Peace

Reading these passages

Almost every promise of peace on this page arrives with a clause attached, and the clause is nearly always the part that gets dropped when the verse is quoted.

Isaiah does not promise perfect peace. He promises it to a person whose mind is stayed on thee. Jesus does not simply give peace; he specifies not as the world giveth. Paul does not tell the Romans to live at peace with everyone — he says If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, and puts two qualifications in front of the instruction before he gives it.

Read with the conditions restored, the page stops being a set of guarantees and becomes something more useful: a description of where peace comes from, who it depends on, and what it is not.

As much as lieth in you

Romans 12:18 is the most carefully hedged sentence about relationships in the New Testament, and the hedging is deliberate. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.

Two limits, stacked. The first concedes that it may not be possible. The second confines the obligation to your own side of the transaction. Paul is writing to people under a hostile administration, and he is not going to pretend that the outcome is within their control.

The practical effect of that phrasing is to define where responsibility stops. A person who has done what lies in them has finished, whatever the other party does next. Without the qualifiers the verse becomes a demand to achieve peace, which would make every unreconciled relationship a personal failure — and would hand the outcome entirely to whoever is least willing.

It also quietly rules out the other misreading. Peace here is not the absence of conflict at any price; the same chapter has just told them not to be overcome of evil, and the letter is full of instructions that would have made them unpopular. What is required is that the refusal, if there is one, comes from the other side.

Not as the world giveth

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

The middle clause is doing more work than its length suggests. Jesus distinguishes what he is offering from what the word normally means, and the audience would have had a specific comparison in mind: the pax Romana, which was real, valuable and enforced by garrisons. The world's peace in that setting was the absence of war, maintained by overwhelming force, and available on condition of submission.

He is speaking on the last night, to men who are hours away from seeing him arrested, and within a lifetime most of them would die violently. Any promise of peace as absence-of-trouble would have been falsified almost immediately. The qualifier is what makes the sentence survivable.

Note also the tense of the two commands attached. Let not your heart be troubled is not a prediction that nothing troubling will happen. It is an instruction about what to do with the heart when it does.

Rule and umpire

Colossians uses a verb that has largely disappeared from English translation: And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.

The Greek is brabeuo, and it does not mean to reign. It means to act as umpire — the brabeus was the official at the games who awarded the prize and settled disputed results. Paul is not describing peace as a monarch installed in the chest. He is describing it as an adjudicator: the thing that decides between competing options when it is not clear which to take.

Which is why the verse continues into a body rather than an individual. Ye are called in one body — the disputes being umpired are between people. Colossians has spent the preceding verses on how members of a community should handle each other, and the peace that rules is the tiebreaker in that context, not a private tranquillity.

Kept, and by whom

Isaiah's promise is conditional and the condition is a posture rather than an achievement: Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.

The Hebrew behind perfect peace is shalom shalom — the word simply repeated, which is how Hebrew forms a superlative. And stayed translates samuk, a word used of a beam propped against a wall or a hand leaning its weight on something. It is not a word about concentration. It is a word about resting weight on a support, which is a considerably less strenuous image than keeping one's mind fixed on God usually suggests.

The psalm pairs peace with strength in a single line and makes both gifts: The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace. Neither is described as a state the people achieve. Both are handed over, and the two are set side by side as though they were the same kind of thing.

A peace that cannot be accounted for

Paul attaches a qualifier of his own, and it is the strangest one on the page: And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

The clause is usually heard as praise — a peace so wonderful it beggars description. The Greek is more specific than that. Hyperechousa means exceeding, surpassing, going beyond; and what it goes beyond is nous, the mind, the faculty that works things out. Paul is not saying the peace is indescribably nice. He is saying it cannot be arrived at by reasoning, and therefore cannot be accounted for by the circumstances.

That is the exact complement of the promise two paragraphs ago. The world's peace is entirely accountable: it is produced by force, or by money, or by the absence of anything currently going wrong, and if you know the inputs you can predict it. This one does not work that way, which is both the reason it is worth having and the reason it is no use as evidence to anybody else.

Note where Paul puts it, too. It arrives in the verse after an instruction to pray about everything, and it is not offered as the answer to the prayers. He does not say the requests will be granted. He says something else will show up.

Given, and made

Everything so far describes peace as something received. One verse on this page describes it as something manufactured: Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

The two are not in tension, but they are doing different jobs, and it is worth noticing which verses belong to which. Isaiah, John, Philippians, Colossians and the psalm all have peace arriving from outside — kept, given, ruling, blessed with. Matthew has it produced. Romans sits between the two, describing an attempt whose success is not guaranteed.

The page is therefore not really about one thing. It is about a state that has to be received and an activity that has to be undertaken, and it declines to explain how they relate. Which is probably honest. Anyone who has tried to make peace between two other people while not having much themselves will recognise that the second does not wait for the first.

The one that is not a promise

Proverbs contributes a sentence that reads like a guarantee and is not one: When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.

Proverbs deals in patterns, not laws. It says elsewhere that the diligent will rule and that a soft answer turns away wrath, and neither holds in every case; the book is describing how the world generally runs, in the confident voice that genre uses. Read as a promise, this verse is contradicted by most of the prophets and by the entire New Testament, where pleasing God is repeatedly what produces enemies rather than pacifying them.

Read as a pattern it is unobjectionable and quite ordinary: integrity tends, over time, to disarm opposition. That reading also keeps it consistent with Romans, which allows for the possibility that peace does not arrive and tells you where your responsibility ends when it doesn't.