
Peace requires just such a prayer and attitude, and just such actions.
Now may the God of peace, who raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead by the spirit of holiness, give life and strength to us also, and may he usher in that kingdom of peace for which we long and for which we work.