Reflection for the Sixth Sunday of Easter C
Readings: Acts 15: 1-2, 22-29 (RM) or Acts 16: 9-15 (RCL); Psalm 67; Revelation 21: 10-14, 22-23 (RM) or 10, 22-27, 22: 1-5 (RCL); John 14: 23-29 (RM and RCL) or John 5:1-9 (optional in RCL).
How can you have inner peace when you don’t feel safe? More pointedly, how can you be at peace when you know you’re not safe?
You would think one of the safest places to be, one of the safest things to be doing, is grocery shopping in your own neighbourhood on a Saturday afternoon.
On May 14, three years ago, a young gunman walked into a Tops Friendly supermarket on the East Side of Buffalo, New York. He was armed with a high-powered rifle fitted with a bump stock, and wearing a bulletproof vest. He murdered ten and injured three more. Local shoppers and a security guard. In a Black neighbourhood, deliberately chosen, the massacre rehearsed ahead of time.
“Pure evil,” it was called, what happened. Pure coldblooded murder. Racialized contempt at its unthinkable extreme. A deep chasm opened up to reveal a deadly core below the surface of a simple weekly routine in your own city.
Black folks in Buffalo were saying, “We’re scared.” Scared to go out, scared of losing their loved ones, scared knowing that the caution they had been used to taking for so long, isn’t enough to keep them safe from violence.
Jesus is depicted in the Gospel this week telling his disciples before the events of his death, “Peace I leave with you … Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” How does that not sound trite in such a time? What do these words mean when fear crosses over into terror? Or terror into rage? Or local tragedies into the wobbling of the global foundations of the common good, of trustworthy governance, of the rule of law, of human empathy and responsibility and equity? Because it’s three years later. Because the world has changed.
Christians in the first few centuries of the church were not unfamiliar with fear. The earliest Christmas sermon text we have on record dates from the year 361 and was preached in North Africa to a community seemingly paralyzed with fear. Although the Edict of Milan in 313 had granted Christians legal immunity from persecution, the later emperor Julian used divisions between Christian groups to favour one and persecute another, in order to weaken the movement. In his sermon, Bishop Optatus of Milevis cites the example of the persecution of the Holy Innocents by Herod to encourage his people to stand fast in the face of ever-new dangers, and to keep their hearts in peace born out of faith in the risen Christ.
The writers of the Gospel of John were apparently doing something similar. They weave these simple sayings attributed to Jesus into a more complex theological fabric that gives them not merely a context, but an anchoring in transcendent realities. Leave aside the patriarchal weight of “Father” for the moment, and just take a look at the profound intimacy pervading the dynamic relation between Christ, incarnate in our own human flesh, and the Holy One beyond all knowing.
The intense love between them leads to vulnerability, not safety. Jesus’ death on the cross represented the apex of divine vulnerability to human evil. Today, those peoples and nations who suffer persecution, aggression, economic devastation, political terror, right up to invasion by brutal enemy forces, reflect back to Christians an awareness of that undying holiness that they know as the risen Christ, who walks with them in what they suffer, and stands beside them in solidarity.
Our ancestors in faith knew how terror can grip you from the inside out. That’s why we have passages such as Isaiah 26:4,
“You keep those in perfect peace whose minds are fixed on you,”
and Philippians 4:7,
“… the peace that passes all understanding.”
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work simply not to read or watch or scroll the news, as a few of my friends say they do. Reality will catch up with you.
But our ancestors also knew that the Holy One is real, infinite, yet nearer to us than we can imagine. The Holy One is not scared off, not intimidated, not bullied. The Holy One is at our very core. The Holy is not divided, not turned against enemies real or imaginary, does not take vengeance by weaponizing … anything.
And therein lies the beginning of pervasive peace, a peace we can speak and model and strengthen in each other, a web of peace, woven tightly together, unbreakable.
© Susan K. Roll
*Seriously revised from the Reflection of May 22, 2022 … because the world has changed that much …
Susan Roll retired from the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, in 2018, where she served as Director of the Sophia Research Centre. Her research and publications are centred in the fields of liturgy, sacraments, and feminist theology. She holds a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, and has been involved with international academic societies in liturgy and theology, as well as university chaplaincy, Indigenous ministry and church reform projects.
