Peace Be with You: The Surprise of the Risen Lord’s First Words
Both men and women have certain things that can be difficult to admit in public. Sometimes what we find difficult to admit are the same things that we all have difficulty admitting. Sometimes they are different, perhaps even specific to gender.
I won’t give you anything too provocative, but I will tell you one thing I’d rather not: for too long after I got my driver’s license, I was what most people would call a bad driver. I know, as a guy, I’m not supposed to tell you that, but it’s true. At least I think it was true, in the past tense.
In the last twenty years, I’ve not had an accident, and I’ve only been pulled over three times. One of them happened when one of my daughters was very young. We struggled to get her to sleep and only driving her would help, so I drove the neighborhood but didn’t, apparently, come to a complete stop. That one got me a ticket. The point is I have twenty years of safe driving. Praise the Lord.
My first five years of driving? Not so much. I had accidents that totaled into the double digits. Seriously. A few thousand cars were in my high school parking lot, and several of my accidents happened there. My first major accident involved hitting the brand-new Ford F-150 owned by my father’s best friend. That was a wild one because the friend just happened to be in the lane at a stoplight when I moved over without looking. Once I hit part of our garage. Stuff like this. Almost all of them, however, were at low speed. But one was not.
On a rainy Saturday morning in the spring of my sophomore year, I came around a turn too fast. I would tell you that cars had just passed me up the hill and were, thus, going faster than me. Nonetheless, I skidded or fishtailed three times, scraping the guardrail with the front right nose of my car. I slowed down, pulled onto the shoulder, got out, and saw my front right headlight hanging like a detached eyeball. And the door of the minivan looked like someone had taken a knife, jabbed it in the side, and pulled.
I got back in, drove to the high school parking lot, five minutes away, parked my car at the far far edge of the lot, and walked to the locker room. I had driven to the school to catch the bus to a track meet. Reluctantly, I called my father from the phone corded to the wall. I remember staring at the red brick wall, wondering what he would say.
“I messed up, Dad,” and I told him what happened.
His first words were not, “You stupid son. How many times have we told you?” Instead, he first said, “Are you okay?”
He said other things after that, but he said that first.
I could write a whole lot of true things about the Easter passage of John 20. But what stood out to me this Easter are the four words repeated by Jesus three times: “Peace be with you.” After all their failures, these are the first words to these men (John 20:19–21, 26).
While the greeting “peace be with you” (shalom aleichem) may have been customary in their day and even still today, peace makes for strange first words to these men.
These men have bumbled along throughout the Gospels. They often take Jesus literally when he meant something more poetic (cf., “Lazarus is asleep” in John 11, cf., “he is Elijah who is to come” in Matt. 11, and “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees” in Matt. 16). In Matthew 17, they could not drive out a demon, even though they tried. In Matthew 18, the disciples argued about who the greatest disciple was. In John 6, after a big confrontation where many followers of Jesus stop following, Jesus knows the disciples are grumbling and asks the twelve if they want to stop following. Their response is okay, but it’s not as great as we might hope. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,” Peter says (John 6:68). This implies they might like to leave but must stay. Again, they just seem to bumble along.
Then consider the final weekend. On the night of the arrest, they can’t stay awake when he tells them to pray. Every single disciple leaves him. In one brave moment, Peter, a leader among the twelve, cuts off the ear of a soldier. But then Jesus rebukes him for fighting as the world fights. An hour later, Peter denies even knowing Jesus.
We receive their failures as familiar material, hardly shocking because we’ve read it all before. But think of what it meant for these men to admit to all this. Think of what it meant to write what they wrote. Think of what it means to show the world you’re a bumbling sinner, not in genric, benign ways, but in specific and ugly ways.
Their failure is only more pointed when you consider the contrast with the women in the story. It’s apparently dangerous to be a follower of Jesus, which is why they hid in a locked room (John 20:19). But not the women; they go early to the tomb looking for his body. In a culture where women were not as valued as they should have been, they were the first to witness the resurrection. They are the first to tell the other disciples that Jesus is alive.
Right or wrong, this would have stung far more than me telling you I’m a bad driver.
These are some of the reasons Christians believe in the reliability of the Gospels. Had it not happened this way and had Jesus not been alive and received them so well, they would never have written the story so transparently.
But the main reason I bring this up is to establish the context for the four words that Jesus says three times: peace be with you.
How can he say that to them?
Well, maybe Jesus is a nice guy, so that’s why he says peace. If we’re talking about whether Jesus is a nice guy or not, and those are the only two options, then yes, Jesus is a nice guy. He’s not a mean guy. He’s not un-nice.
But can a nice judge just let criminals go? Niceness has nothing to do with it. So, how can Jesus say peace to them? How can he say peace to you? It has everything to do with a little phrase in John 19:30. From the cross, just before he dies, Jesus says, “It is finished.”
On Easter morning, even more so than other Sundays we can come to church looking our best and putting on a good show. But the Easter Sunday version of yourself can trick us into thinking we should hear peace from God because we’re not so bad.
On that Easter morning, however, these men were not in their Sunday best. There were no illusions. They knew they had failed, and they knew they had deserted, and they knew they were not the disciples Jesus wanted them to be. This allowed them to experience Easter with more joy than when we come with our religious pretense.
Jesus can say, “Peace be with you,” only because he also said it is finished.
Why was the cross so bloody? Why was the cross so painful? The bloody, painful crucifixion was so physically violent to dramatize the violence of the spiritual reality: when Jesus died, he took upon himself all these sins of his followers. But when he died, it was finished—really finished. No more wrath.
And when he rose, he can preach peace to them and to you.
Many years later, Paul, a man who experienced this peace from God wrote to a church these words:
For he himself [Jesus] is our peace, [and speaking of Jews and Gentiles who didn’t get along, he writes that Jesus] . . . has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Eph. 2:14–18)
All of Paul’s letters begin with some variation of a greeting using the word “Peace”—every one of them. The letters of Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon all begin with peace because they all go on to describe how it is finished and how he is risen indeed.
For all the excitement the disciples would have had to see Jesus on that first Easter Sunday morning, they likely wondered, Does Jesus want to see me? Maybe you have wondered the same.
The gospel of John was written, John tells us, so that you would believe that God the Father wants you to have life and peace through the risen Son of God (John 20:30–31).
When I crashed my car on that highway, I mentioned I parked at the far end of the parking lot. I did that so no one would see. When the bus drove away, we went right past my car. Everyone laughed. It hurt to have them see my failure, as I’m sure it hurt the disciples.
But their laughter hurt me less knowing my father loved me unconditionally.
And Jesus loves us even more.
* Photo by Warren on Unsplash