What was the secret of Christ’s deep and unfailing peace?
1. First of all, and most of all, it was the conviction that all through His earthly career Christ felt that He was at one with God, in the spirit and purpose of His life and work. Realizing His oneness with the Father, it was ever His meat and His drink to do His will; and so, notwithstanding all the humiliation and sorrow and pain which the fulfilment of His mission entailed, there was in Him at all times the absolute and blessed conviction that His words and acts were in complete accord with the mind and will of God, and were, as such, the means of manifesting His grace supremely to a sin-stricken world.
He often said, “I am come to do the will of him that sent me” (Joh_6:38). That was the firm road that His holy feet for ever trod. It led Him through dark ways, but He never flinched. No, not even when the bitter cup was held to His fainting lips and the faltering manhood shrank; even then, “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done” (Luk_22:42). Temptation, trial, agony! We have seen what He went through right up to the very Cross; but on one moment especially we linger—after the agony of Gethsemane, as He rose from the exhausting prayer that drained His life-blood, and the traitor, and the soldiers, and the multitude came upon Him. And in that moment Jesus met them, profoundly calm, with the paleness of death already on His face, but with strength of perfect peace. Victory was His; victory after conflict and agony of soul; victory of absolute submission, and therefore of absolute decision. “I come to do thy will, O my God.” No need, then, of the soldiers. “Whom seek ye? I am he” (Joh_18:4-7).
All around Christ raged a very storm of lies—hypocrisy and blindness born of pride, confusion of the old with the new, battling opinions contradicting and denouncing each other, false ideas and false gods. Oh, do we not know it all too well? We cannot always find our anchors in the storm of false and true, in errors that last because of their truth, in truth that fails because of its error. The very ground of our faith, the belief in God, sometimes trembles beneath our feet. A thousand opinions beset us, eager for our acceptance; a hundred sects each claim the truth as alone in them; the stars of our childhood’s religion are hidden, and we drift rudderless over the ocean, now to this island, now to that, hoping in each new land to find repose—and find it not. We might despair, did we not hear the wondrous tidings that one of us had peace—One, too, who lived in as great a storm as we. We know there is but one way in which He could have had it, for it is the only way in which we should be content ourselves to have it—in union with divine truth. For it is that we are bold enough—in true remembrance of our lofty origin—to ask for, to desire, to be unsatisfied until we find it. We demand to be at one with absolute Truth. [Note: Stopford A. Brooke, The Spirit of the Christian Life, 327.]
2. He was at peace in Himself. As revealed to us in the Gospels, especially in that of St. John, we perceive that a deep sea of holiest repose lay at the very centre of the personal being of the Lord Jesus. Amidst all the conflicts and sufferings and contradictions which surrounded Him, and which, as the Man of Sorrows, He felt as none of us could feel, there was in the depths of His soul a calm strength, not of indifference or impassiveness, but of “something vital, and flowing like a calm, strong river.”
What is human peace? In the individual life it is balance, proportion, co-operation; and consequently the doing of the things that life is made to do. Balance of what? Proportion in what? Co-operation as between what? Let personality be divided; if you will, in apostolic language, as consisting of spirit, soul, and body; or accepting Kant’s analysis, as consisting of intelligence, volition, and emotion. Find me a man in whom these things are balanced, and I find you a man who is at peace. That man who is cultivating his physical powers at the cost of mental and spiritual is never at peace. That is a disproportion of personality that means war and ruin ultimately. That man who is cultivating his spiritual activities at the expense of his physical is not at peace. Find me a man in whom these things are perfectly poised and balanced and adjusted, and I show you a man at peace. He is not a still man, not a stagnant man, not a man at rest. He is a man at peace. [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]
3. He was in union with God’s Universe. Natural forces become the friendly allies of men who are right with God. “The whole creation groaneth and waiteth for the manifestation of the children of God.” When a man is one with the Maker he has the co-operation of all the Maker has made. The winds and currents are his friends. “The stars in their courses” fight on his side.
There is established “a covenant between him and the stones of the field” (Job_5:23). And so peace is the condition of the soul in its God-purposed relationship of being right with Him and one with the movements of the Divine order in the world.
For a moment we may guess thee
From thy creatures that confess thee
When the morn and even bless thee
And thy smile is on the sea.
Then from something seen or heard,
Whether forests softly stirred,
Or the speaking of a word,
Or the singing of a bird,
Cares and sorrows cease:
For a moment on the soul
Falls the rest that maketh whole,
Falls the endless peace. [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Poems, 139.]
Light is peace. In these wonderful days through which we have been passing as to the weather—glorious days of God’s own wind and shower and sunshine, intermingling, kissing, laughing at each other—we have more than once seen a rainbow. If we have looked carefully at the rainbow we have seen the units, which, merging, make light. We have observed the whole gamut of colour; the red, the orange, the yellow, the green, the blue, the indigo, the violet; and then, presently, the prismatic raindrops ceasing to cause the spectrum analysis, the rainbow ended. But light was there, and light is peace. The rainbow is the result of storm; it is the dividing up of light into its essential and constituent rays. Merge the rays, and you lose the colour, but you have light, and light is peace.
