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Gospel Mandate for Peace

Jesus said,
"If two make peace between them
in the same house,
they will say to the mountain
'move,'
and it will move."
Gospel of Thomas, logion 48

The Day of Resurrection teaches that God's love shows no partiality (Acts 10:34). No one is dispensable or disposable. There is a toughness to God's impartial love. We see this in the resurrection. God's love is stronger than death.

Frederick Buechner writes in his book Wishful Thinking: "One of the titles by which Jesus is known is Prince of Peace. And he used the word himself in what seem at first glance to be two radically contradictory utterances. On one occasion he said to the disciples, 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword' (Matt. 10:34). And later on, the last time they ate together, he said to them, 'Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you' (John 14:27). the contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle but the presence of love."

Peace also means the breaking down of boundaries in the Letter to the Ephesians: "For (Christ Jesus) is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups (Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female) into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.... so he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father" (Ephesians 2:14, 17-18).

One thinks of peace and the breaking down of boundaries as the President of the United States meets with Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, May 20. The dividing wall in Israel seems to be one that is made of much more than concrete. Come Lord Jesus, bring peace.

Passion for Peace

Fr. Roy Bourgeois of the Maryknolls stayed at the Saint Paul's rectory on Saturday May 14. I had the privilege of presenting him with the Passion for Peace Award at the Friends' Center the next day. My first encounter with the Maryknoll order was in 1981. I was vicar of Saint Luke's Church in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Fr. Albert Reymann returned that year from El Salvador and found his way to our ministry among the poor at Saint Luke's. He was in Philadelphia recovering from a total breakdown after watching countless women and children killed over the past fifteen years of his ministry. He emphasized that the United States was at war in El Salvador not against communism but in the name of private business and even in the name of God. In 1981 on Easter morning Roy Bourgeois flew to El Salvador with a CBS camera crew. It was a trip from which he almost did not return. Salvadoran peasants risked their lives to show him the extent of their suffering.

The School of the Americas Watch was founded in 1990 by Father Roy Bourgeois after six Jesuit priests and a mother and daughter were massacred in El salvador by troops trained at the School of the Americas. The purpose of School of the Americas Watch is to close this school that has been used as a tool of oppression, to stand in solidarity with the poor and to educate the public about U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.