The Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2024
The Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2024
As the reading reminds us, the peace of God is beyond our understanding. To define it as the absence of strife and conflict is, in fact, to be confronted by the reality of the strife and conflict surrounding us. To define it as the absence of war is, in fact, to admit that wars never cease. To define it as the absence of personal hardship in the form of sickness, poverty, or failure is to note how deeply those hardships penetrate our lives together. To define it as the absence of that spiritual struggle which Luther named “Anfectung” is to deny one of the most important insights of the Reformation, the theology of the cross.
We can grasp these sorts of “absences” with our human understandings. The reality of these contentions brings prayers of lament and pleadings for deliverance from our lips. But these absences are not the peace of God, for his peace is not absence but presence: the presence of Jesus Christ who has come to be the life of sinners dead in their sin. Jesus Christ has come to be the future for those who have no future. This little phrase: “in Christ Jesus” sets out the location where the peace of God guards us. Only in Christ Jesus, not in ourselves, will this “peace of God which surpasses all understanding” provide for our protection.
A wonderful commentary on this text comes from the hymn “The Christian Life” by William Alexander Percy (1885-1942). After delivering several verses highlighting the contradictions inherent to depictions of peace as “absence,” Percy delivers this wonderful verse: “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod yet let us pray for but one thing — the marvelous peace of God.” Truly, this peace beyond understanding comes when we lay down all our strivings and go beneath the sod and into our grave. But our strife also ends with the humility of a life lived beneath these words: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Ge. 3:19). In such a life, John the Baptist tells the truth, “He [Jesus] must increase, and I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30).
Table Talk: Why do we get in trouble when we try to “Be Something?”
Pray: Heavenly Father, keep me in the humility of my mortality. Amen
Phillipians 4:4–7
4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. 5 Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; 6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.