Surface Peace, Contemplative Peace

10 Pentecost, Cp15, August 17, 2025

Jeremiah 23:23-29  Psalm 82
Hebrews 12:1 – 14  Luke 12:49-56

Lectionary Link

We can tout the Bible as a book of peace, but that would be far from the truth.  Peace or peacefulness in time is only temporary states of no conflict, war, troubles, hassles, or disagreement that co-exist with certain and eventual conflict, war, troubles, hassles and disagreement.

Our biblical hero Jesus was proclaimed the Prince of Peace; he is the one who whispered the interior lives of people to restful calm, he is the one who greeted people with a greeting that has become the chief hello greeting in the Arabic and Hebrew languages: Peace be with you.  Certainly this greeting expresses the sentiment of a very desirable state of existence.

Our hero Jesus is quoted as saying some things about peace which contradict his Prince of Peace image.  His coming was not to bring peace but a sword and division.

The Gospels as parables of Jesus to inform the communities which preached him as the value setter of their community, understood the wisdom words of Jesus to be insightful for what they were going through in their lives.  And what were they going through?

Community divisions.  The New Testament is a story about community break down and disagreement among, one might say sincere parties.  St. Paul had "sincere" disagreements with Peter, who was also sincere.  St. Paul had sincere disagreements with other followers of Jesus whom he verbally trashed as being those whose god was their bellies.  The disciples were presented as ignorant and competitive followers of Jesus who had petty ego trips about who would have the best positions in the administration of Jesus which was soon going to take over the earth.  Lots of "sincere" biblical people disagreed openly, even in ways that certainly did not seem peaceful.

The New Testament is hardly peaceful in the presentation of various apocalyptic scenarios.  In some of the visions, the Pax Romana of the Caesar, a peace that came from eliminating rivals, would be replaced with the apocalyptic peace of a conquering heavenly hero.  Such an apocalyptic peace would be achieved with divine violence.  Indeed, what kind of a peaceful book is the Bible?  Biblical visualizations about how a future utopia would be achieved were not peaceful and they seem to smack with "in the end, my side is going to win."

The life of the famous heroes of faith listed in the book of Hebrews is hardly about their peaceful lives.  It is is about their harsh struggles through which they maintain a faithfulness to the Divine, whom they believed to be the only stabling peaceful and consistent event occurring during the tumult of their surface lives.

The history of the people of Israel is told around their failure to maintain their covenantal relationship with the Shalom God of Israel.  The story of Israel is a story about people who continually lost their peace.

It is insightful to say that peace and time do not mix.  Time is the succession of different occasion with different people and different events.  Sometimes successions in time seem peacefully continuous but often successions in time are painfully conflicting.  In every field and areas of life paradigm shifts can result in painful disagreements, even horrendous and harming conflicts.  What we can say about time and peace, is that sometimes the appearance of peace seems to occur, and indeed we are grateful when peace seems to be our surface experience.

If peace cannot prevail in the events of time, what then is the value and the meaning of the highly touted peace of Christ?

What can be said is that people can know a deep inner contemplative peace even while the surface events of life contradict the very meaning of peace.

Contemplative Peace can occur as a graceful event as being surprised by No thing, No word, No thought, No Picture, just as a deep, deep No thing that one is able to say that has always been stably there and continues to be so no matter what is happening on the surface.  Even though I use the words "no word" to indicate the reality of something that is there, I know it is there, even though I can only continue to use words to speak about the "wordless" peace.  When everything else seems to be changing, this contemplative inner experience peace seems to hauntingly stable.

To find this hauntingly stable peace, is to learn to simply be the carrier for this peace, and to let it rise and distill "upward" through one's thoughts, emotions, feelings, and attain directional status in how one lives one's life in the many surface events of one's life.

Let us appreciate the distinction between surface peace and contemplative peace, but also their relationship.  Let us understand how contemplative peace can be plumbed to make events of surface peace actual healing events in our world.

Let the contradictory words of Jesus about peace inform us on how contemplative peace can rise in us to whisper our life situations to a peace of being better able to sew the occasions of time together with healing purpose.  Amen.