Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C (2025) - Fr Paul Rowse, OP

St Augustine sure knew what peace looked like.  He was raised with Christian values by his mother, St Monica, but schooled with polytheists.  He was educated in rhetoric and public virtues but pursued vanities and pleasures without end.  He accepted Manichaeism – that is, belief in a never-ending battle between the supposedly-evil flesh and the pure spirit – but was dissatisfied with its myriad inconsistencies and endless scepticism.

After all this, Augustine was baptized and, as a Christian priest and bishop, went on to make an unparalleled contribution to the Latin Church.  Regarded as the first Western autobiographer for his work, Confessions, famously he wrote: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

There are as many ways to prove the truth of Augustine’s magnificent prayer of restfulness as there are people: everything from the exploratory waywardness of the penitent Augustine to the unrivalled holiness of the Blessed Virgin herself.  Perhaps we can place ourselves somewhere between them.  But however we may describe the way we found God – or rather, God found us – our current restfulness corresponds with the peace Christ bequeaths his Church.

If the commandment to love one another as we have been loved is Christ’s will and testament, then peace is the estate which is parcelled out.  The peace we’re interested in, and which we in fact have, is the peace of the Church, the peace Christ put into his Church.  “My own peace I give you,” says the Lord to us.  Peace is what the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit abide in together.  So, we have among us the peace which belongs to divine life.  It means we have found God and been found by him, and so together we fete the discovery.

Christ’s gift of peace to us all answers the experiences of peace which can come.  There are semblances of peace in deals done and matters resolved.  In those instances, there is an active sense of relief: it no longer hurts or bothers us; it’s no longer happening or looming.  Sure, there is relief for us in having found our home in God, but there is more than that too.

Our peace goes hand-in-glove with unity.  Without Christ, there is no principle of unity between people which can keep us together.  Who else but Christ could draw all people together into a new unity to worship Israel’s God and serve the poor?  Anyone who tries will fail because there is always going to be something about them which is as much disuniting as it is uniting: they too will be someone’s ‘other’, just like all the other messiahs.

When we fight, whether with words or weapons, it is a sign that mere characteristics have been prized more highly than essential commonalities.  So, beware when you’re seeing mainly moral distance between you and your neighbour: sometimes it’s a sign that conflict is in the air.  Do just stop if you hear yourself saying: “He doesn’t think like us; she doesn’t fit in; they’re quite unusual.”  Differences between us there are, but peace comes because they have been surpassed by a unifying power.

Christ transcends all differences between us by reconciling us to his Father.  What once united us in some sense was guilt for sin; we were lumped together for no other reason than that we were guilty.  What now unites us is holiness, worthiness, righteousness before God – these things anyone can have and come from Christ, and because of them there is peace among us.

So, we celebrate and safeguard Christ’s peace among us.  The Prince of Peace is a true brother to everyone, to every kind of person, because he destroys the barriers which keep us from one another and can make our various differences enrich each others’ lives.  The peace of Christ, the peace in the Church, is what we’re inviting people to.  Peace, restfulness, delighting in the discovery of God is the reason to evangelize and sacramentalise, to worship and to work.

Fr Paul Rowse, OP is the Parish Priest of Camberwell East, Victoria.