A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. On the evening of that first day of the week, even though the disciples had locked the doors of the place where they were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came into their midst and stood before them. Peace be with you, Jesus said. When he had said it, he showed them his hands and his side. At the sight of the lord, the disciples rejoiced.
And Jesus said to them again, peace be with you. As the father has sent me, so I send you. Then he breathed on them and said to them, receive the holy spirit. If you forgive men's sins, they are forgiven them. If you hold them bound, they are held bound.
Now it happened that one of the 12, Thomas, the name means twin, was absent on this occasion when Jesus came and stood in their midst. The other disciples kept telling Thomas, we have seen the lord. His answer was, I'll never believe it without probing the nail prints in his hands, without putting my finger in the nail marks, and my hand into his side. A week later, the disciples were once again in the same room, and this time Thomas was with them. Despite the locked doors, Jesus came and stood before them.
Peace be with you, Jesus said. Then turning to Thomas, he said to him, take your finger and examine my hands. Put your hand into my side. Do not persist in your unbelief, but believe. Thomas said, my lord and my god.
Jesus then said to Thomas, you became a believer because you saw me. Blessed are they who have not seen and still have believed. Jesus performed many other signs as well, signs not recorded here, says Saint John, in the presence of his disciples. But these have been recorded to help you believe that Jesus is the messiah, the son of god. So that through this faith, you may have life in his name.
And this is the gospel of the lord. Peace be with you, Jesus said to his disciples, who had retreated behind locked doors. Notice how that stressed. Because of the fear of the Jews. They were deathly afraid.
They were going to suffer the same thing that Christ had suffered. Now at the sight of the lord, they rejoiced. And Jesus said to them, again, peace be with you. And he repeated it several times. This is, of course, taken from today's gospel.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. This word peace is almost in the same class as the word love, especially in English. But the word peace is even harder to work with Because, first of all, Christ used it a lot and especially after his resurrection. And then I made a rough count of the use of the word peace in the New Testament.
It's a rough count, but it's about at least a 120 times. And you know how much it occurs in our liturgy. During the mass, we have the sign of peace. We begin with peace, and we end with peace. And during the mass, and this I think is extremely important to note, our blessed lord says, the pea my peace I give you, not as the world gives.
So he's giving us something, Something, that's a reality, not words. And certainly, since the last part of February and March and above all in recent in the last two weeks, we have heard an awful lot about peace. And it's so jubilant. There's so there's so much exuberance, all of the joys and the best, you might say, of human nature coming out. And I'm thinking as I said this of of so many photographs, pictures in the paper of the reunion of husbands and wives and children and parents as these thousands of our men and women coming back from The Gulf are being welcomed home.
Everywhere, we're hearing about peace. And only yesterday, we were I was very much relieved to hear that finally Iraq had accepted the conditions of peace with the allies. So we we get a lot of peace is all around us, you know, as a word. Now what in the world does it mean? What are we talking about?
I'm not illogical positives, but we you know, we use so many words, and words are just signs. But what significance do they have? I mean, that we could write it down in black and white. When we turn to each other during this mass and say, peace be with you, what what do you mean? What are we talking about?
At the beginning, when I said, peace be with you, what does that mean? What am I doing? Now I looked the word peace up just for the heck of it in a number of dictionaries, and, they all agree. They all agree, whether it be French or the Greek or the German or the French or the Spanish. It's all I had available.
It didn't go under the Arabic or the Hebrew. But I could say the same thing for shalom because I've done that before. And they the first definition they give is the absence or the cessation of war. Now that can be highly criticized. And the first criticism of it is it's a negative.
Notice the absence of war, the cessation of war, freedom from war. Now there are about six or seven or eight more definitions, but every single one of them is negative. Negative in the dictionaries that I had at my disposal. Every one of them. They talk about the absence of disturbance, the absence of this.
Instead of absence, many of them not many, but some of them say freedom. That makes no difference. You're talking about the absence of something. And if that is all peace is, the absence of hostilities, freedom from war, then go into a well kept cemetery, and you've got loads of peace. Go into a well run jail, and you'll have loads of peace.
