On the sixth Sunday of Easter, we focus on Christ's gift of peace to the disciples. What does it mean to have peace? Is it the absence of war, the absence of disagreements, where everyone is treated exactly the same and there are no recognizable differences? There have certainly been those who have sought peace of this kind throughout history. Ironically enough, they have also often thought that waging war was the way to get there: Peace through superior firepower, as the saying goes.
But is that really peace? Is that what Jesus meant? It seems that the peace he is referring to is something different. After all, we know from the writings following the gospels that the followers of Jesus did not have it easy. I think that our clue here is that Jesus promised peace, not safety. There is peace in knowing that one is working for a good cause. There is peace in meeting the needs of others. There is peace in saying no to violence, even in the face of death. There is peace in finding a way to live without having to destroy the livelihood of others.
This week's song has multiple layers of meaning for us. April and I began dating while we were taking a medieval female mystics class together. One of the last mystics we read that term was Julian of Norwich. She was an English anchorite attached to the church at Norwich. One of her visions was of the world the size of a hazelnut being held in the palm of Christ. She also had a tendency to use female images when speaking of Jesus, hence the title "Mother Jesus." And she is the namesake of our son.
The words of this song come out of her poetry. They have been set to music by a friend that we went to seminary with; we asked him to sing this song at our wedding. I can't think of a better way to think of peace than to remember these words - "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."
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