Fifth Sunday Of Lent

Maryknoll Lay Missioner Sarah Bueter reflects on striving to create God’s peace on Earth, here and now.

Ask what violence looks like in our world, and we have myriad examples. In El Salvador, structural violence and interpersonal violence are visible: structurally, the poor majority fight for basic protections against an authoritarian regime, and interpersonally, in my village, the yells of neighbors’ interfamilial violence echo over the tin rooftops.

Ask what peace looks like. We know what it should look like. We often treat it as a future goal, an empyrean, elusive expectation toward which we strive.

Like Martha (“I know [my dead brother Lazarus] will rise in the resurrection on the last day”), we profess that good will triumph over evil in the distant future. We can imagine it sometimes.

Imagine Jesus then responding to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life.” Here. Right now!
Jesus tells Martha that the resurrection and the life exist here, now, in the middle of mourning her brother’s death. Not as a future promise on the last day. But right now. In her midst. In him.

How Martha must have felt! To imagine goodness in the midst of her brother’s death would be unbearably difficult.

So it is with the peace that Christ brings.

Pope Leo invites us to see peace not as a future reality, but something we cultivate daily: “Peace is more than just a goal; it is a presence and a journey.” Although Pope Paul VI famously pronounced in 1972, “If you want peace, work for justice,” the invitation is also as follows: if you want peace, work for peace. Live peace. Imagine peace. Cultivate peace in actions and attitudes that are “lived, cultivated, and protected.” It is a “ principle that guides and defines our choices.”

Working for peace is not a disavowal of a commitment to justice, but rather a reminder that justice operates within the gratuitousness of God’s love and mercy. This calls us to be “houses of peace…where justice is practiced and forgiveness is cherished.”

The village where I serve in the mountains of El Salvador often models what a “house of peace” looks like. After civil war fighting razed their homes and after they dwelt for many years as refugees in Honduras, the villagers returned in 1987 to rebuild their entire village. Some families were on one side of the fighting, others on the other side, yet they banded together to construct a new life for themselves. When a death occurs in the community, everyone drops everything to attend the funeral. Even school is cancelled.

Yet it is far from perfect, our recent community meeting devolved into shouting, derailed by words weaponized [even under the guise of defending certain values]. Old wounds still run deep. After all, not everyone in the village was on the same side of the war.

However, everyone stayed the entire meeting. No villager walked out.

This is not simply an example of practicing justice, of giving people their due. This is an example of peacebuilding. It is messy. When you commit to it, you undoubtedly look foolish. “Why go to those meetings?” some villagers told me. “Nothing gets done. You’ll see.” But you know what? You can’t be a peacemaker to some without being a joke and an embarrassment to others.

That’s the thing about peace. It is disarming. It looks foolish, just like the Christ who entered into the world as an unarmed child and tells us, “Put your sword back into its sheath” (Jn 18:11; cf. Mt 26:52).

The community meeting made very little, if any, progress. But villagers keep showing up. Peacebuilding looks slow. Nonviolence looks ineffective. Peace must be remembered, sought, and chosen over and over again. Our readings tell us that evil will not have the last word. Love will win out. Thus says the LORD, “I have promised, and I will do it.” (Ezekiel 37:14).

Sarah Bueter joined the Maryknoll Lay Missioners in 2023 and is serving in El Salvador, where she lives and works in the rural village of La Ceiba, Chalatenango.

Photo: Ceiba tree, courtesy of Jackson Wang, available in the public domain via Flickr.