Peace, Peace

A while back an official stood on the television, asked about a war that had been going on for months, and he said, “I wouldn’t call it a war.” The missiles disagree. The families disagree. But the sentence went out anyway, smooth as a pulpit blessing.

I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since. Not about the war itself, though we’ll get to the war. About the sentence. Because the Bible has a category for men whose job is to talk a thing out of existence, and it is not a flattering category.

Jeremiah stood in Jerusalem in the last days before everything fell. The city was rotting from the top. The courts were crooked, the prophets were on salary, and the army was coming. And in the middle of it stood a row of professional men of God, healing the wound of the nation lightly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there was no peace (Jeremiah 6:14). They were not lying about the weather. They were lying about the diagnosis. The wound was deep, and they kept applying bandages and calling it healing, because that’s what the king paid for.

God’s opinion of that line of work is not subtle. It’s in the chapter. He says their conduct is shameful, that they don’t know how to blush.

We know how to blush less than any generation that ever lived. We’ve built a whole language designed to keep us from blushing.

Woe to the Euphemism

Isaiah, preaching about a hundred years before Jeremiah, put his finger on the mechanism: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20). Isaiah has plenty of woes for people who do evil; two verses later he pronounces one on judges who take bribes. But this woe in verse 20 lands on the renaming itself. He says woe to those who rename it. The renaming is its own crime, because a thing you can’t name is a thing you can’t repent of, and a thing nobody repents of is a thing nobody is saved from.

The renaming business is booming. A war isn’t a war, it’s a “dispute,” it’s “kinetic activity,” it’s “supporting the aspirations of the people.” Dead civilians aren’t dead civilians, they’re “collateral damage,” four smooth syllables over a pile of children. A plant closes and two hundred families lose their income, and the press release calls it “restructuring for efficiency.” And don’t fool yourself that the dialect belongs to one party. It’s spoken fluently from every podium. One side calls the taking of an unborn life “reproductive health care.” Another side calls a strike that kills a wedding party “precision.” A government that turns hungry children away calls it “border security,” and a movement that burns down the corner store calls it “a message.” Somebody lies to you and it’s a “misstatement.” Somebody sins and it’s “struggling.” The church learned this trick too. We used to say sin. Now we say “brokenness” if we’re feeling tender and “lifestyle” if we’re not, and either way the sharp edge comes off the blade before it ever touches us.

Hear me carefully, because this is not a sermon about vocabulary. It’s a sermon about the link between words and repentance. You cannot confess what you will not name. A man who calls his rage “frustration” will die with his rage intact. A nation that calls its dead “casualty figures” will keep producing them, because figures can be rounded down. The prophet’s complaint against Jerusalem wasn’t only that there was no peace. It was that the preachers said “peace” anyway, and the people loved them for it (Jeremiah 5:31 says they loved to have it so). The lie felt better than the truth, and there was a market for the feeling.

The Way He Talked

Now set all that beside Jesus, because his tongue is a rebuke to every one of our smooth phrases.

This is the man who looked at the most respected religious professionals in Israel and said, “You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones” (Matthew 23:27). No euphemism there. He told Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews who came to him under cover of night, that whoever did evil hated the light. He told a rich man to sell everything. When his disciples pointed at the temple stones, he said, not one stone left on another. When the soldiers came for him he said plainly, “This is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53). He never once called darkness something prettier.

And when violence came for him, he did not call it a dispute. He didn’t call the cross a hardship. He named it, told his disciples exactly what was coming, walked into it with his eyes open, and let the worst thing we ever did be recorded in full, in daylight, with witnesses. The gospel writers didn’t soften it and neither did he. That’s one of the strongest reasons to trust the story: it doesn’t protect the reputation of anybody. Not the disciples, not the crowd, not us.

And this same plain-talking man said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9). Notice he didn’t say blessed are the peace talkers. The euphemists of Jerusalem were peace talkers, plenty of them. A peacemaker is somebody who makes peace, which requires looking straight at the thing breaking it. You can’t heal a wound you’ve been taught to describe in words that hide it. Jesus never once healed lightly.

But Here’s the Mirror

Now, a preacher could stop there and let us all nod along at the television. But this is not a mirror for cable news. It’s a mirror for the pew.

Where do we heal wounds lightly? We do it in our families. The marriage coming apart is “a rough patch.” The son drinking again is “going through a phase.” The estrangement that’s five years old is “we just don’t talk like we used to.” We do it in this room. The budget that doesn’t match the mission is “a challenging season.” The member we ran off is “not really involved anymore.” And we do it with our politics, all of us, whichever flag is ours: the other side’s violence is thuggery and ours is strength, their lies are lies and ours are messaging. James asked a question for exactly this: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (James 4:1). He puts the war in us first. Before we diagnose the world’s habit of renaming its violence, we should confess our own: we have renamed plenty, and the renaming always runs toward whatever lets us off.

And here is the grace in the middle of it, because there has to be grace in the middle of it or none of us could stand the room. The God who refuses to accept “peace, peace” from Jeremiah’s audience is the same God who came in person to say the true word about us and then take the sentence for it. Jesus doesn’t rename your sin so you’ll feel better. He names it so fully that it killed him, and he forgave it from the middle of the dying. That’s the difference between the whole world’s spin and the gospel. Spin says the wound isn’t there. The cross says the wound is real, and borne for you, and cleanable. You can afford to call things what they are when your standing with God doesn’t depend on the renaming.

So What Do We Do?

Speak like a believer whose Lord hates euphemism. Name your own sin with its own name this week, out loud, to God and to one person who can pray for you. Don’t call it stress. Call it what Isaiah and Jeremiah would have called it.

Refuse the smooth words when they come across your screen. When you read that a wedding became a casualty event, say the true sentence: children died. Say it to somebody. Grief that never gets spoken honest gets buried in the body.

Pray for the enemies by name. Not the generals only. The pilots, the politicians, the mothers on the other side of the border who sat down to supper the night the sky came apart. Jesus didn’t leave us a loophole on that one, and we have never seriously tried it.

And be a peacemaker somewhere small. Peacemaking isn’t a foreign policy, and it isn’t a rebuke of everybody who wears a uniform either. The same Lord who said blessed are the peacemakers marveled at a centurion’s faith, so defending the vulnerable and making peace are not enemies. But no uniform and no ballot excuses a lie. Peacemaking is a father who ends the silent treatment. It’s two church folks who stop the feud. It’s telling the truth early, when the truth is cheap, so the lie never gets big enough to need a war to defend it.

The prophets said “peace, peace” when there was no peace, and the city fell. But Micah saw further down the road, to the day God himself arbitrates between the nations, when “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and neither shall they learn war anymore” (Micah 4:3). That day is not a slogan, and it is not only an appointment on God’s calendar. It is a commission, and it has a name. He is the Prince of Peace, and he does not heal wounds lightly. He heals them completely. And until that day, every honest word we speak and every small peace we make is a piece of it arriving early. So his people tell the truth about every wound, make whatever peace can be made, and weep over the city like he did.