Supernatural Peace
There are few places that endanger my religion more than the driver’s seat of my car. Driving nowadays has definitely become a contact sport like something out of Mad Max. And when others insist on driving like Mel Gibson in the 1979 blockbuster, it triggers me. Oh, I try to implement strategies into my morning commute to stay away these maniacal motorists, but sometimes they are unavoidable. Case in point, yesterday morning I was pulling out into traffic on the way to take my daughter to school. I should have had plenty of margin but a pickup truck, barreling down the street, was very clearly speeding. He zoomed around me, across double-yellow lines into oncoming traffic with horn blaring.
Can I be completely real? I actively wished that guy ill.
I then proceeded to feel guilty about my angry, impure thoughts. “Jesus wouldn’t have muttered curses at an insensitive driver,” I said to myself. “He wouldn’t have felt the urge to flip that guy off.”
It’s times like these that I realize how very far away I am from the Christian maturity I so desperately yearn for, and it reminds me of a familiar image of John Wesley and the Wednesbury Riots. On the 20th of October 1743, Wesley preached in a north Staffordshire town, notorious for its lawlessness, called Wednesbury. The story is long and complex. (Spoiler alert: many of his attackers came to Christ and Wesley escaped relatively unscathed.)
But it’s the image of that event (from the imagination of an anonymous artist) that I find so evocative and, at times, convicting. Published many years after the riot in a book entitled “Wycliffe to Wesley; Heroes and Martyrs of the Church in Britain” (published in 1885 by T. Woolmer, London. Author Gregory J. Robinson), the engraving depicts Wesley in the midst of an angry, howling mob poised with clubs, bottles (and, yes, even a pitchfork) ready to do Wesley in.
What I find so compelling about this image is the way Wesley is depicted… calm, serene, even Christ-like… without the faintest hint of fear in his demeanor. Just to point out the obvious… when an angry mob is baying for blood and trying to kill you, that is not a normal response.
Jesus, of course, was always Wesley’s model. We read in Luke chapter 4:
28 When they heard this, the people in the synagogue were furious. 29 Jumping up, they mobbed him and forced him to the edge of the hill on which the town was built. They intended to push him over the cliff, 30 but he passed right through the crowd and went on his way.
How on earth is it possible to keep your cool when people are out to get you? In short, it isn’t. “On earth,” there is no defense from the constant daily attacks designed to rob us of our joy and snatch away our serenity. We need the “Supernatural Peace” of Jesus Christ.
Many Christians, when they hear the word “supernatural” tend to think of the more “exciting”, in-your-face manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s power: like raising the dead, cleansing the leper or casting out demons. But may I suggest that the peace of Christ is every bit as “supernatural”? What I mean is that the peace we need is not of this world. Jesus himself said in John 14:27,
27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (emphasis added)
Jesus told his followers, it’s not the world’s peace. It’s his peace. Elsewhere he explained the world can never give true peace. Moreover, the world cannot even understand it. That’s the kind of peace I need to deal with crazies on the highway and even the everyday little annoyances that come my way.
I am encouraged by the 16th-century Roman Catholic mystic, Teresa of Avila. Teresa was quite the prayer warrior and, yet, she was human enough to admit that she often tapped the hour glass in an attempt to make her prayer time go more quickly.
After St Teresa of Avila died, the thoughts that have come to be known as “St Teresa’s Bookmark” were found written in her handwriting in the margins of her breviary. The prayer is perhaps familiar to us:
Let nothing disturb you.
Let nothing frighten you.
All things pass away.
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
They who have God
lack nothing.
God alone is enough.
That’s what I’m praying today. “Lord, give me your peace today and remind me that angry mobs, blaring horns and even my own failures pass away but you never change and that when I have you, I have enough.”
“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.”