This gospel is taken from what is called the “Farewell Discourse” of Christ.  It is presented in the context of the Last Supper, the last chance that Christ would have, so it would seem, to teach and strengthen his Apostles.

And so, in these Chapters, John portrays Christ as speaking more clearly than ever before about his own divinity, about the mystery of the Trinity, and about the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.

Much of what he tells them would prove to be very challenging indeed.  Christ was asking them to put aside their accustomed reliance on their instincts and their senses and put their trust in what he said, simply because he said it.

But it wasn’t just spiritually that the Apostles were being tested.  By now they knew that Christ’s more and more thinly veiled references to his leaving were to be realised in his arrest and execution.  And the Apostles knew, too, that if they were heirs to his message, they would very likely also be heirs to his fate.

Christ’s final greeting to his Apostles, as John records it, must have sounded a little out of place.  He said, “Peace, peace is my farewell to you, my gift to you.”  Fairly clearly, if the Apostles were to take Christ at his word, they would have to do so with a new understanding of that greeting, a new understanding of peace.  As Christ himself cautioned them, “I give you peace not as the world gives it.”

For the followers of Christ, peace would not necessarily mean that sort of full contentment, that sense of well-being that comes when human needs are satisfied.

Christ, it would seem, was asking them to believe that peace may not have much to do with comfort and satisfaction, that it was much the birth-right of the poor as of the wealthy.

Christ’s gift to his people, his gift of peace, was not a promise of comfort, nor of freedom from conflict.  Rather it was a promise that, despite these things, his people would enjoy a sense of rightness about their lives.

Christ’s gift of peace is a promise that we, all of us, are in the midst of a process of creation that is still going on.  God’s divine creation of the world, the world as John pictures it, is a process to which we are witnesses, in which we have an active part.  The New Jerusalem will be formed from our unfinished world just as surely as a work of art is formed from a half-molded lump of clay.  The worst that humankind can do, with all its selfishness and weakness, is to delay that process.  We can never destroy it.                                                                                                                                                                              Fr Andrew