Blessed are the Peacemakers (Part I)
Peace is a concept that emerges clearly in the Biblical account of Creation. The poetry of Genesis characterizes the creation of the cosmos as God making a dwelling place for Himself. Each part of the creation story involves a kind of call-and-response as God makes a place and then fills it with life, calling each of these dwellings and dwellers “good.” On the seventh day, when God takes His rest, it is meant to invoke an image that would have been common to those familiar with the architecture of an ancient temple: the god seated in the center of the temple to consecrate it and inaugurate its operation. God on His throne decrees the rightly-ordered way of things as all things move and have their purpose in relation to God at the center. The harmony of their diverse functions around and for God, and the sense of purpose and place each creature enjoyed--this was the condition of existence that we call ‘peace.’ God is the first peace-maker, because peace is the crown of His good creation.
It is important to start here because we too often buy into the idea that the primary condition of things is chaos, conflict, and disorder. But the Scriptures are adamant that these are privations or distortions of God’s good order and purpose. In the Biblical creation story, over and against other creation accounts of the ancient world, the God of peace never competes with another god of chaos. God is a God of order who speaks and it is done, whose word and power accomplish all they set forth. Our experience of conflict, disorder, and chaos are departures from the way God made all things to be, a failure to participate in His peace.
The rebellion of humanity after the good beginning was humanity’s attempt to be as God, issuing in an anti-creation with its own attending false-peace. Ever since then, we have been obsessed with this anti-creation. We’ve been trying to make it work, to make it produce a peace like God’s peace. The best we have managed, though, is to suppress the chaos for a time. We cannot create lasting peace, and the false peaces we continue to create, pursue, and ultimately worship follow the basic shape of the Fall and our first parents’ sins of grasping for power and abdicating their place in God’s good world. Bereft of genuine peace, we are continually set against God, set against each other, set against the creation, and set against ourselves.
Set against God, we strive for peace through either outright rejection or a kind of magical usurpation. For some, a sense of peace requires us to deny God even exists. We come to believe that we have to kill God before He kills us. Peace, like peace in a brutal, total war, is only to be enjoyed by the last person standing as they destroy the last vestige of their enemy. On the other hand, some seek to make a false peace with God through their own brutal systems of atonement. God can only be placated, and only at great cost. Much moral, intellectual, sentimental, and social blood must be spilled for Him to cease His wrath toward us. If we do enough, are sorry enough, then He will be fooled into thinking we’re better and will call off the hounds. So we use programs, potions, tokens, talismans, rituals, and services to get Him to promise that He won’t hit us when our backs are turned, so we can have a moment’s rest from the terror of the One who sees all things and can execute His vengeance without resistance.
Set against each other, we strive for false senses of peace along lines of rabid individualism and rabid collectivism alike. In the first, we imagine that humanity’s peace will be established through the adamantine assertion of individual rights and privileges and self-determination. Such a person imagines peace as everyone living as they deem best without intervention of others--an equilibrium, they think, will surely find itself. Such people disdain what they see as the invasive presence of governors; they worship at the altar of the self-made person and imagine that if everyone were responsible in this way, that peace would ensue. The opposite condition is the person who believes individualism to be a capital sin and for whom the primary way to understand humanity is in group-think and a kind of toxic uniformity. Each person is a participant in a collective history with its innocence and guilt. Those who try to act as individuals are selfish--humanity is not humans but a nobler abstracted idea than that. Only that which will satisfy all is pure and good. Anything that threatens to offend or alienate the group is anathema.
Set against creation, we pursue false peace along the lines of mastery and of subjection. In the first error, humanity responds to the unpredictability, power, and complexity of nature by forcing it to assume a shape we’d like. We want to build houses on a flood plain, in fire zones, in tornado alley--and nothing is going to stop us. We will follow this desire toward silly ends on one hand--we’ll build walls to harness the ocean and then seem surprised that uncontrollable things prove uncontrollable. We follow this impulse toward violent ends, eradicating forests where we want houses, destroying species so that commodities can be more easily acquired, leveraging the comfort of the present day against the environmental quality of life of our children’s children. And yet some abandon this sense of mastery through a puerile subjection to nature. They fussily object to any disturbance of the phenomenon of nature so as to disdain meaningful progress and technology in favor of an imagined natural purity. They draw a sense of innocence from this purity as though that absolves them of the Fall. But rather than becoming tyrants, they abdicate their stewardship--nature longs for the revealing of its caretakers and this vocation such souls refuse.
Set against ourselves, we are afflicted by a divided heart that is, at once, desirous of peace and the way of righteousness that attends it, while experiencing a frailty that gives too often to temptations for the sense of self-empowerment on the one hand and self-negation on the other. The main ways we create that empowering pseudo-peace within ourselves are through hedonism and stoicism. Some of us try to settle our inner conflict by eliminating declaring it wrong to resist the inevitable pull of temptations. It strikes us as easier just to follow our impulses and treat them as though the mere presence of the thought of them is an expression of our true self, a voice of truth from within telling us what is best for us. In the milder senses of this, we talk about it in terms of “I’m only human,” or “you do you.” In the more insidious forms that--God save us--we’re even willing to tell children it is the phrases of “follow your heart” or “find your passion.” Such talk is often energizing, because it is based on a kind of wild chaotic energy. It does not require a commitment to humble change and hard discipline over a long time. We can change today and live our best lives now!
Some, though, flee to self-negation, self-abdication. Here we seek peace in the constant struggle of the interior life by eradicating the interior life altogether. In the more philosophical-sounding versions of it, some seek to suppress desire, to annihilate the emotional, subjective, and passionate. We seek to become pure mind or pure spirit, not realizing that this is to become not persons at all but rather functions or ideas in relation to an impersonal force of nature. We want peace in the form of becoming incapable of inner conflict and we’re willing to trade the gift of being real persons. But everything goes out the door with this loss. To abdicate our personhood makes other persons seem less personal and thus less relatable. Eventually, God Himself becomes impersonal in our eyes, and the sense that He becomes first a blandly benevolent warmth, but then a cold idea that can only come to terrify while increasingly we despair of His or our ability ever to really connect.This self-empowerment and self-deception are the false peace, and so it is a kind of anti-creation. Rather than integration we have alienation--in the language of the Scriptures: exile, separation, and hell.
And so it goes. Our vain efforts to make peace on our terms never restore us to the peace of God’s good world. We will always only exhaust ourselves in the attempt, destroying people and places and ourselves in the process. All the while, though, we will exalt ourselves and proclaim our victory over self, other, nature, and God. We will shout it until we are left voiceless and breathless. ‘Peace peace!’ the false prophet cries in all ages of history. But there is no peace and eventually we come to know it as weary bitterness sets in, leaving us exhausted and despairing.
Lent is upon us. All of us may detect within ourselves the presence of this pull to the false idols of peace. Our call in the face of idols is always to abandon them without compromise. To repent, to be converted again and again, is the moment God saves our lives and begins to open our hearts to real peace, the peace of God that passes understanding, the peace that Christ alone provides and the peace through which alone we are made the children of God. There is a real reason for hope. Jesus does not leave us in our futility, and the peace He comes to give and make in us is the only peace that can anchor us firmly enough in God’s good world, the Kingdom itself, that we will be able to reject the false offers that tempt us away.
As the Lord said to Ezekiel: “Because, indeed, because they have seduced My people, saying, ‘Peace!’ when there is no peace—and one builds a wall, and they plaster it with untempered mortar— say to those who plaster it with untempered mortar, that it will fall. There will be flooding rain, and you, O great hailstones, shall fall; and a stormy wind shall tear it down.”