If You Only Knew What Makes for Peace

In Luke’s gospel, right after His triumphal entry into the city, and just days before His death, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and says, “If you only knew today what makes for peace. But now you cannot see it! The time will come when your enemies will surround you with barricades, blockade you, and close you in from every side. They will completely destroy you and the people within your walls; not a single stone will they leave in its place, because you did not recognize the time when God came to save you!” (Lk 19: 41-44)

In the year 70 AD, 48,000 Roman troops under the command of Titus, the son of the Emperor Vespasian, accomplished exactly what Jesus had prophesized The destruction of the second temple and the fall of Jerusalem had stunning cultural and religious effects: over 1 million Jews were killed, it ended the Jewish revolt, put an end to temple worship and hastened the diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people.

But what did Jesus mean when He asked, “If you only knew what makes for peace?” We might wonder, what exactly makes for peace? That question has echoed through the ages and to the far reaches of planet earth. And it has been repeated up and down the centuries. Peace? Is peace even possible in this fallen world ruled by the deceiver, the Prince of Darkness?

Jesus answers His own question seven days later when He appears behind the locked doors of the upper room and greets the ten apostles who are gathered there in fear and trembling.  His first words are, “Peace, be with you.” and then, so there would be no doubt,  He says it again. “Peace, be with you.”

Imagine the worst day possible. Lost your job, wife left, a family member did something terrible that is all over the news, dog hit by a car, enemies at the gate, dreams collapsed, death and disappointment everywhere. No hope. None. The upper room is that and more.

And Jesus appears in the icy chill of that gathering to His crushed and humiliated followers saying, “Peace, be with you.” Talk about not reading the room.

Bible scholars and our Jewish friends will tell us that the Hebrew word “Shalom” means more than peace. It is a word that goes straight to the heart, to our inmost being. It means wholeness, completeness, safety, health, prosperity, and more. What could Jesus possibly mean when He greeted them that evening with the word shalom?

A message given by Jesus to St. Faustina almost 100 years ago may help us to understand. Recall that back in 1934, after explaining the pale and red rays that flowed from His heart in the Divine Mercy image, Jesus told St. Faustina that “Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy.” (Diary 300)

This statement suggests that peace is not possible in any other way. This makes perfect sense. If Jesus is the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, and absolutely everything is summed up in Him, then there is no other way for the world, all of creation and all of human history to obtain perfect wholeness and completeness than through Him. And since His mission as the Messiah was to redeem the world through His death and resurrection and since His work is now finished, as He reminded us just hours before as He died on the cross, there is nothing left to be done now but to extend His peace throughout the whole world.

That is why His next words are, “As the Father has sent me, so I now send you.” Jesus came to reconcile the world to the Father. His death on the cross accomplished that. Now, Jesus is going to use these broken men, the nascent Church, to continue the mission. This is exactly what Jesus will send the Church to do, to reconcile the world to the Father. Just one problem. There is still a lot of sin in the world at that moment and there will be sin (and sinners) for the foreseeable future. How can the risen Christ take care of that? He breathes on them. This is the only time Jesus does this in the New Testament. He has used spittle and mud, loaves and fishes, but this is the only time He breathes on anyone and remember this is the breath of God, the same breath that hovered over creation in the Book of Genesis, the same breath that entered into Adam.

Jesus is going to recreate the world through the Church! Blocking the coming of the New Heaven and the New Earth is sin. He will be ascending back to heaven relatively soon and so He gives His power to forgive sin to these humiliated apostles that have just run away at the worst possible time. If there is ever a time to change His plan, it is here and now. But Jesus doesn’t pick 12 new apostles and start over. Jesus knows that sinners will be coming to the Church looking for forgiveness and the apostles will have to be merciful to the steady stream of penitents who approach the Church seeking reconciliation down through the centuries because they too have received His mercy.

When the Blessed Virgin first began appearing to the six young children in Medjugorje back in June of 1981, she identified herself as the Queen of Peace and one of her first messages was “Peace, peace, peace. Be reconciled! Only Peace. Make your peace with God and among yourselves. For that, it is necessary to believe, to pray, to fast, and to go to Confession.” Insistently, Our Lady called for the people to pray for peace. Life was quite difficult for the people under communist rule, conditions were harsh, and most families were poor, but Yugoslavia, as it was then called, was at peace. However, ten years to the day after her first apparition in Medjugorje, on June 25th, 1991, a terrible war broke out in the region and that war persisted for four long and bloody years.

At onset of the war, the Blessed Virgin called for prayer and fasting. For example, on August 25th, 1991, Our Lady told us: “Today also I invite you to prayer, now as never before when my plan has begun to be realized. Satan is strong and wants to sweep away plans of peace and joy and make you think that my Son is not strong in his decisions. Therefore, I call all of you, dear children to pray and fast still more firmly. I invite you to renunciation for nine days so that with your help everything I wanted to realize through the secrets I began in Fatima may be fulfilled. I call you dear children to understand now the importance of my coming and the seriousness of the situation…”

What makes for peace? In one word, it is Jesus and Him alone who can bring peace to this troubled world. Christ must permeate our families, our society, our culture, our governance, our entertainment… every facet of our existence and only then will we experience the peace of Christ. If Christ is not an integral part of the solution, then we have just created another form of the problem. Christians must strive to place Christ at the center of our lives… not just going through the motions, engaging in a hypocritical practice of our religion, but rather, allowing Christ to transfigure us completely so that we may say, as St. Paul did, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Without Jesus, there is zero chance of peace.  With Christ, all things are possible...