12-09-23

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
December 9, 2023
A few years ago, Richard Rohr, the Franciscan Monk, quoted St. Francis of Assisi,

“Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart,”

And then Rohr went on to write….

Generations of Christians seem to have forgotten Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence. We’ve relegated visions of a peaceful kingdom to a far distant heaven. We hardly believed Jesus could have meant for us to turn the other cheek here and now. It took Gandhi, a Hindu, to help us apply Jesus’ peace-making in very practical ways. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), drawing from Gandhi’s writings and example, brought nonviolence to the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

In recent Christian history, there has been a strange battle line (intentionally using a war image) between those who, as Rohr suggests, relegate the idea of peace to heaven and those who look at Jesus and see someone who embodied his expectation of how his followers would live in the here and now. For those who have been the victims of continuous violence, the idea of a peaceful kingdom beyond this life can be very comforting. But those who are the perpetrators of violence or those who sit silently while violence occurs, ignoring what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, is to ignore one of the primary messages of Jesus. In that Sermon, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” I do not believe Jesus was saying that to be a child of God one must be a peacemaker. Instead, once we joyfully discover the love of God that makes all humanity children of God, then peacemaking is the only faithful response. Of course, as St. Francis suggested, this peace needs to begin within us if it is ever going to be embodied through us. As I said yesterday, we have some work to do.

O Lamb of God, O Prince of Peace, may the life of Jesus guide me to a place of peace in my own life. And then, from there, I pray to be a conduit of peace in my little part of the world. Amen.