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May 21, 2023: Faith in Jesus, the Prince of Peace
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This time when they entered, they didn’t hurriedly lock the door behind them. Previously, they ascended the stairs to the Upper Room as quickly as their Jewish feet could climb the concrete steps. A number of times they did this after Jesus had been arrested, killed, and such. The culminating events of the Lord’s life placed the deepest sense of fear into their hearts and all their actions. They never ran up a set of stairs so fast. And not only run their feet up a set of stairs, leaving a flame behind their sandals, their hands could not reach the lock on the door quickly enough. You would have thought a ghost followed on their heels. Or the Boston Strangler. “Lock that door!!!” they shouted at Thomas as he stepped into the Upper Room after performing his chore of food shopping for some famished Apostles. They were so afraid at this point, it’s amazing they could even think of food. I’m sure we’ve had a moment or two when food was our last thought, having been forced to deal with something so serious that it consumed our thinking day and night. This would be the Eleven in the Upper Room after Jesus was taken prisoner, subsequently led to death on a cross.
Remember the time when we used to keep the doors unlocked in our homes, both day and night? If our parents forgot to lock the front door later in the evening before they called it a day, we wouldn’t lay in our beds wondering if the front and back doors were locked or not. I would prefer to wonder and think about my Little League game the next day, hoping I would hit a home run. I always enjoyed running around the bases at a slower pace rather than all-out. The only way to do this in baseball, of course, was to hit the ball far enough and high enough to fly over the fence. My thoughts were not on whether my parents locked the front door or not. Even in the crowded neighborhood in which our family lived, with numerous families and kids just yards from one another. I guess we call those days “the good old days.” In a sense, they were good days. I’m certain the Apostles recalled their own good old days when Jesus called Lazarus out of his tomb, or when he fed the thousands with the best bread and fish they ever tasted.
But the concern of locking our doors was not an overriding, obsessive concern like it is nowadays. If they locked it, they locked it. If they didn’t, they didn’t. What’s there to be afraid of? What is there to fear? Some switch went off along the way that changed this way of free-thinking. Someone dropped a massive cloud of fear over much of the United States and other nations at some point, causing us to purchase outdoor cameras; door bells with cameras where you can now see who’s at your front door in Shrewsbury while you lay on the beach at Cape Cod; alarms loud enough to scare off a pack of wolves and cluster of bears; lights throughout the yard and driveway that get tripped off by the nocturnal skunk or raccoon, scaring the daylights out of such cute animals; triple bolt locks on doors that a Sherman tank would have difficulty bowling over; other weapons that will stop anyone and anything who enters without invitation, sending them off to see the face of God, and wherever their judgment sends them after their unexpected Divine encounter. We never forget to lock our doors anymore. It’s on the top of the to-do list after 6 P.M. each evening. We live in fear, and we know it. No different from the Apostles in the Upper Room after their Master was taken hostage.
In truth, fear is a human emotion that works best for us when limited, or altogether gotten rid of, for the most part. This is better known as the peace Jesus gives. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you…” I suspect the only human beings who ever lived while possessing no fear, the smallest bit of fear, or the most productive sort of fear, were the Saints. They actually listened and applied Jesus’ words above to their lives. Saints did not fear other people. They found/find peace in Christ. If they held/hold any fear within their hearts, it was/is concerned with a genuine fear of their own salvation, and not how violent people could damage them physically. Saints were a thousand percent focused on how God could “damage their souls” when they went forward to meet Him face-to-face. Sadly, many folks have not learned or considered this basic lesson of eternal life from the holy Saints in the Church. It’s best to not walk around the streets of our world attempting to instill fear into the hearts of other people, while not fearing the judgment God will thrust upon us when we die. It’s very spiritually healthy to fear our eternal judgment, hopefully drawing us toward God’s mercy. This is what the Saints did across the board. Would you like to have no fear in your life? Yes? Then live like a Saint, which is not impossible. Otherwise, lock your front and back doors every night, like the Apostles did during the most haunting time of their lives, living like someone was always coming up behind them, ready to destroy them. “Hurry, lock the door quickly!!!” No thanks. That’s not for me.
What’s so fascinating about the Eleven Apostles is to read in the Scriptures about their transformation from abject fear to peace and courage. It’s a story that never grows old, speaking to every generation. Really, speaking to us individually. What began in the Garden of Gethsemane with the arrest of Jesus, and their reaction to his arrest as one of all-out fear while running from the authorities, is transformed into these same creatures now proclaiming openly and forcefully what God has done for every human being in the Person of Christ Jesus his Son. Now, it’s the devil who takes flight when we say, “Get behind me, Satan.” Or, “Hail Mary, full of grace…”
So, would it be proper and on target to say that others who seek to instill bad fear into the lives of people, fear grounded in violence and control, fear that emanates from down below, that they do the devil’s bidding? Remember, good, healthy fear humbly concerns our judgment before God when our hour arrives. But imposing fear on others as a form of control, imposed by mere mortals seeking to control speech, thoughts, actions, and all that attacks the freedom of the person with which God has blessed us…Well, we can either lock the front and back doors of our lives, or, we can live in the peace that Christ gives, and not as the world gives. I pray we do not, as Christians, live in the fear of what authorities or other people can do to us in this slight moment of our lives because we openly believe, say, that human life begins at the moment of conception, and to be complicit in or support the stopping of a child’s life any time after conception is the gravest sin against the 5th commandment. Rather, I pray we fear what God will decide with us eternally if we support in any way the above, which is what matters most. To walk absent of this healthy fear of God is to walk in present spiritual blindness, in my humble opinion.
Also in my humble opinion, as we hear proclaimed in the Acts of the Apostles this Sunday, the Apostles returned to the Upper Room after witnessing Jesus ascend to heaven. To have been there that day as part of the small crowd witnessing such an event! Their walk back to the Upper Room was far better than the walk Jesus had with two disciples on the Road to Emmaus when they thought he was still dead. The walk of the Apostles back to the room where Jesus fed them, for the first time, his Body and Blood in the bread and wine set before them at table, was a walk where the huge cloud of fear that dropped on them a few weeks earlier was no longer. The cloud of fear and doubt that found its source in the devil went up like a puff of smoke, disappearing for good. They did not run up the stairs to the Upper Room this time, looking back each step they took to see if someone with vile intentions had followed them, searching them out for personal destruction. They took their sweet ol’ time, sauntering up the stairs laughing, rejoicing, celebrating, high-fiving, patting each other on the back, filled with joy that Jesus was alive, with them, and about to send the Spirit of Truth into their hearts. It was like they returned to their childhood when their parents had no need to lock the house doors. They could sleep at night without an obsessive concern for their own safety.
Fear can be an emotion that stops us in our tracks, causing us to hide from forces and the outer world, locking us in our homes. Homes were not made for locking ourselves into. They are meant to be places of comfort, rest, good eating, good cheer, watching the Bruins and Red Sox lose, and many other actions that speak to the better part of who we are. The Apostles finally reached this good point in the Upper Room in their love for Christ. Above all, though, may our homes be grounded in our faith in Jesus, the Prince of Peace, the One who was fearless in his “assignment” of bringing our world back to his Father.