Okay, Princess Bride fans, I’ve got your attention now, right? I keep saying I’m going to stop making references to The Princess Bride, one of the most beloved films of all time, and a personal favorite of mine. But I can’t help myself. Bits and pieces of the wacky dialogue pop into my head at the strangest of moments, even when I’m reading Scripture. This time, it’s the villain Vizzini, who lisps “Inconceivable!” every time his dastardly plans go awry. “You keep using that word,” his henchman Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) coolly observes. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

It’s Paul’s words in Philippians 4 that trigger that association:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Phil 4:6-7, NRSVUE)

We examined the first verse last time: Paul isn’t scolding the Philippians for worrying about what will happen to them as they face persecution from their neighbors. He’s giving them the alternative, reminding them of their joy and pointing them toward prayer and gratitude. The result of such persistent and grateful prayer is a renewed perspective and the peace which “passeth all understanding,” to quote the well-known phrase from the King James.

In other words, inconceivable.

But not completely incomprehensible.

When we use the word “peace,” we often mean the absence of war or conflict. That’s a negative definition: peace as the absence of something bad. But when Paul uses the word, he’s referring to the broader biblical concept of shalom, which also has positive content: it’s not just the absence of bad, but the presence of good, indeed, the ultimate good. Shalom refers to a rich state of wholeness, well-being, prosperity, and justice. In today’s social science parlance, we’d call it thriving or flourishing. As theologian Cornelius Plantinga has put it, shalom refers to a state of affairs in which everything is “the way it’s supposed to be,” the way a good, loving, righteous, and gracious God created things to be before they were marred by sin.

God’s peace surpasses all understanding, not because we cannot know anything about it, but because we cannot know everything about it. After all, for all our theories, who can truly explain creation, let alone its shalom? For all our theology, who can fully explain God’s holiness, God’s goodness? God is not defined by our words; our words are an attempt to express what God has revealed. And words will fail us.

But, again, not completely. And we might do ourselves a favor by not using our words in a way that limit our imaginations. Often, when we speak of praying for a sense of peace, we mean something that we possess as a personal emotional state, a feeling of calm, the opposite of anxiety. And that’s fine as far as it goes.

But Paul, I think, means more than that. Yes, peace guards our hearts and minds, the core of who we are. But that doesn’t mean that peace is just an internal experience. It’s not just something which enters us, it’s an external truth into which we enter. God is even now restoring peace to a broken creation, and Jesus calls us to be peacemakers (Matt 5:9), agents of God’s shalom.

That peace is not just personal and private, but relational. Through Jesus, we have peace with God (Rom 5:1). And we are to live in unity and peace with one another as a sign of God’s presence among his people through the Holy Spirit (e.g., Eph 2:15, 4:3). Thus, when Paul says that peace will guard our hearts and minds, he doesn’t just mean each of us individually; he means us as a community. And in Philippi, the relational dimension of peace would show itself in what he has already called their gentleness toward one another (4:5).

(Euodia and Syntyche, are you listening?)

Real peace between believers? Gentleness toward each other, even in the midst of difficulties that make us anxious?

I hope that’s not inconceivable.