Blessed Are the Peacemakers . . .

THE PRESIDING JUDGE

As a committed believer you are to have a judge that rules within you, presiding over all the decisions you make. This judge is peace, the peace of Christ. This is clear from Col. 3:15, which in the Good News Version reads: “The peace that Christ gives is to guide you in the decisions you make; for it is to this peace that God has called you together in one body.” It is one of the great liberating truths, freeing us from selfish judgment and allowing peace to rule in our hearts. Peace as the presiding judge! What a transforming dynamic that is! It will be helpful to see how this is rendered in different versions.

“Let Christ’s peace be arbiter in your hearts.” (New English)

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.” (RSV)

“May the peace of Christ reign in your hearts.” (Jerusalem)

“Let Christ’s peace direct your minds.” (Schonfield)

“Let the peace of heart which comes from Christ be always present in your hearts and lives.” (Living)

Phillips captures the beauty of the meaning as well as any: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, remembering that as members of the same body you are called to live in harmony, and never forget to be thankful for what God has done for you.”

We are called to be peacemakers! It is as simple—and as profound—as that. God has not called us to be problems, agitators, and factionists, but peacemakers. We are called to live in harmony with each other, for that is what it means to be members of the same Body.

One of our Presidents was known to have a sign on his desk that read The buck stops here, which reminded him that he had to make the decision, even when he did not want to. Logicians assure us that all reflective thought is in reference to solving some problem. We may have things on our minds and we can jog our memories and ponder on many things, but whenever we think critically it is in order to solve some problem. Problem-solving. It is what life is about, and our world would be unfit for us if we did not have the challenge of problems, even if some of them seem impossible.

But all our decisions are in the hands of an arbiter or judge. The arbiter is often selfish pride, which means that all decision making revolves around self. One’s own ego or self-will is the presiding judge, and so all decisions are for self esteem or bodily comforts.

The judge may be some outside force, and we are increasingly becoming a nation of “other directed” people, which Toynbee found to be a cause of the fall of the great empires of history. Some men who never grow up are still directed by their mothers, who cannot turn them loose. Others are “organization men” who learn to think as DuPont thinks or as IBM thinks. Career people in the military often so “belong to the Army” or to the Navy that a decision is hardly ever a free one. The authentic self is often lost in the morass of the masses, and thus what Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, calls the Crowd becomes our presiding judge. The masses really make the decisions for the majority of the people, which Martin Buber, the philosopher who advised Ben Gurion, mournfully called massification.

Taking a page from Buber we might call a lot of the decision making among our congregations as churchification. “What would the other churches think about us?” is often the question of arbitration among our leaders. Or it may be a hangup on tradition—We’ve never done it that way! It isn’t that our folk do not have a presiding judge, but that the wrong one is presiding.

I am not suggesting that a liberated believer is foot loose and fancy free. I do not believe in individualism. Protestantism’s most grievous error has been its accent on individual and personal religion, to the neglect of the Biblical concept of community. To the contrary the Christian is free to be bound—to his family, to society, and most of all to Christ and his Body. The plain truth is that someone or something will preside as judge within us—a party, an institution, an ism, the crowd, or the self—and so we must decide if the wrong judge will be dethroned and the peace of Christ enthroned.

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne, “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” He went on to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

For the believer the question is not simply whether he is involved in mankind, but what resources he takes with him into that involvement. To be both sustained and constrained by the peace of Christ is the highest motivation. If he is in a tug of war with the evil forces, which is the figure in Gal. 5:17, he is not alone in the struggle, for he has a Helper. Moreover he has a goal, peace, for to this he has been called.

Self-reliance is a great American virtue, popularized by Emerson in an essay by that title; and it is, to be sure, a virtue that is getting away from us as Americans. But self-reliance is hardly a Christian virtue, unless carefully defined, for the believer knows all too well that no one can actually rely on self. We may love Emerson when he says, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude,” but the believer is hesitant to place such emphasis on solitude. She knows that she is never really alone. It is better to say that in the midst of the crowd the Christian, with perfect sweetness, looks to the divine arbiter who rules from within, and thus cultivates peace in a troubled world.

Peace has its price tag, for it comes only by being waged. The most blessed peacemaker of all was crucified, and if peace is our business, it is to this that we have been called, we are likely to get hurt in the struggle. After all, the one who wrote, “Let the peace of Christ be the presiding judge in your heart,” also testified of the apostles in their role as makers of peace, We are fools for Christ. The apostles were in fact under the sentence of death, a spectacle to the world. They went hungry, ill-clad, and homeless. They were not only slandered but were treated as the scum of the world (1 Cor. 4:9-13). Peacemaking is serious business. It may end at a cross, or in jail, or in disrepute. If the party or the crowd rules the heart, the decisions will be safe. If Christ is enthroned, the decisions may be risky.

“Set Christ apart in your hearts as Lord,” 1 Pet. 3:15 tells us, which is something more than believing him to be the Son of God. God made him both Lord and Christ, Acts 2:36 assures us, and he is both to us. He is to reign within us as Lord. His peace is the presiding judge.

This settles a lot of things in advance. We will not quarrel in our homes since the presiding judge rules for peace. We will not handle disagreement in the community of saints by dividing, for the ruling Christ within reminds us that we are called to peace.

Called to peace! We have not lately been that kind of people, but we can change. The change will come when we go to the ballot box of our heart and throw that rascal out that presides over our decisions. And install the right one.—the Editor

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity,—George Bernard Shaw