Joseph Barber Lightfoot on Christ’s parting gift of peace
Bishop Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-1889)
IN this morning’s reading (Mk 12:35-13:14), Jesus promises to his disciples not world peace and seamless social justice, but constant persecution and betrayal.
FOR nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom… the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death. And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
Jesus never promised a Utopia. “Not peace, but a sword” was his prediction (Jn 14:27). And yet as Bishop Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-1889) reminded us, Jesus left with his Apostles a peace which no other creed, no commerce or politics, can begin to approach.
IF you would learn how Christ fulfils His promise to His true disciples, if you would test the value of this peace which He has left as His parting gift, do not seek it in the heat of controversy, in the wrangling of theological disputants, or in the strifes of religious parties: but go rather to the true disciples of Christ, to the lowly and the poor in spirit, to the suffering and oppressed, to the sorrowful and bereaved, to the sick and dying.
Watch the wife cruelly outraged in her deepest feelings by the desertion, or worse than desertion, of a husband, for whose love she has given up all; or the mother wounded at heart by the base ingratitude of a child, for whose advancement she has sacrificed all the comforts, and was ready to sacrifice even the necessities of life.
See how, notwithstanding the bitterness of her trial, a deep calm broods over the sufferer, lulling her sharpest pangs, and enabling her to forget her own sorrow, while she ministers to the less poignant sufferings of others. Go to the wretched hovel of the pauper, worn out with age, helpless, unfriended and alone, destitute of everything which could make the burden of life tolerable, and yet cheerful and contented, drawing from an unseen source never-failing draughts of comfort and hope.
Go and stand by the bed of the dying man; watch his last agonies, as the soul struggles to set itself free; see how amid his paroxysms the gleam of joy lights up his features, flushing them with the consciousness of an invisible Presence, and the faint smile and the pressure of the hand bear witness to this inward peace, triumphant over pain, triumphant over death. Go and visit these scenes, and then say, whether Christ is slack to fulfil His promise, whether the peace of the Gospel is a delusion or not.
Sermons In St Paul’s Sermon X: Christ’s Gift Of Peace.
More by Bishop Lightfoot here.
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"[Politicians] are employed in framing laws and statutes for preventing crimes, and keeping the disorderly multitude within bounds; and at the same time, by personally discountenancing public worship, they are weakening, they are even abolishing, among the multitude, that moral restraint which is of more general influence upon manners than all the laws they frame."
I FIND, by experience, that by often seeing her Portrait, & that of her Dearest Son, I many times recall Him & His Merits, her & her Perfections, to my mind, which before was void of such Heavenly Guests.
I BELIEVE in one God the Father Almighty,