Blessed are the Peacemakers (Part III)

In Part I, we started by acknowledging the many ways we attempt to make peace without being born again to the life of God the Trinity, without seeking earnestly to enter peace in the rest of God the Father by being conformed to the likeness of Jesus the peacemaker and the Spirit the peace-giver. In Part II, we approached and considered again the Person of Jesus, He who is the peacemaker, seeking understanding of how He enables and empowers us to know the peace of God again. In this third and final essay, I think it is now possible for us to talk about what it means to be makers of peace like Him in the world.

Let’s come back to our understanding of the Fall as both an abdication of vocation and a grasping for control. From generation to generation, these have been the foundational habits of broken humanity. So what are their counterparts in the redeemed and whole humanity that the Father gifts us through Christ by the Spirit? From the wound of abdication we begin to experience the wholeness and significant labor of vocation. To see this in action, we might look at the restoration of St. Peter seen in the last chapter of St. John’s Gospel. Having betrayed Jesus three times before His crucifixion, St. Peter is then restored three times in love with Jesus as the risen Lord calls Him back to His purpose to feed the sheep. While Peter had departed from His Lord and friend, he is healed by being given renewal of purpose and is brought near again. As he feeds the sheep, then, Peter experiences the presence of the One who drew near to Him. 

For a Christian to carry out their vocation is for them to manifest the Lord who gives the vocation in the power of the Spirit who vivifies the gifts attending that vocation. Where our mere occupations become facets of this divinely-gifted vocation is the place where mere activity becomes the experience of life in God. They are the places where we meet and are present with the risen Christ. As we are formed in this way, the words of our mouths, the meditation of our hearts, the work of our hands--all of these become manifestations of the life of God dwelling within us. We are thus harmonized to His will and purpose, we are set firmly in the new Creation, and we experience again the divine shalom or peace.

But what of grasping? As we grow into this new life, we are formed in the antidote to grasping, which is humility. More and more, the notion that we are enough of ourselves to help ourselves is put away in favor of the acknowledgement that all we offer and do is that which we have received. We always give back to the Lord what is His own. As the Scriptures say, “in Him we live and move and have our being.” There is no breath to offer a prayer that is not the breath God gives us. Humility is this very thing: to assent to being upheld and knowing that were we not to be upheld we would fall apart. As humility forms in us, we learn to live life with an open hand that does not reach out to seize what was not given as a gift, but waits with patience to receive what is given as it is given. And when it is given to the humble Christian, the same hand that receives then holds the gift openly still, extending the arm to offer it to God with thanksgiving for His blessing. Anything that comes to us and is received in this way–be it sensibly comfortable or uncomfortable–becomes a token of being turned in worship to God as the giver of all good things. When we live life in this way, when the posture of our heart mirrors the extending of our arms and the opening of our hands, that is what it means to worship,  what it means to live all of life as though we are here before Him on His throne giving Him the whole creation and receiving it back from Him with thanksgiving. It means to stand, wherever we are, with our feet back in the Temple of His creation. We become again the people He made us to be: the people who live and work and have their joy and rest in that holy Temple–whether it be in a church or far away. Whenever we stand before Him with our lives lifted up with open hands, we stand before Him in worship. And that is what it means to be restored to our place in the creation again.

As the Fall fractured our relationships, so this redemption restores them. Before God we again become persons–real persons and not projections or imitations of persons–before the source of all Personhood, the divine Persons of the Trinity. Never again are we led away into the merely notional vision of God. He is really who He is, who He knows Himself to be, and He is always with us. With His world we are restored to being likeness of that real person and walking like Him through the world. We are benevolent, disciplined, and attentive to our path through life so that we respect the world as it is, we refuse to reshape it after our every desire, and we meekly cultivate it as those whose dust shall be received graciously by that Creation. With others we are restored to harmony again, one that balances our uniqueness and our commonness. Our life together becomes  one sweet life divided among many. We are fully and beautifully who each of us is and we are fully and beautifully who we are together. Neither vision threatens the other and both magnify the splendor of the other. With ourselves, finally, the division of heart is healed, no longer at war with itself. Our will and desire are turned, as Dante said, by the Love that moves the Sun and the furthest stars and also each of us small ones. We do not exalt ourselves, but are exalted. We do not negate ourselves, but are quieted in love. 

Thus restored, we are set again to the good work of showing forth in our lives that God is among us, that we are called by His name, that we are His children and fellow makers of peace and are thus blessed. Shalom becomes no fleeting sense of relief from a supposed, primary chaos of things, but the substance of every breath. It is the heart of every atom of existence and moves all things in worship to God at the center.  We go forth to invite others to come and see what we have come and seen. We are brought back again together to see what is real, to see God the Father who calls, God the Son in whom we answer the call, and God the Spirit who inbreathes our word of “Amen” at the end of every prayer and at the end of this retreat with life beyond this world. Our ‘Amen’ to God is the first breath and act of our renewal and restoration to that work of the New Creation, the first breath of new life, always. That which ends our time here begins our time there and forms us so that as we breathe out for the last time here, we breathe in the very next breath the new air of Paradise.

As Jesus said to His friends: “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”