The peace of Jesus.

“Peace: I forgive you all;

I give you my peace.

I give it to you, not like the universe gives you:

Keep your mind from being irritated or fearful.

You all heard me tell you that I’m going away,

and returning to you.

If you all love me, you’ll likely be pleased that I’m going to the Father,

because the Father is greater than me.

Now, I told all of you what comes beforehand,

so that once these things happen, you’ll trust me.

I won’t speak much longer with you all,

because the ruler of the universe is coming.

It has nothing on me.

But this is so the universe may know

that I love the Father,

and do as he commanded me.

Get up; we’re leaving.”

—Jesus,

The purpose of the Passion Discourses was to get Jesus’s students ready for the fact that he left: He needed to return to the Father so that we wouldn’t focus on his specific presence in Israel, and would instead obey him and spread his gospel everywhere—wherever we are.

What he left behind with us is his portable presence, so to speak: His Holy Spirit. And he also left us his peace. Jesus’s peace, which he pointed out is different from the so-called “peace” that anyone else offers, is meant to keep us from being irritated or fearful.

Fake peace does no such thing. Fake peace is always a temporary thing, in a state of precarious balance: At any point we might lose it, so we have to keep constant watch over it. We have to “keep the peace”—we have to look out for anything that might disrupt it, and squelch it before it succeeds. The Romans’ method of keeping peace, their pax Romana, was to find any troublemakers and crucify them. A lot of times we Christians preach that Jesus had committed absolutely no crime worthy of crucifixion, and under the Law he absolutely hadn’t. But to the Roman mind, he had disrupted the peace—he had made people angry with him, and they were making a fuss—and, accusations of being a king aside, that alone would get you crucified in most Roman territories.

But Jesus’s peace is not about tamping down external disturbances. Firstly it’s about tamping down internal disturbances: “Keep your mind from being irritated or fearful.” Don’t freak out at every little thing. Don’t give way to paranoia that everyone’s out to get you, that everything is a test you’re meant to fail, that devils are behind anything new and unfamiliar. Don’t spend your life looking for enemies to defeat. They will come up on their own without any help from us.

Secondly, it’s about embracing Jesus’s forgiveness. “I forgive you all; I give you my peace,” Jesus says. Usually this is interpreted, as the KJV “Peace I leave with you.” The verb is afí’imi/“sets aside,” which is the word we most often translate “forgiving” because it has to do with setting aside offenses and sins. Part of peace is setting aside our groundless worries, and part of Jesus’s peace is setting aside any groundless worries that we can’t do what he expects of us, or that we need to focus on getting our act together before we can obey him. Obeying him is getting our act together, and yet somehow we’ve divorced those two ideas. In any event we’re to obey him, knowing that he’s already forgiven us for whatever we feel guilty about—plus for anything we don’t even know we should feel guilty about. We don’t obey Jesus to get right with God: He’s made us right with God, and now we’re free to obey Jesus. Don’t put the cart in front of the horse.

Thirdly, it’s about trusting Jesus. That’s where the other verses come in: Jesus has returned to the Father, and the Father is mightier than the Son. Essentially Jesus is telling his followers, “If you think I’m mighty, and need me around for that reason, you ought to be pleased that I’m going to the Father; he will take care of you much better than I can.” Jesus, in his self-limited power, stepped away so that our focus can be directed towards the unlimited power of the Almighty, dispensed to us by the unlimited power of the Holy Spirit. Peace comes once we learn to depend on Jesus’s teachings, and learn to trust him fully.

The starting point for trusting Jesus, and growing his peace, is to look at what he said, what he taught us, and follow us, and see whether it works or not. It is to obey first, rather than build up enough trust so that we can start obeying. Jesus’s students were following him already, so they were most of the way there. The rest of Jesus’s students—us—have to catch up.

The last verses—about how the ruler of the universe is coming, and how they’re leaving—have to do with the circumstances that Jesus and his followers were in at that time. Jesus had taught them all of this while they were lying around the Passover dinner table. Less than an hour before, Judas Iscariot had gone out to get the cops. Hence “the ruler of the universe” —KJV “the prince of this world”—was coming to get Jesus. Many Christians have interpreted this to mean the devil, ’cause Satan had entered Judas once he had finally decided to turn Jesus in. Others interpret this to mean the literal rulers of the world at the time—the Jews over Jerusalem, and the Romans over the Roman Empire. Jesus taught that the real ruler of our world is sin, which everyone who doesn’t follow God is a slave to. So whether through the devil, its lawyer; or through the police, its enforcers; sin, the embodiment and accumulation of the sins of the world, was coming to catch and kill Jesus, the God that it was entirely opposed to. But before it did, Jesus—who had a few more things to teach—decided to move his students elsewhere, and put off sin a bit. He would conquer it soon enough.