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13

INNER PEACE

  The healing power of God’s gift of reconciliation must touch the three great relationships in our lives: our relationship with God, with each other and with our own selves. These three areas are all wounded by sin. In each there can be disharmony and alienation which cry out for healing. In Christian preaching the emphasis is usually placed on the need to be reconciled to God and to our neighbour. But, in fact, the first and most basic and painful form of alienation we experience is alienation within ourselves. Reconciliation with God and my neighbour is intimately related to being reconciled with my own self. If we do not enjoy some inner peace, harmony and love, it will be quite difficult to approach others in forgiveness and love. The first and most important reconciliation must take place within myself. When that happens we become whole. We are healthy as people. They say that the words ‘holy’, ‘health’ and ‘whole’ are all related and come from one root. It is easy to believe that.

  ‘Be holy, for I, Yahweh your God, am holy’ (Leviticus 19:2). This God has revealed himself as Trinity, the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit bound together in a community of love, a holy harmony. So we can say the call to be like God is an invitation to harmony within ourselves. It begins with joyful acceptance of God’s first gift to us, the gift of our own selves. In invites me to pray with the Psalmist:

'It was you who created my inmost self,
and put me together in my mother’s womb;
for all these mysteries I thank you
for the wonder of myself.'
Psalm 139:13-14

  Let me stop wishing I was someone else, stop comparing myself with others, stop judging myself. Let me go further and accept that this self is in some strange way wounded and capable of evil. And go further still and believe that God knows this and still draws close, very close in love, with power to heal these wounds, to forgive actual failures, no matter how many or how terrible and to reach down to the mysterious roots of the evil with the healing balm of love. He does not hold my sins against me. He keeps no record of wrong. He offers a healing so powerful that I can become a new creation. My part is to believe this good news and to accept, to see myself as he sees me, to believe what he tells me about myself, to let go of self-hatred and self-judgment. My heavenly Father invites me to go in with him to celebrate this experience of being found after being lost. We judge ourselves more severely than God does. If our conscience judges us, St. John tells, us, ‘God is greater than our conscience’ (John 3:20).

  We find it so hard to let God be God. We measure him and impose limits on him and his healing power. We say ‘What’s done cannot be undone’. With God that is not true. It is another of our limited human concepts. It is human wisdom. We speak of the infinite mystery of God’s love revealed in Jesus. A saying attributed to Oscar Wilde goes like this: ‘No man is rich enough to buy back his past.’ We know what he is saying. ‘What’s done is done and cannot be undone. Evil is irreversible. You can’t gather up spilt milk.’ But that is human wisdom. God can gather up spilt milk. Christ is rich enough to buy back our past. The very expression ‘buy back’ is a common scripture phrase, ‘to redeem’. In Isaiah, the Lord says, ‘Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you’ (Isaiah 43:1).

  The holiness of God is the closeness of God and God is not time-bound. God is loving and healing through all the three tenses, past, present and future. Make an act of faith in that healing love which reaches back down your past life. Enter into that healing river which has been and is flowing through the whole of your life. Offer for healing the apparently irreversible evil, the curse you uttered which seemed to destroy another person, the abortion you advised or caused, the wasting sickness of AIDS brought on by your own careless lifestyle, the hatred towards another which was not healed before the other died, the spiteful calumny which ruined another’s good name and which you cannot take back, the hatred towards a father or mother you never met or expect to meet, the apparently unbreakable addiction in which you are trapped and which could have been avoided had you accepted good advice. It is a dreary list and can go on and on. The good news is that there is a power of beauty, truth and love greater than all this misery. There is a healing love available. There are no terminal illnesses of the human spirit.

  Yes, you are hurt. You lie wounded by the roadside like that helpless traveller on the road to Jericho. But do not be afraid, take hope. Look up. Someone is approaching. He kneels down beside you. You see the compassion in his eyes. His touch is so gentle as he cleans the wounds with oil and bandages them. And, as he does, so you notice strange scars on his hands. He, too, at some time, must have been attacked and hurt and wounded. Indeed, the prophet says that it is by these very wounds and bruises of his that you are now being healed (Isaiah 53:5). The prophet does not say, ‘By his wounds you are judged’ or ’By his wounds you are condemned’. No. He says that by his wounds you are healed, because these wounds of his speak of a love beyond all telling. There is your healing and reconciliation. ‘It is all God’s work’, says Paul (2 Corinthians 5:18). Let him heal you. And when you remember that evil from the past which seemed irreversible, it will now have lost all power to sting and hurt you. It is healed. Now it can even be a source of joy and of love, for it reminds you of this Good Samaritan. Your healed wounds become like the healed scars on his hands: they remind you of a love you thought impossible.

  In Mark’s Gospel we have a powerful, dramatic description of a man totally alienated within himself, a man no longer self-possessed and evil-possessed. This is how Mark describes the poor afflicted man:

'A man with an unclean spirit came out from the tombs.
The man lived in the tombs and no one could secure him any more, even with a chain; because he had often been secured with fetters and chains but had snapped the chains and broken the fetters, and no one had the strength to control him. All night and all day, among the tombs and in the mountains, he would howl and gash himself with stones.'

What a graphic picture! The man has opted out of life itself. He has chosen to live among the tombs, the place of the dead. He is a man but howls like an animal. He is so alienated within himself that he even hurts himself physically, gashing himself with stones. The evil in him is stronger than any human effort to help him. Some had tried to bind him to prevent him hurting himself, but he broke the fetters. Jesus appears on the scene. ‘Catching sight of Jesus from a distance, he ran up and fell at his feet’ (v.7) Jesus drives out the evil spirits, and when the terrified onlookers who had run away return, they see the demoniac ‘sitting there, clothed and in his full senses’ (v15). Jesus restores the man to himself, to health, to wholeness.

  Incidents like this in the life of Jesus drew admiration from many. But in others they provoked a hostile, jealous and bitter criticism. Those who saw in Jesus someone they could not understand, someone who was too different, who would not conform and who challenged traditional structures, these critics put an ugly and sinister interpretation on this kind of healing. ‘The man casts out devils only through Beelzebul, the prince of devils’ (Matthew 12:24). And so, Jesus, having done battle with an evil spirit, is now confronted by evil with a more human face, people’s blind and jealous hatred. Very simply he says that evil cannot cast out evil, you cannot put out fire with another fire. The true interpretation of what is happening is that a greater power has now appeared in our world, a power greater than any evil, and it is the power of love, unconditional love. 'If it is through the Spirit of God that I cast devils out, then know that the kingdom of God has overtaken you. How can anyone make his way into a strong man’s house and burgle his property unless he has tied up the strong man first?’ (Matthew 12:28-29).

  This image of ‘the kingdom’ was central to the teaching of Jesus. Here we have considered one great fruit of the kingdom, the healing of inner alienation and the experience of inner peace and harmony. Again we recall the poem of the fifteenth-century anonymous author:

'Thou shalt know him when he comes
Not by any din of drums
Nor by the vantage of his airs
Nor by anything he wears
Neither by his crown
Nor his gown.
For his presence known shall be
by the holy harmony
that his coming makes in thee.'

 

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