Peace

In last Sunday’s gospel we heard Jesus asking his disciples who the people said he was, and then putting to them the question, but who do you say I am? Peter acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ. Jesus however orders them to tell no one about this and then, as we hear today, began to tell the disciples that he was destined to suffer death.

Peter’s response – ‘Heaven preserve you, Lord; this must not happen’ – is quite understandable. Sometimes Peter could have a big mouth, and while he abandoned Jesus at the time of trial what comes through here is a warm and generous personality. And with his brother Andrew he had left the modest security of the family fishing enterprise to follow Jesus. Despite failures and setbacks, in the end, Peter followed Jesus all the way.

In today’s account, as at other times, Jesus has stern words for his closest followers. Sometimes I think Jesus deliberately said it too strongly so that there would be no mistake. We shouldn’t be too hard on Peter. If he perhaps still expected a nationalist messiah, that was understandable. The Jewish people, the common people, were suffering under the oppression of the Roman imperialists and the Romans’ local collaborators. We can understand a desire for the Return of the King, for a new David.

But that was not what Jesus came for. Earthly power was not the point. Pope Leo XIV has spoken several times of ‘disarming’. The day he was elected he spoke of ‘the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally’.

An unarmed peace. In his message for the Day of Prayer for Care of Creation, 1 September, Pope Leo referred to Isaiah’s vision, that the nations ‘will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation; no longer will they learn how to make war’ (Isaiah 2:4).

More than two and a half thousand years after those words were written, we seem to be as far away from them as ever.

Pope Leo, like Pope Benedict XVI, reminds us that Isaiah’s call is not only to the leaders of nations, but to each one of us. ‘We must not only reform structures but also renew our hearts’. We are called, says Pope Leo, ‘to allow our hearts to be renewed, so that we might seek peace and care for creation’.

May peace be with us all.

Jim McAloon