John s Gospel was written for another troubled group of people. The Johannine community was a small persecuted minority, who had been excommunicated from the synagogue, from the faith of their ancestors for confessing faith in Christ, and who faced daily hostility in an intense way. For them the sense of having been abandoned by Jesus in the world was quite real. But Jesus tells them too, - do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid, take on my peace even in the midst of crisis. How in reality can I get hold of this kind of peace, when life begins to close in on me, and everything seems bleak, or I m anxious about something that simply can t be resolved.
Peace sometimes seems far away and difficult to find, yet alone maintain.
The anxiety we struggle with in the nitty gritty of the everyday is no different on the international stage, and has the same roots. The world as we know it is powerless to sustain peace. It is so full of ethnic and religious bitterness, anxiety and fear that attempts to bring enduring peace between nations are continually swamped. In places like the Middle East people struggle to overcome age-old hatreds, and centuries of pain and discontent to find peace, but it is always elusive and incomplete, and the innocent continue to suffer. People spoke of the First World War as the war to end all wars and set about finding an everlasting peace.