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Living in Peace

In the beginning, God established a world of wholeness and peace. Once that world was shattered by Adam and Eve’s disobedience, God chose to re-establish the state of shalom through his chosen nation, Israel. If Israel had obeyed God’s law of compassion, life in Israel for both men and women would have been the happiest place.

The Hebrew word for peace, “Shalom”, is so rich that its almost untranslatable. Thus the society envisioned by the psalmist in Psalm 85:10, as a society of shalom, is an order of life characterized by joy and justice, piety and plenty, kindness and caring. But God’s people failed to achieve God’s loving ideal. Isaiah graphically depicted the moral  and spiritual sickness of that disobedient nation (Isaiah 1:5-7). Divine punishment, administered in sorrowful grace, again and again overwhelmed Israel.

Although the nation lasted more than 450 years, eventually Israel was overtaken by invading empires. Thousands of God’s people were taken  captive and carried to another land. But God in his mercy allowed a remnant of Israelites to return from exile. They fiercely resolved not to repeat their ancestors’ sinful failure. So began a long period of legalism that extended from roughly 400 BC to 400 AD. Well-meaning rabbis, many of them devout and learned, developed a restrictive system of rules and regulations. At first these teachings circulated orally, but gradually their interpretations were written down. Life-giving laws that were once a delight and joy as well as the source of soul-enlightening guidance and blessing (Psalm 119) changed into a rigid system of religious ritualism that Jesus denounced (Matthew 23:13-14).

To be sure, there were teachers of the law, rabbis, priests, as spiritual servants of God, proclaimed and practised Micah 6:8, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you ? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”. Likewise, many ordinary Israelites were models of virtue and piety, loving God and doing good to their neighbours. The  Jewish people as a whole found life a heavy burden under the oppression of their Roman conquerors and the rigid rules and structure of the Pharisees. Economically impoverished and spiritually ignorant, they were “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36).

Yet into this turbulent situation, Jesus came as compassion incarnate. He made caring central in his ministry, sweeping aside any legalistic distortions and ethnic limitations, and focussing on the all-inclusive grace of God. A Jew by birth, and a devout Jew by practice, Christ knew that his heavenly Father, the God of the Old Testament, is the God of compassion. Jesus modelled perfectly the compassionate neighbour-love that Paul later wrote about to the church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 13), declaring it to be the greatest of all virtues.

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