Shepherds tend their flocks by night. The very glory of God encompasses them, and they are rightly filled with fear. An angel appears to comfort them. “Fear not! I bring to you good news, news that will be a great joy to you and to all people.” So great is this news and its attendant joy that the heavens seem to burst open. There is suddenly a multitude of heavenly beings proclaiming: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men” (Luke 2). Something momentous is happening. In this world of conflict, oppression, war, and strife, in this world, then as now, so often bereft of joy and comfort, in this world so often robbed of the material means of security, of the spiritual grounds for happiness, here in a bed of straw the least influential men are told to find the one who will be the peace and joy of the earth. Here they are told to find God bound in cloths, bound in infancy, bound in humanity. Again, all this to the least influential of men.
The gospel message is framed in this message of peace. As he prepares for his death Jesus bequeaths to his disciples his peace (John 14). Paul tells us the entirety of the gospel is about peace (Ephesians 5). Christ is in his very self our peace with God, and therefore our peace with one another (Ephesians 2). He whom we confess the Lord of history is hailed also the prince of peace (Isaiah 9). The Risen Lord breathes out his spirit onto his disciples, and among its fruits are peace, and that joy of which angels sang (Galatians 5).
Feast day upon feast day we still sing: “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of good will.” We have been repeating those words for the better part of two millennia. Where then is this peace and good will? Anyone who has read world history will scrutinize in vain to find the golden age of such things. Anyone looking out their window today will be hard pressed to find realized that angelic testimony. Where is this peace?
We may well be confused because Jesus teaches he has not come to bring peace (Matthew 10). He acknowledges his message will cause strife among even the most intimately connected. It indeed will tear at the individual’s soul. He tells his disciples they will face in this world tribulation (John 16). Yet he blesses the peace-makers and calls them the children of God (Matthew 5). He tells his disciples to be neither troubled nor afraid for he bequeaths to them a peace such as the world cannot give (John 14).
The gospel truth concerning peace then is that it is not as simple as the absence of conflict. Indeed, conflict, tension, and an opposition of forces are written into our very constitution both biologically and psychologically. Is peace then something we can realistically make, manufacture, negotiate? Is there among us some critical mass of concessions and agreements that can create peace on earth? Is there potentially some assembly of prime ministers, presidents, and their diplomates which can conjure peace?
If we are to believe the angelic message, peace is something God gives the world. It is declared unto us. It is bequeathed unto us. It is a gift given in God incarnate. As with any gift, any grace and favour, it is upon them that receive it to open it, appreciate it for what it is and from whom it comes, to use it, and as with all things, to use it wisely and well. We can only absorb this divine graciousness and pass it on. Better put, we can only allow ourselves to be immersed into it, baptized into it, and therefrom live it within and without. We can be absorbed by it only as we are open to it, only in so far as we are of a “good will.” This good will is naught but an alignment with the good will God offers the world in Christ. It is not a wanting for this or that regardless as to how “good” this or that might appear to us, how “right” it might seem in the light of our agenda. The good will God sends out onto the world wants only for the good of all. Thus, the good will in man is the will that thirsts for the God of peace, the God who forgives us, heals us, reconciles us, in brief, loves us. Here the good news the angels proclaim, the good news of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, is an anticipation of the fulness of the gospel message, the peace which God in Christ bestows upon the faithful, a peace unlike any the world might strive to create.
Where is the practicality of such a peace in this world with all its baggage of varied ideologies, wants, hopes, desires? Is it not a vain thing to hope humanity in any part might come together in peace, in con-cord, in one heart? In this world is peace not simply something defined in the negative? Is it not the absence or abeyance of discord, discontent, disruption, disagreement, disenchantment, disinterest? In this world is not the reality of peace always the tenuous state of the “not visibly at odds at this moment?” Is not peace at its practical best but a veneer, a stab at sincerity made out of an exhaustion of spirit or resources?
If sacred narratives are meant to tell us something of profound importance about our life, about our life together, why on earth are angels given to sing about peace on earth? Is this gospel-peace simply a prophylactic promise, a type of spiritual anesthetic gifted us as a respite from the conflict-ridden press of our existence? Or is this divine gift of peace something that can infiltrate the real world of daily life in a positive manner? Can peace be made incarnate in this world? Is Christ—our peace—something that awaits us in eternity, or is he present-able on this earth?
The peace given us by God in Christ is an openness to the other who in God’s world stands with us under the singular redeeming and revelatory cross of Jesus Christ. It is a realignment of life, of the human soul. It is a new orientation of man to the God who has made him, and now reveals to him the truth of himself, the truth of the cross whereon God does that which man wills not to do, whereon God dies in his incarnate self, dies as man to free man from not merely death of body but that death of soul which is sin, which is enmity and war with oneself, with one’s world, and above all with the God who is the fount of all meaningfulness and purpose, man’s meaningfulness and purpose.
The peace God gifts is a state of the soul. It is not so much an equilibrium of powers as a surety of being which resides as life traverses its shallows and storms. There is no doubt that the soul of the faithful knows the pains of the world, the distresses of body, soul, and estate that plaque us all. There is no doubt the disciple knows of the torturous thirst for justice, the want of the oppressed, the displaced, the disenfranchised. There is no doubt the soul of the disciple knows its frailty and failures, its sin, its sinfulness, and the temptations of property, profit, power, prestige. Yet, here is a peace that “surpasses” understanding. It is a peace founded in God’s forgiveness, God’s love. It is a peace that makes no sense to Ceasar, to Herod, or to any other potentate, be that potentate someone real or simply a power-hungry figment of one’s distorted imagination. Peace is a grace given, and a grace to be ever prayed for that we might be partakers of that divine journey of God’s birth into the world, into our humanity. Peace is an attitude of faith in the face of the world. It is the balm that heals as it proclaims, suffers, serves. It is not the absence or abeyance of conflict, but a new spirit, a new approach, a new way in man for man. It is the gift we are called to quietly carry into the everyday encounters of life (Romans 12, Colossians 3, 1 Peter 3).
There is from God to man no prestidigitation, no magic formula that transforms this world and its ego-driven divisions into a land of bliss. God comes as an infant because the grace of God within us is always bound in swaddling and lying in a manger of straw and hay. The prince of peace is for us always the gift undertaking the journey, the struggle to learn to walk, to talk, to grow, to grow “in wisdom and graciousness.”
There will be no great peace, no enduring peace on earth until every soul opens itself to the peace gifted within itself, and so is free to find peace in one another. That journey is rehearsed in Revelation wherein turmoil rocks the world and the spirit within until the soul falls before the Lord of time and history and cries for that anciently given grace of peace and good will saying unto him who has come and will come again: “Come, Lord Jesus!”
As the secularized and commercialized world tosses its bedizened version of Christmas at us, the church robes itself in contemplative and penitential purple. It rehearses how its Lord, the Lord of all, came in the humility of perceived illegitimacy, in the docility and simplicity of Bethlehem, in the turmoil of a jubilant Jerusalem, and how he will come again in judgment. We can be swept up into the world’s frenzy, and bury the angelic message under sentimentality and tinsel, or we can take it seriously. Given its ultimate fulcrum is the cross, we need take it deathly seriously, and live it, live it together moment by moment. Only when we do so shall we discover the richest fruit of God’s peace, that rarefied air of heaven which angels and saints are gifted to breathe—joy.
“Fear not! I bring to you good news, news that will be a great joy to you and to all people.”