1 Sunday, April 18, 2021 Easter 3B Luke 24:36–48 PEACE BE WITH YOU Beloved people of God, grace and peace to you from the risen Jesus. AMEN. “Peace be with you.” What a beautiful greeting Jesus offers his disciples in the first verse of our gospel! It is the same greet he offered three times in last Sunday’s gospel reading from John. “Peace be with you” became the classic greeting early Christians used to greet one another. Given the challenges and persecution many faced, such a greeting would have meant so much. It was not an exclusively Christian greeting. As Daniel Esparza explains, “peace be with you” is also “a traditional Jewish and Arabic greeting. In both languages, when one is greeted with `shalom aleichem’ or `as-salaam alaykhum’ (Hebrew and Arabic respectively for `peace be with you’), the typical reply is `aleichem shalom’ or `wa alaykumu as-salaam’ (`and peace be with you, too’).”1 Esparza clarifies that this greeting is not limited to “wishing each other a peaceful existence”; it is about actively building harmony. He refers to the first couple of lines of the beautiful Prayer of St. Francis: 1 https://aleteia.org/2019/04/28/where-does-the-expression-peace-be-with-you-come-from/ 2 “Lord, make us instruments of your peace: where there is hatred, let us sow love.” What makes “Peace be with you” special in our gospel reading is not its uniqueness; what makes it special is the amazing reality that the risen Lord is offering it. We might have anticipated that the risen Jesus’ greeting would have produced elation in the defeated band of disciples. Jesus was alive. On their way to Jerusalem Jesus had taken the twelve disciples aside and said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished For he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.” All this had come true, just as Jesus had told them. They should have been elated. But when the risen Jesus appeared to them and greeted them with “Peace be with you,” “they were startled and terrified, and thought they were seeing a ghost.” The good news that Jesus had risen from the dead was too good to be true for them. How then did Jesus respond? He put his greeting into action. He sought to convey peace to them, 3 peace that impacted their minds, bodies, hearts, and souls. First, he sought to set their fears at ease and comfort their hearts. He asked them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” He did not condemn their fear or their doubts. Instead, he spoke directly to them: “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” In their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering how the risen Jesus could be with them. Again rather than condemning them for being slow learners, he did the most concrete thing possible: eat. He asked, “Have you anything to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Notice how Luke’s account of the appearance of the risen Jesus emphasizes the bodily resurrection. With this simple act of eating Jesus not only comforted their hearts, but also affirmed the importance of their bodies. Peace entails the well-being of the body. Next Jesus sought to put their minds at peace. He did so, asserts Luke, by opening “their minds to understand the scriptures.” The risen Jesus wanted their thinking about him to be firmly grounded in scripture. 4 We are Evangelical Lutherans. The term “Evangelical” comes from the Greek word “evangel,” which means “gospel” or “good news.” As Evangelical Lutherans, our thinking is to be grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ, as written in the four gospels. The gospel provides the fundamental orientation for our thinking in life and ministry; it provides the lens for the way we see the world. For Jesus and the disciples scripture would have been what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. Jesus wanted them to understand that his death and resurrection fulfilled the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms. He asserted, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.” The risen Jesus as the fulfillment of scripture would provide the fundamental orientation for the thinking of the disciples. Finally, Jesus addressed the well-being of their souls. “Repentance and forgiveness of sins,” he affirmed, “is to be proclaimed in [the Messiah’s] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Repentance and forgiveness were to provide a path to spiritual health or well-being. The good news for the disciples was that their failures as disciples were not going to be held against them. 5 For the risen Jesus then the greeting “Peace be with you” expressed his desire for the well-being of the heart, mind, soul, and body of his disciples. His response to the fears and doubts of his disciples indicates that he had a much deeper and fuller understanding of peace than tends to be common in our society. On Friday, before I began writing this sermon, I watched a report on the latest mass shooting in our country. Eight people were killed and multiple others injured at a FED EX facility in Indianapolis. The shooter apparently committed suicide. In 2021 we have had at least 11 mass shootings, in which four or more people have been killed. On Friday President Biden called the mass shootings and gun violence a national embarrassment. Protests continued this week in the aftermath of the shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright by a white police officer on April 11 in Brooklyn Center, a city on the northwest border of Minneapolis. This shooting happened in the middle of the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for his role in the killing of George Floyd. President Biden also announced this week that all US Troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 11. The cessation of gun violence, the reduction of police killings of blacks, and the end of war 6 are all important in the pursuit of peace. But from a biblical point of view, peace is never limited to bringing violence to an end. When the risen Jesus greeted his disciples with “peace be with you,” he conveyed so much more. At the heart of Jesus’ message was the nearness of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is the kingdom ruled by God’s love. Jesus could have greeted the disciples with “The kingdom of God be with you.” Jesus wanted the love of God to be with the disciples. He wanted the love of God to rule in all aspects of their lives and the life of the world. That love leads to peace or well-being in our personal lives and in all our relationships to God, our neighbors, and to other creatures. The fullness of peace includes well-being in our households, our neighborhoods, our congregations, our communities, and our nations. As our ecological awareness has increased, we have come to realize that peace also includes the well-being of our watersheds and ecosystems. Our gospel reading concludes with this verse: “You are witnesses of these things.” The Greek word for witness is martus, the root of our word “martyr.” Traditionally in the church we have used “martyrs” to refer to people 7 who have died for their faith in Jesus. When Jesus called the disciples witnesses, he did not necessarily mean that they had to die for the faith. But they were to lay their lives on the line to carry out the ministry begun in Jesus. When the risen Jesus greeted the disciples with “peace be with you,” he was not just expressing a certain condition he wanted them to experience; he was commissioning them to live by that peace, to put that peace into action. The peace of God was to be a way of life, a way of life rooted in the love of God. We will never make significant progress in our nation in ending violence unless we come to embrace a more wholistic understanding of peace and take up peace as a way of life. We do not have to seek martyrdom, but followers of the risen Jesus will lay their lives on the line for the sake of the full peace of God. Not everyone will welcome the peace we offer. Many in the early church faced persecution and even martyrdom due to their efforts to put the peace of God into action. In the past year or so we have discovered how challenging it can be to pursue peace in the midst of a pandemic and political turmoil. Even simple public health measures such as wearing a mask and maintaining social distance, intended to provide for the well-being of all, 8 have been resisted and even mocked by some. Virtually all attempts to establish gun controls have been controversial. Desp ite resistance to our best efforts to put peace into action, the risen Jesus wants us to be relentless in our pursuit of the peace God offers.