If that's all peace is, a negative. But let me tell you right now, in parenthesis, because I don't wanna get waylaid. I when I say that, I want to right away say that I am not downgrading that. I am not despising that because the absence of war in its consequences, not in itself, because in itself, it's it's a negative, but in in its consequences is far more than a negative. The absence of men and women killing one another, the absence absence of of this this obscene destruction, the wantonness of it, the waste of it, the suffering of it, to have those things not happening is certainly something worthwhile in in its effects which are positive.
After all, if I escape being shot and continue to live, my living my escaping from being shot is certainly something positive. I looked up. I just happened to you know, Sherman said war is hell. But I looked that quotation up, and let me give you the full the full quotation of of general Sherman. General William Sherman.
He died in 1891, a hundred years ago. He delivered a graduation address at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, a few years after the civil war, where he played a role, let us say. And here's what he said to those would be soldiers. War is at best this is the the whole quotation of Boar's Hell. War is at best barbarism.
Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for more desolation. War is simply hell. And now as I say to be free of that obscenity, that monstrous, awful thing, notice I did not call it evil in saying. But to be rid of it, I don't care what the cause of it is, is certainly a blessing.
But in itself, it's a negative. As I say, if you if if the only thing you can say about peace is that it's the absence of hostilities, disturbance, it's the absence of all those disquieting elements of life with a picture of a hammock and a mint julep at your right hand and soft music in the background. If that's all peace is, then go into the graveyard. Peace has gotta be something more than that. Now on a much smaller scale, while I was down in Cartagena, this all this was brought home to me very clearly in word and in picture.
You know they have trouble with gorillas down there. They've had trouble for forty years. There's some sign that the situation is improving. And one minor group, 4,000 young men and young women, laid down their arms and have returned to the political scene. They have their own political party now and are represented in parliament.
They numbered about 4,000. It's a small group. They laid down their arms, four tons of them. As a matter of fact, one of the pictures showed them throwing a lot of the and they're very sophisticated weapons. I don't know how to get them into the into some pond or or pool or or lake.
It was very dramatic. And there was a there and rightly so. I don't I'm this is a good sign. And it was it was the the people's army for liberation. And there was all kinds of jubilation that at last they were making peace with the government.
Well, just a few days later, you know, the paper was beginning El Tiempo from Bogota, that it it was beginning to say, what are these 4,000 people going to do? They've gone home. They now have peace. But now what happens? Why?
Well, that's a good answer, isn't it? It's certainly nothing has happened to give them a way of life, to bring put food on the table, to give them an education by simply laying down their arms. Nothing. I don't know how it's going to work out. This is a serious problem.
They they already have a big unemployment rate. But, anyway, what I'm trying to point out is that all this jubilation about peace is wonderful. I'm for it, every bit of it, but let's realize what we're dealing with. Now all of this is merely by introduction. I don't wanna get get lost here.
When Christ went into those when when when Christ said peace to anybody, when he said, peace I give you, my peace I give you, And and he used the word peace a lot, especially after his resurrection. What is he talking about? What are you talking about when you use the word peace? What do the Benedictines mean? That's their big symbol, pox.
What do you mean by that? If I'm wishing you peace, what am I doing? Does it have any meaning? Supposing I ask you, take a little index card and write down your understanding of peace, what would you write down? And if you can't write it down, what I'm assuming we're all literate.
What do we know? What are we talking about? Are we rational creatures? Are we using signs with significance, or aren't we? You know, of course, I talk like this, my great friends say, that's just semantics, you know.
You're just being frivolous. They can say it all they want, but this is absolutely basic. When you, in spite of Alice in Wonderland and Humpty Dumpty, when you use a word, what do you mean? Anything, or do words have meaning? Or is Wittgenstein right?
I maintain they have a meaning, that when Christ said, I give you peace, that he meant something. He's the son of god. He wasn't playing games. He wasn't fooling around with this beautiful word semantics. Or was it?
