'Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you.' We have seen, in
former discourses on this chapter, how prominently and repeatedly our
Lord insists on the great truth of His dwelling with and in His
disciples. He gives His peace because He gives Himself; and in the
bestowal of His life He bestows, in so far as we possess the gift, the
qualities and attributes of that life. His peace is inseparable from
His presence. It comes with Him, like an atmosphere; it is never where
He is not. It was His peace inasmuch as, in His own experience, He
possessed it. His manhood was untroubled by perturbation or tumult, by
passions or contending desires, and no outward things could break His
calm. If we open our hearts by lowly faith, love, and aspiration for
His entrance, we too may be at rest; for His peace, like all which He
is and has, is His that it may be ours.
The first requisite for peace is consciousness of harmonious and loving
relations between me and God. The deepest secret of Christ's peace was
His unbroken consciousness of unbroken communion with the Father, in
which His will submitted and the whole being of the man hung in filial
dependence upon God. And the centre and foundation of all the
peace-giving power of Jesus Christ is this, that in His death, by His
one offering for sin for ever, He has swept away the occasion of
antagonism, and so made peace between the twain, the Father in the
heavens and the child, rebellious and prodigal, here below. Little as
these disciples dreamed of it, the death impending, which was already
beginning to cast its shadow over their souls, was the condition of
securing to them and to us the true beginning of all real peace, the
rectifying of our antagonistic relation to God, and the bringing Him
and us into perfect concord.
My brother, no man can be at rest down to the very roots of His being,
in the absence of the consciousness that he is at peace with God. There
may be tumults of gladness, there may be much of stormy brightness in
the life, but there cannot be the calm, still, impregnable,
all-pervading, and central tranquillity that our souls hunger for,
unless we know and feel that we are right with God, and that there is
nothing between us and Him. And it is because Jesus Christ, dying on
the Cross, has made it possible for you and me to feel this, that He Is
our peace, and that He can say, 'Peace I leave with you.'
Another requisite is that we must be at peace with ourselves. There
must be no stinging conscience, there must be no unsatisfied desires,
there must be no inner schism between inclination and duty, reason and
will, passion and judgment. There must be the quiet of a harmonised
nature which has one object, one aim, one love; which—to use a very
vulgar phrase—has 'all its eggs in one basket,' and has no
contradictions running through its inmost self. There is only one way
to get that peace—cleaving to Jesus Christ and making Him our Lord, our
righteousness, our aim, our all. Your consciences will sting, and that
destroys peace; or if they do not sting, they will be torpid, and that
destroys peace, for death is not peace. Unless we take Christ for our
love, for the light of our minds, for the Sovereign Arbiter and Lord of
our will, for the home of our desires, for the aim of our efforts, we
shall never know what it is to be at rest. Unsatisfied and hungry we
shall go through life, seeking what nothing short of an Infinite
Humanity can ever give us, and that is a heart to lean our heads upon,
an adequate object for all our faculties, and so a quiet satisfaction
of all our desires. 'Wherefore do ye spend your money for that which is
not bread?' A question that no man can answer without convicting
himself of folly! There is One, and only One, who is enough for me,
poor and weak and lowly and fleeting as I am, and as my earthly life
is. Take that One for your Treasure, and you are rich indeed. The world
without Christ is nought. Christ without the world is enough.
Nor is there any other way of healing the inner discord, schism, and
contradiction of our anarchic nature, except in bringing it all into
submission to His merciful rule. Look at that troubled kingdom that
each of us carries about within himself, passion dragging this way,
conscience that, a hundred desires all arrayed against one another,
inclination here, duty there, till we are torn in pieces like a man
drawn asunder by wild horses. And what is to be done with all that
rebellious self, over which the poor soul rules as it may, and rules so
poorly? Oh! there is an inner unrest, the necessary fate of every man
who does not take Christ for his King. But when He enters the heart
with His silken leash, the old fable comes true, and He binds the lions
and the ravenous beasts there with its slender tie and leads them
along, tamed, by the cord of love, and all harnessed to pull together
in the chariot that He guides. There is only one way for a man to be at
peace with himself through and through, and that is that he should put
the guidance of his life into the hands of Jesus Christ, and let Him do
with it as He will. There is one power, and only one, that can draw
after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the weltering ocean,
and that is the quiet, silver moon in the heavens that pulls the tidal
wave, into which melt and merge all currents and small breakers, and
rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ, shining down lambent,
and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of our skies, will draw,
in one great surge of harmonised motion, all the else contradictory
currents of our stormy souls. 'My peace I give unto you.'
Another element in true tranquillity, which again is supplied only by
Jesus Christ, is peace with men. 'Whence come wars and fightings
amongst you? From your lusts.' Or to translate the old-fashioned
phraseology into modern English, the reason why men are in antagonism
with one another is the central selfishness of each, and there is only
one way by which men's relations can be thoroughly sweetened, and that
is, by the divine love of Jesus Christ pouring into their hearts, and
casting out the devil of selfishness, and so blending them all into one
harmonious whole.
The one basis of true, happy relations between man and man, without
which there is not the all-round tranquillity that we require, lies in
the common relation of all, if it may be, but certainly in the
individual relation of myself, to Him who is the Lover and the Friend
of all. And in the measure in which the law of the Spirit of life which
was in Jesus Christ is in me, in that measure do I find it possible to
reproduce His gentleness, sympathy, compassion, insight into men's
sorrows, patience with men's offences, and all which makes, in our
relations to one another, the harmony and the happiness of humanity.
Another of the elements or aspects of peace is peace with the outer
world. 'It is hard to kick against the pricks,' but if you do not kick
against them, they will not prick you. We beat ourselves all bruised
and bleeding against the bars of the prison-house in trying to escape
from it, but if we do not beat ourselves against them, they will not
hurt us. If we do not want to get out of prison, it does not matter
though we are locked in. And so it is not external calamities, but the
resistance of the will to these, that makes the disturbances of life.
Submission is peace, and when a man with Christ in his heart can say
what Christ said, 'Not My will, but Thine be done,' Oh! then, some
faint beginnings, at least, of tranquillity come to the most agitated
and buffeted; and even in the depths of our sorrow we may have a deeper
depth of calm. If we have yielded ourselves to the Father's will,
through that dear Son who has set the example and communicates the
power of filial obedience, then all winds blow us to our haven, and all
'things work together for good,' and nothing 'that is at enmity with
joy' can shake our settled peace. Storms may break upon the rocky shore
of our islanded lives, but deep in the centre there will be a secluded,
inland dell 'which heareth not the loud winds when they call,' and
where no tempest can ever reach. Peace may be ours in the midst of
warfare and of storms, for Christ with us reconciles us to God,
harmonises us with ourselves, brings us into amity with men, and makes
the world all good.