Easter 6, Year C: John 14:23-29 | Revelation 21:22-22:5
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
May 22, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” – John 14:27a[1]
With Pentecost being only two weeks away, the Lectionary has begun leaning pretty heavily into texts preparing us for the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Similarly to last week, our Acts reading shows us the Spirit once again subverting the expectations of Jesus’ followers, this time using a vision to trick Paul and his companions into abandoning the assumptions of their patriarchal culture and forming a Christian assembly among the women of Philippi. And in his speech from the Last Supper, Jesus openly announces the coming of “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit.”[2] But even with that obvious guidance on what to consider, today I’d like to take a look at someone else Jesus mentions.
Chances are you didn’t notice her name, even though she appears twice right in the middle of our reading. This isn’t a case of translators intentionally erasing a woman from the Bible. Because of the way our society looks at things and assumptions we make about the text, chances are they didn’t even realize she was there. After all, Biblical scholars don’t tend to pay a whole lot of attention to ancient gods and goddesses, no matter how popular they may have been in the 1st Century.
Eirene was a significant figure in Greek culture long before the founding of the Roman Empire, and she’s still quite a prominent character today. However, it can be hard for us to recognize her because she goes under so many different names. In English, we would call her “Peace.” In Latin, she was known as “Pax.”
Ever heard of the Pax Romana? The “Peace of Rome” is a title historians give to the first few centuries of the Roman Empire, starting with Augustus’ consolidation of power in 27BCE. After quashing decades of civil war under the Roman Republic and to assuage concerns about the new imperial form of government, Augustus adopted the Grecian love of the goddess of peace and began promoting her Roman form across the entirety of the Empire. His successors continued to encourage her worship. So just as the New Testament authors would have been thinking about Pistis or Fide—English “Faithfulness”—when they used the word “faith” or “believe,” Pax was likely who Jesus had in mind when he talked about “the world’s peace.”
We often see the word “world” in the New Testament and assume it’s talking about a sort of expansive, evil conspiracy to overthrow God and cause mass ruin. However, most of the time it’s just talking about what we would call “society:” the way things work among people from day to day across a certain geographic region—customs, legislation, common mythologies—all that stuff bundled up together. Sometimes, like in today’s Gospel, replacing it with the word “government” helps us find the most likely sense in which it’s being used.
Peace under Rome was largely about two things: propaganda and domination. The Pax Romana wasn’t peace based love or in the absence of conflict. Eirene was free to roam the land only because of the power and patronage of the Emperor—the hero who had successfully suppressed conflict. Even as a goddess, she was largely Caesar’s puppet. If a region rejected the Peace Rome offered, the military would forcibly install her, and she would remain the area’s benevolent queen until the Emperor felt the need to remove her, most likely under the guise of “her own protection.”
As Roman subjects living in occupied territory, Jesus and the apostles would have been completely familiar with the “peace” their Empire offered. They all would have seen examples of those who hadn’t embraced it hanging on crosses lining the sides of certain roads. In fact, Jesus was preparing both his disciples and himself for the consequences of a perceived slight to Pax as he was speaking these words!
Pax looks beautiful and inviting. She appears quiet and gentle. However, her enforcers are anything but. Pax is the smiling face worn by those who wish to hide their demand for control either from their peers or from themselves. But her mask is fragile. It easily cracks and chips when she doesn’t get her way. As Empire’s consort, those in charge will do anything and everything they can to restore her smile. Pax, the only kind of peace any government or human power can offer, is actually a veneer of peace. It’s a peace supported, at some level or other, by fear and oppression. Pax is the “world’s peace” Jesus warns his followers not to fall prey to.
So if this imposed peace—the only peace most of the world has ever known[3]—is something Jesus wants us to avoid, then what should we be looking for if we want to find the peace Jesus offers?
Our reading from Revelation reveals a bit of how John at least interpreted the vision of peace Jesus had been casting. There we catch a glimpse of what it can look like when, as we heard last week, “the home of God is among mortals,” where God “will dwell with them as their God; they will be [God’s] peoples, and God [themself] will be with them.”[4] And what John presents us with isn’t dissimilar to what we saw when we talked about Revelation two weeks ago: the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”[5] But just as the Spirit keeps confounding and expanding the apostles’ expectations in Acts, this time we discover the same crowd not simply unified in their place of worship but in daily life itself:
“…the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”[6]
People living together, working together, and coming together. People gathering the best of who they are and where they’re from and then accepting the best of those who look different or sound different or come from different places or govern themselves differently or have different traditions or understandings of how the world works. None of those things that separate us under the sway of Pax and her overlords—the same things that lead to our unending and unquenchable rash of hate crimes and mass shootings and senseless aggression, distinctions Empire teaches us to use as a wedge to divide and distinguish the loyal from the wicked—none of those matter under God’s Reign. In the Kingdom of Heaven, diversity is accepted and celebrated and draws us all together for the same reason we saw the “great multitude…no one could count” singing with one voice a few weeks ago: they’re centered in who they worship—
“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.”[7]
The unity found in the core of their devotion—in their God who is “love as action”—has spilled out of their distinct places and times of worship and overflowed into all of life’s interactions.
Sadly, even as Christians, Pax is the kind of peace most of us have settled for: the peace of cultural imperialism and racial supremacy and Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s hard not to fall for it when it’s the only kind any government or society can offer, the only kind even we have ever really known. But now that Jesus has cast his vision and John has shown us a taste of what that can look like—now that Jesus has offered us a different kind of peace—we have a choice. We can stay where we are and what we are—we can visit the Kingdom of God on Sunday mornings and then walk back into the grind of Empire as soon as we leave the sanctuary doors. Or we can live as the Children of God that we are, carrying our Creator’s reign with us throughout the week and revealing the present reality of Christ’s Kingdom.
Walking about under the watchful eye and calculating smile of Pax won’t necessarily be easy—it’s hard to step out from beneath the pressures of society and the expectations the world has instilled in us. We’re bound to slip back into the paths of false Peace and even her worship from time to time. But walking together in humility, we can remind one another of the Reign of God and gently guide one another back into living the customs of the true Kingdom, where peace isn’t simply an impotent promise but the pervasive reality of God’s presence among us.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] John 14:26
[3] Also the peace many of us in the Episcopal Church reap the benefits of on a daily basis
[4] Revelation 21:3
[5] Revelation 7:9
[6] Revelation 21:23-26
[7] Revelation 21:22