The River That Refused to Be Still

When Jesus said, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give as the world gives," He was not offering the kind of peace that asks us to be quiet while others suffer.

Rachel Held Evans once wrote about how the most Christ-like communities she encountered were the ones brave enough to sit with discomfort. Real peace, she suggested, looks less like silence and more like showing up.

Consider a river. The world's version of peace would dam it — control it, still it, make it predictable and safe. But a living river is never still. It carves new channels through rock. It floods old boundaries. It carries sediment to places that desperately need fertile ground. The river is peaceful not because it stops moving but because it knows exactly where it is going.

Jesus offered His disciples this river-peace on the eve of His own execution by the empire. He was not promising comfort. He was promising a current strong enough to carry them through crucifixion Friday and out the other side. A peace that moves toward the marginalized, that sits at unwelcome tables, that speaks when silence would be easier.