Can Christians Be Makers of Peace?
Friday, August 29, 2025
I can think of nothing more prophetic than to preach the gospel of Jesus. Nothing more radical, more countercultural, than to nurture and promote the values of the Spirit—love, peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness as well as self-control—in little ways and great. —Cyprian Consiglio, Epiphanies
Camaldolese monk and songwriter Cyprian Consiglio shares a memory of visiting Israel and Palestine:
One of the strongest images I have from my brief but intense pilgrimage to the Holy Land is of Rabbi Eli, who was probably the closest thing to one of the Hebrew prophets I have ever met. This was an Israeli who had been arrested several times for standing in solidarity with Palestinians, protesting the human rights violations against them…. We were standing at a high spot in East Jerusalem looking out over the disputed territories, and Rabbi Eli was pointing out the various iterations of the security wall making its serpentine way through Palestinian land. He was showing us a map of a new settlement about to begin construction in defiance of the UN and the US, which would effectively cut Palestine in half, thus preventing any possibility of Palestinians ever having a contiguous piece of land to call their state and effectively destroying the so-called two-state solution. Rabbi Eli said, “And so we are asking ourselves: What time is it? Is it a quarter to midnight? Is it five minutes to midnight? With this development I think it’s one minute to midnight. It’s almost too late.”
That moment seared so deeply in my mind that on the way home on the plane I wrote a whole song about it called “One Minute to Midnight,” the closest thing to a ’60s-style protest song I had ever written. One of the verses included lines that were my sadly ironic version of the famous verses from the prophet Isaiah: “We’ve beaten our ploughshares back into swords / and made spears of our pruning hooks.” And I added, “We’ve turned revelation to a battle of words / and made weapons of our holy books.”
Consiglio finds himself changed by Rabbi Eli’s solidarity with the Palestinian people:
My friends told me that when I came back from that trip to the Holy Land my preaching changed. It was more fiery, more “prophetic,” I suppose. I was fired up by the frustration and energized by the agitation that I felt witnessing up close a situation that was patently unsustainable and obviously unjust, but with no visible solution and no one with enough real moral authority to “fix” everything. And I think I felt like never before the challenge of being a follower of Jesus, and I glimpsed what a privileged position we Christians have there in the Holy Land as well as in the world at large, to stand in the breach between our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters and dare to preach love of our enemies, dare to believe that peace if possible, dare to take Jesus at his word.
______________________________________________________
John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.”
– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk
If you and I are made by God and of God (as Julian of Norwich teaches us), and if God is Love, then it would make sense that, on a deep spiritual and even material sense, we are Love as well.
2.
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
– Flannery O’Connor, American Author
This feels true to me.
It is not only that the truth shall set us free, but it will make us odd to a whole world that prefers to live in illusions, half-truths, and fabrications. The world has sanctioned stories that it chooses to tell, it has pre-approved narratives that it wants us to live within because they keep us from challenging the status quo and not rocking the boat “too much” for everyone else.
However, the truth shall make us odd.
To live truthfully, listening to the sound of the genuine around us, will invariably make us antagonists to falsehood.
Perhaps this is why many of us feel uneasy or even lonely when we consider the scope of Christianity in the West today. What passes for “truth” is often merely rhetoric or propaganda tailored to a particular group of people.
However, it will be okay.
Truth always eventually roars like a lion, falsehood eventually crumbles, and the odd ones will be shown as those who have been made free.
3.
“For we no longer take up “sword against nation,” nor do we “learn war any more,” having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus, who is our leader.”
– Origen of Alexandria, 2nd Century Early Church Father
The way of violence has nothing to do with the way of Jesus of Nazareth.
Who would Jesus shoot, bomb, starve, cage, or execute?
No one.
After all, the Beatitude says, “Blessed are the peacemakers…” not “Blessed are the warmakers.”
4.
“If every man took only what was sufficient for his needs, leaving the rest to those in want, there would be no rich and no poor.”
– Basil of Caesarea, 4th Century Cappadocian Theologian
44% of the world’s population (that’s roughly 3.5 billion people) live on less than $6.85 per day.
And yet, I live in a country where we spend that much per day on coffee on the way to work.
It is interesting to me that what marks so much of Christianity in America is centered around topics of the culture wars, and yet the early church had much more of an emphasis on the poor.
In fact, the topic of the poor is mentioned more than 2,000 times across both the Old and New Testaments.
Regardless, the actual ethics of the Bible are much more socially aware than many might want to acknowledge.
5.
“Whoever has ears, let him hear.”
– Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew 11:15
There is a strange paradox that even Jesus himself encountered people who were not ready to hear the teachings he gave them. He who is the Christ could not communicate in a way that more people could understand him. It is perplexing.
This means we should not be too surprised if the teachings of Christianity are not heard or understood by more people today. We are, by no means, as good a teacher of the faith as Jesus was.
And, there are plenty of lessons that Christ is still trying to teach each of us individually that fly completely over our heads.
Christ, have mercy. We don’t know what we are doing, and we are a stubborn people who think we know better than we do, failing to have the humility to keep learning throughout our lives.
May we each stay open to the new lessons and insights that Spirit is trying to teach us, and be willing to hear from new teachers who can phrase things in a way that they can finally sink in.
