Tuesday in Holy Week – Peace

I associate the service of compline with the word peace. The candlelight, the calm, the stillness at the end of a busy day. It feels like a glimpse of the peace that so commonly evades our world.

Yet the liturgical language of compline is not devoid of threat. We pray that we may be defended from fears and terrors, even from deadly foes. The peace we encounter in compline – the peace in which we will lie down and sleep – is not the absence of danger and risk.

The idea that peace is simply the absence of war is quite a modern humanistic one. It presumes that conflict is an aberration, and once removed, humans will revert to their natural state of harmony. But that is no one’s experience of everyday life. Conflict and tension occur in relationships, in families, among colleagues and in communities. Geopolitical conflicts too have continued to rumble on, even while we in the Western world were cocooned in a bubble of security that made us believe that war was a barbarism soon to be eliminated.

So part and parcel of the peace we encounter at compline is a naming of the reality of our fallen predicament. It’s not a spiritual escapism nor a state of denial. It can even come with a warning. We often read the verse from 1 Peter: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil is prowling round like a roaring lion, seeking for someone to devour.”

The story of Holy Week too is shot through threat, risk, violence and conflict. The colonial rulers of Jerusalem fear an insurrection brought about by religious fervour during the Jewish festival of Passover. Conflict penetrates Jesus’s own circle as Judas betrays him to a brutal death. Jesus’s prophecies about his resurrection (“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”) allude to the violent sacking of Jerusalem and the tearing down of its temple that the Romans will carry out within the lifetime of many present. So if we’re looking for peace as the absence of war and violence, we won’t find it in Holy Week either.

Peace in the Christian understanding is not just an absence, it’s a presence. It’s something positive and powerful. In the face of chaos and disorder, it is coherence, a meaningfulness that holds all things together, the good and the bad. In a world of fragmentation, it is an energy for connection and healing.

That energy is manifest in Jesus’s actions throughout the passion story. We see it when he heals of the ear of the High Priest’s slave when soldiers come to arrest him. We see it in the washing of his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. These are all signs of the judgment of this world that Jesus refers to in John’s Gospel, the driving out of its ruler the devil.

But most of all peace is simply what Jesus embodies. In his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. As his beloved disciple reclines on his chest at the Last Supper. In his silence at his trials. John’s language for the passion story is the “lifting up” of Jesus, and it is in this that Jesus draws all people to himself, draws them into coherence and peace.

As chaos and darkness engulfs, Jesus is what the poet T. S. Eliot calls “the still point in the turning world”:

Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Like peace itself, this still point is a paradoxical place. It is where time and motion appear to cease, yet this stillness is the source of movement and dance. As the committed pacificist Sidney Carter captures in his famous hymn, the journey of Jesus to the cross is not a passive submission, it is the greatest manifestation of the Lord of the Dance. “They cut me down and I leapt up high. I am the life that will never, never die.”

So to grow in the spiritual fruit of peace, to be a peacemaker, is to stand where Jesus stands. It is to find and inhabit the still point in the turning world, the point where the world is gathered up. And when we find that place, we find that it is not an escape from the world, an otherworldly nirvana. It is the place from which we engage in the connecting, and reconciling, and healing that makes us bearers of peace to the world.

It might feel privileged and naïve to talk about peace in such terms when we think of what is happening tonight in Gaza. But it’s from my encounters and friendships with Palestinian Christians that I have perhaps learnt most about the meaning of peace. I think of Sami Awad who founded the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem. He has pioneered what he calls non-linear leadership training, working with both Palestinians and Israelis to put an end to the working out of each side’s self-defeating response to trauma. He helps people find that still point where past and future are gathered and where we find the imagination and creativity to believe that coexistence is possible.

If Sami can find the still point in the brutality of the occupied West Bank, then we can find peace and share peace in the conflicts of the culture wars and the harshness we encounter in our lives. When Jesus said on the night before he died, “My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you”, he wasn’t wishing his disciples a quiet life. He knew they wouldn’t have that. He warned them about the persecution that was to come. But he was giving them a peace they could believe in and encounter come what may.

This isn’t simply to say that peace is a state of mind. That would indeed seem glib. Rather, peace is realised in the world by those who attune themselves to the coherence and connectedness that is often hidden, the energy of reconciliation and healing, the gathering up of all things in Christ.

This is why I associate compline with peace. It brings us to the still point of the turning world. It calms the monkey-mind of our busy days, it shuts out all the distractions that compete for our attention, and it allows us to encounter God, the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, in the greatest opening up of the still point in our temporal world, the resurrection that is at the heart of our faith. So as the fruit of God’s peace grows in you, may God make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight. May you know peace, and may you be a peacemaker.