EASTER VI (C)
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. – John 14: 27
Here’s a Mother’s Day story for you:
A mother wistfully handed her son a beautifully wrapped package on his 18th birthday. Carefully, he removed the bow, untied the ribbon, unwrapped the “Happy Birthday” paper & lifted the box cover. Finally, he parted the soft inner-wrapping, revealing the contents: two long strips of percale material that he recognized almost immediately as his mother’s apron strings. It was the most beautiful gift she could have given him. She realized that the time had come for her to ‘let go,’ & it hurt. It signaled her recognition that he needed the freedom to mature & to express his own individuality. In that act of self-giving, the wise mother revealed herself & opened up her life to her son in a way that moved them closer together. Their relationship could now proceed on a deeper level, a more personal, more intimate level, because of her expression of love for her son in this beautiful way.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus knew the time had come for his disciples to grow up in the faith. He would soon be taken from them, & He wanted to bequeath them something they needed whether they realized it or not. If it were something material, such as money, it could have been an occasion for bickering & dissention. It had to be something profound that would bind them to Him & to each other.
Jesus’ last will & testament values relationships above all else. Therefore, His bequest to His disciples (& by inference to us) is something that will not break them apart, but an active force in binding them together. He leaves them His kind of peace, the only truly generative gift to the future that by its nature does not divide people but restores them to one another.
It is not like the peace the world affords that comes & goes & depends on outer circumstances beyond our control. Whenever everything is going well, we can manage a certain amount of inner calm; but when bad times come, calm is replaced by anxiety & fear. Jesus’ peace comes from the conviction that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God. This abiding presence of God was to be revealed on the Cross.
The peace that our Lord leaves us is not a vague wish for inner calm & outer harmony. It comes from inhabiting with love the home of human fear. Death is the ultimate fear that generates all our other fears. We feel we are being separated from life & we become anxious & frantic.
The resurrection demonstrates that this fear is groundless. Thus the disciples should not be paralyzed with grief & loss at His departure. Instead, it will be an occasion for rejoicing in the expectation of a greater presence of God in their lives than they had previously experienced.
Their relationship will become more intimate than the restrictions of space & time can allow. They will come to realize that God’s love is far more intense & expansive than anything they could have imagined. This in turn will help them to see their infinite worth in God’s eyes, & that realization dissolves fear. As St. John himself put it, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4: 18). AMEN!