27th April 2025
Peace in an Upper Room
It's hard, after 2000 years and many, many retellings and depictions of the story, to recapture the utter surprise of the resurrection. For the first disciples, huddled together in a locked room, processing the trauma of the week they had just experienced, the horror of Jesus' death, the devastation of their dreams, their individual and collective guilt at having let down their friend and Lord, the women's news as they returned from the tomb must have been just one more shock added onto all the others. The stone rolled away? Visions of angels? Actually meeting... Him? They must have been hallucinating, surely. It was wishful thinking, hysteria...
And so, in Sunday's reading, on the evening of the first day of the week, we find the disciples still gathered in the upper room, the doors still locked for their fear of the authorities. And, suddenly, Jesus himself appears among them, with these simple words: "Peace be with you."
In the New Testament, peace is always more than simply an absence of war. Peace is God's Shalom - which expresses wholeness, restoration, complete well-being - salvation, in fact, in its broadest sense. The risen Jesus appears to his frightened, grieving , bewildered disciples and, quite simply, speaks God's Shalom, God's peace to them. He doesn't demand a reckoning; he doesn't berate them for their lack of faith; he doesn't try, at this stage, to explain what has happened. He simply, calmly and quietly speaks God's Shalom, God's peace to them, and then breathes the Holy Spirit, the breath of God, into them.
Restored, healed, made whole, and strengthened by the breath of God, these frightened, broken disciples will in time go out and change the world. It begins with peace - that Shalom of God, that peace that passes understanding. In this season of resurrection, we too can bring our unanswered questions, our griefs and hurts, our struggles and uncertainties before our risen Lord (and, if we have carefully hidden away and locked the doors, perhaps we can expect him to burst in anyway?!). Like those first disciples, the risen Jesus speaks peace to us. Like those first disciples, the risen Jesus breathes God's Spirit into us. And then, restored, healed, made whole and strengthened like those first disciples, where might the risen Jesus be sending us?