Into the realm of music I hardly dare venture to go, so great an ignoramus am I, and yet there, most perfectly, we discover the meaning of peace. You who know the modes of music more perfectly will follow this line of illustration for yourselves. I shall content myself with the simplest application. That is perfect harmony in which we hear soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass. If each sings alone, that is not harmony. Join them, make them agree, let them symphonize, and in the harmony we have reached the sense of peace.
I am less competent to invade the realm of the engineer; and yet I venture. Do you see the great ship that ploughs her way across the sea? Have you been on her deck intelligently? Have you thought of the marvel, the mystery of the ship, when that ship is not at anchor, but under full steam, ploughing the waters, and braving the elements. That is peace. It is the combination in unity and activity of the elements of power. There is static power, the power restraining and holding in place; there is dynamic power, the power equal to accomplishing things; there is kinetic power, the power in action. The three perfectly working together, peace! Peace is not stagnation, not stillness, but harmonic realization of all the meaning and the mystery of being, and the expression of that meaning and mystery in the grandeur of accomplishment. [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]
I have seen
A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell ;
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.
Even such a shell the universe itself
Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times,
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things ;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power ;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation. [Note: Wordsworth, “The Excursion.”]
4. Again, in His dealing with men there was perfect sympathy—keen, quick, sensitive. Whenever He came into contact with a man He entered into that man’s life and shared his feelings. He expressed His sympathy in perpetual sacrifice. We know how we have been disturbed by men, and perplexed. He was never disturbed. His peace was the peace of perfect balance and poised relationship, expressing itself in His sympathy with men, always expressing itself in service.
He had throughout His entire life the consciousness that He was seeking the welfare of men. True, He was misunderstood, hated, and despised, and hence opposition and persecution arose against Him, but none of those experiences could ruffle the pure calm of His spirit. Men might say all manner of evil against Him falsely, but He knew that, in all things, He had been seeking not their hurt but their good. Never once had He departed from His Father’s great commission “not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them,” (Luk_9:56) and so no charge of man brought remorse to His soul, nor caused Him the slightest degree of inward discomfort. His peace was that of one who knew that His will blended with the will of His Father, and that His purposes were ever beneficent towards men.
Walking the New Earth,
Lo, a divine One
Greets all men godlike,
Calls them his kindred,
He, the Divine.
Is it Thor’s hammer
Rays in his right hand?
Weaponless walks he;
It is the White Christ,
Stronger than Thor. [Note: J. R. Lowell, “The Voyage to Vinland” (Poetical Works, iii. 229).]
5. It was peace in the view of the Cross. It is an attainment; it is a victory; it is tribulation overcome. It is the mightiest powers of our nature balanced, reconciled, and harmonized at last, through we know not what struggles and sufferings, till, by the perfect sway of one supreme principle of faith, there are the equipoise and serenity that pass all understanding.
When one looks at Him as represented, say, in the beautiful play at Oberammergau, one of the most beautiful things about Him is the calm with which He goes through that terrible last scene. He seems to have an atmosphere of peace folded round His soul. People say the most bitter things to Him, but this beautiful atmosphere catches all the things that are said and burns them out, as the atmosphere surrounding the earth catches the meteors that fall and turns them into thin dust. A glorious peace surrounds His soul. [Note: A. F. Winnington Ingram, A Mission of the Spirit, 105.]
Did He not recognize the meaning of the Cross? I remember a remarkable sunset in the valley of Sarnen. It was an evening in the later summer The sun was westering slowly, and throwing across the lake and nearer ridges streams of mellowing golden light. The long line of the mountains of Engelberg rose peak on peak against the sky. The sky! Not sky behind those mountains, but volumes of vapour, for mass on mass, pile on pile, rose the tremendous bastions of the clouds. To call them inky black would be to speak in tame and insufficient language. They showed such depth of unimagined darkness, it seemed the very essence of the night. And against this background of elaborated gloom stood clear, as if from a sky of oxide of silver, the peaks and promontories of the mountain world. The effect on the mind was marvellous; the gazer could not but be arrested by the deep, uncanny darkness revealed by the glory of the setting sun. One governing fact was on the mind, one illuminating power, one strange tone, half of physical nature, half of mental vision; the light was the sunset, the tone was a sense of unknown possibilities of doom, the fact was the silent awfulness of the gathering storm.
How clearly and constantly that fact was before the mind of Christ is evident from the sacred story. Did He speak sweet words in the quiet home of Nazareth? did He walk in later life in the fig-shaded paths of Ephraim? did He teach in the Temple? did He rest at Bethany? did He burst forth for the moment into His native glory on the Mount of Transfiguration?—behind all—like the cloud curtains behind the mountains of Sarnen—was the fact of the Passion. And yet, even when the Cross was close at hand, His words were (Joh_14:27), “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” [Note: W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of the Passion, 161.]
“Not peace! A sword I come to bring!”
And with its keen edge didst Thou thrust
The empty pomp of priest and king
Into the empty dust.
Yet was Thy sword our peace! For spurned
Wert Thou, and for Thy blood they cried;
And so on Calvary they returned
The sword—into Thy side!
Nor dreamt they that it should release
(While vengeance thus they were demanding)
That sacramental flow of peace
Which passeth understanding! [Note: G. Thomas, The Wayside Altar, 21.]