Is that what you're going to say, that the son of god came to play games with us with semantics? So what does Christ mean? What does these words mean when Christ says them, when the apostles say them, when you use them? What are you talking about? Merely the cessation of war, what we call tranquility, which is defined as the lack of disturbance.
Notice the negation. Is that all you mean? Then get your rocking chair and go into the cemetery. There's plenty of it there. Loads of it there.
Morning, noon, and night. Or did Christ mean something when he said, my peace I give you. Peace be with you. He repeated this. Repeated it.
In one paragraph, he uses it two or three times. Now I want to lay before you, and I maintain that it is is not abstract in the sense in which it's beyond comprehension of any sensible person. Let's look at it. Let's look at it very simply. When Christ said, peace be with you.
My peace I give you. What is he talking about? The one keyword that I have come up with is messianic salvation. Now I'm going to explain that. Messianic simply means the adjective of messiah.
Messiah means God came to save me, and there's plenty about it in the Old Testament. So what I'm what I maintain, that the word peace as Christ uses it, as a as Saint Augustine used it used it, as Aquinas in the thirteenth century used it, and as the liturgy of the church uses it today, it means messianic salvation. That means salvation through Jesus Christ. Now that's not hard to comprehend, is it? That Christ came, the son of god, to save us, which means salvation, to put us on the right track to back to god, To put us on the right track back to God.
That's not hard to get, is it? Now Saint Augustine, March to 04/30. Notice those dates. He defined and this is used a lot today even in the secular press. He defined peace as the tranquility of order.
In the Latin, of course, the same thing. Tranquillicos ordinis. Big difference. That tranquility of order. Fine.
Fine. And now if you want if if you're with me yet still, then this next step is clear because Christ gave us an order. So that peace means the tranquility of heart I have, the lack of disturbance in my heart, which is negative, because I'm on track, because I'm in the order of Christ's salvation, messianic salvation. Isn't that clear? And now look at it.
Centuries later, in the thirteenth century, Augustine's dead in 04/30. In the thirteenth century, we have Thomas Aquinas bringing this out in full flower. Full flower and so simple. It's in the second part of the second part of his Summa, the whole part. I came from god.
God made me to come back to him. And to go back to him is to be on track. It's to be in order. It's to be in the order of salvation, to go back to god. Isn't that simple and clear?
But you can't do it without Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Jesus Christ, the Messiah, put you in that order to persevere, in that order back to God, back to God. And doing living your life daily in its tiniest details, which lee which put keeps you in the order of going back to god, which means your salvation, is peace. Peace. That's and this is not a fiction.
And and to put it in a phrase, messianic salvation. That simply means going back to god by virtue, and we can do it only by the grace of Jesus Christ, our savior. So you have God, me, and Jesus Christ. I God created me, me individual. Now Christ didn't come Christ or or God did not create humanity.
Christ created human beings, individual human beings. He did not create an abstraction. And those individual human beings are destined to go back to god from whom they came. They can't do it except through the grace and the blessing of Jesus Christ, the Messiah. And they do it in their daily lives.
How do we live? What do we do? Are we in the order of going back to God? Are we on track going back to God? It's another way of saying order, track.
Isn't that simple and plain? But it's magnificent. Not because it I'm saying that I'm only telling you what I what I have seen so clearly from Jesus Christ, from the use of the word peace in the New Testament, and in the old because in the old, shalom means salvation. I discovered that, and I verified it with some some of my Jewish friends. We are it's so simple.
I came from God. I'm going back to God through my daily living, but I can't do it without Jesus Christ, the Messiah. And that's the point of the resurrection, that our savior proved beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt that he was truly the the son of God, not just a good and second rate Socrates, but that he was the son of God. He came to give me life. Notice, our lord said it, I am the way.
Notice the the way another word for way is track or road or ordo in in Latin and order in English. These are all synonyms. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He said that. He also said, without me, you can do nothing.
So peace of Christ, the peace he gives us is his salvation. Messianic salvation. The salvation of the messiah. Peace. And may you have a lot of it.
In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.