The Makers of Peace

Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus said, back on the hillside, in the great catalog of blessings that turns the whole world upside down. It is worth pausing to notice exactly what he said and, what is harder, what he did not say.

He did not say, “Blessed are the peace-lovers, the ones who admire peace from a safe and comfortable distance, the way you admire a painting in a museum, standing with your hands clasped behind your back, murmuring about how lovely it is, and then going home to supper having never once had to live with it or pay for it.” Nearly everybody is a peace-lover in that sense. It costs exactly nothing. You can love peace the way you love good weather, as something it would be pleasant to have more of, and go right on hating your enemy in the meantime, with a perfectly clear conscience.

He did not say, “Blessed are the peacekeepers,” either, which is the counterfeit we are most likely to mistake for the genuine article. The peacekeepers keep things quiet by making sure that nobody ever upsets the boat, that no hard and true thing is ever said out loud at the table, and that the wall stays exactly where it has always stood, because a wall is at least orderly and everybody knows which side of it to stand on. But that is not peace. That is only the absence of noise, which is a different thing altogether and, now and then, the cruelest thing of all, since it requires those being slowly crushed against the wall to keep still about it for the sake of everybody else’s comfort.

He said, peace-makers. Makers. And making, as anyone who has ever tried to make anything at all knows in his bones, is active, exhausting, and very nearly always thankless work. It is the work of putting your own body into the narrow space between two people who are furious at each other and taking some of the blow yourself. It is the work of being misunderstood by both sides at once, being called a traitor by your own people for refusing to hate the enemy with sufficient enthusiasm, and being called naive by more or less everyone for daring to think it could ever be any other way.

Peace, as Jesus uses the word, is not the absence of conflict. It is not the silence that falls over a battlefield once everyone is dead. It is shalom, that great, deep Hebrew word that means wholeness, flourishing, and the way things are finally supposed to be when every last person and every last creature is at home, at rest, and unafraid. To set about making that kind of peace is to labor against the grain of the entire world. He called those who give themselves to it nothing less than the children of God, which is to say the ones who, of all people, most resemble their Father, the family likeness showing through at last.

Paul, who was almost always better than anyone else in the room at giving things their right names, gave this strange labor a name of its own. He called it the ministry of reconciliation. All this is from God, he wrote to the troublesome and divided little church at Corinth, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. God was in Christ, he said, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. And then, having said that much, he did the most extraordinary thing of all. He turned around and handed the whole enormous business straight over to us. He has committed to us the message of reconciliation, Paul wrote. We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making his appeal through us.

Stop for a moment and let the weight of that settle on you. The reconciliation God accomplished in Christ, the breaking down of the wall, and the end of the long and bloody war between heaven and earth and between them and us, is not finished. It is, of all the unlikely things in the world, still going on, and it has been entrusted to people like us, ordinary, compromised, and only half-converted as we are, sent out into the streets as ambassadors, as living rumors of a peace that has already, somewhere, been declared.

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And what does a ministry like that actually look like when you bring it down out of the clouds and set it on the floor of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon? Mostly, it looks like nothing much. It looks like the phone call you have been putting off for a year and do not want to make. It looks like sitting across the kitchen table from the very person you had written off for good and choosing, against every last instinct, to keep listening until you can make out the face of the human being hidden beneath the position you cannot stand. It looks like declining to repeat the cruel and genuinely clever thing about the other side, even though it would land, even though the whole room is leaning in, waiting for you to say it. It looks like being the one person at the gathering who will not pick up the pen everyone else is reaching for to draw the line. It is small and unglamorous and hardly ever feels heroic at all. Most days, if we are honest, it feels a great deal like failure. And it is, I have come to believe, very nearly the only work that finally matters.

I cannot pretend that any of this is easy, because it is not. Anyone who tells you otherwise has either never tried it or has something to sell you. To make peace is to climb down into the narrow, contested strip of ground between two armies and stand there without taking cover. A person who does that had better not be surprised to find himself fired on from both directions at once. The peacemaker belongs wholly to neither side, and so neither side will quite claim him or spare him. He becomes the one place in the whole landscape where the fury in the air can converge and, once converged, do its worst. This is not a dark figure of speech dreamed up for effect. It is simply what tends to happen, in practice, to those who actually try.

The man who stood on the hillside and blessed the peacemakers went on, soon enough, to show the whole world exactly what the blessing costs. He had spent his life walking that contested ground, sitting at the wrong tables, touching the wrong people, and loving the wrong side, until at last he was lifted up into the very middle of everything, hung between two thieves on a hill outside the city, with the religious authorities on one hand and the Roman empire on the other, his own people and the occupying power, who agreed about almost nothing under heaven except that the world would go easier for them with him out of it. Luke records a small and terrible thing about that afternoon. He tells us that Herod and Pilate, who had been enemies, became friends that very day. Stop and let that land. The peacemaker made peace even between the two men who were killing him, and the peace they found was a peace against him, sealed quietly over his body as he died. That is the going rate. That is what it costs to stand in the gap, take the hatred of both sides into yourself, and give back, even then, even there, nothing whatsoever but love. He made peace by being torn apart in the middle of it.

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So when Jesus turns and calls us peacemakers, let us at least be honest about what is being handed to us. It is not a mild and pleasant hobby for those who dislike raised voices. It is his own work, and it came with his own wages, and he never once pretended otherwise. And yet here, in just this place, the whole thing turns from unbearable to merciful. We are not being asked to manufacture peace out of thin air by the sheer force of our own goodness, which is a great relief, since most of us have so little of it to spare. The peace has already been made. It was made on that hill, once and for all, in a body stretched out between the warring halves of the world. We are not the architects of it and never were. We are only the messengers, the ambassadors, sent out to carry word of a peace already signed in blood that we did not shed, to go about the streets as walking rumors that the long war is, at the deepest level, already over, whatever this morning’s headlines may insist.

Which is why I have come to think that, in the end, a peacemaker looks less like a soldier or a statesman than like someone quietly setting a table. Not someone who has stopped feeling the old heat climb the back of the neck at the sight of the enemy. Not someone who has become the least bit good at any of it. Only someone who keeps laying one more place than the room appears to call for, who keeps the porch light burning and the kettle warm, in case the one he cannot abide might, against all the odds, come up the walk after all and want to sit down. He does it on ordinary Tuesdays, against the grain of the entire world, for the sake of a supper he has been promised but has not yet seen, the great and crowded supper at the end of all things, where the dividing wall is gone for good and the just and the unjust, the ones we loved and the ones we could not bear, sit down side by side at last and pass one another the bread. After two thousand years, it is still the hardest thing in the world to believe and the only thing finally worth telling anyone. And the ones who give their lives to believing it, the ones still setting places for guests who have not yet arrived, he promised, will be called the children of God.

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