Verse of the Day for March 25

This is said in the upper room, on the night of the arrest, to men who are about to watch everything they have organised their lives around be taken apart in eighteen hours.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.

The distinction is in the middle. The world's peace is the absence of trouble — quiet borders, settled accounts, nothing pending. It is real, and it is entirely dependent on circumstances holding.

His peace is described as his own, handed over like property. It arrives in a room where the circumstances are about to collapse completely, which is the strongest possible statement about what it does not depend on.

And the instruction that follows is not a suggestion: let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Twice he uses let, which puts something in the hearer's hands.

You cannot stop trouble arriving. You have some say in whether you let it in and give it a chair.

If your peace requires the situation to resolve first, it is the world's kind. That is not a rebuke; it is a description of its limits.

He handed his over in the worst room in the gospels.