the Fourth Wednesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Micah 4:1-5
1 In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, 2 and many nations shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 3 He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; 4 but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. 5 For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.
Ephesians 2:11-22
11 So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands— 12 remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. 15 He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, 16 and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. 17 So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; 18 for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, 20 built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. 21 In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; 22 in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.
Luke 1:46b-55
“My soul magnifies the Lord, 47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 50 His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, 55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
NRSV
In the Footsteps of Peace
by Xenia Chan
Xenia Chan Ling-Yee 陳靈兒 is a Ph.D. Candidate (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) at Regis-St. Michael's College, Toronto School of Theology, University of Toronto. As a former pastor, her scholarly work is informed by the present condition of the Canadian evangelical church, particularly the churches within the Sinophone revivalist tradition in Canada. Her work at present deals with Jeremiah's Confessions.
Christmas 1914—it was only five months into the First World War. Cultural memory remembers this war as senseless and wasteful, ending an era of stability for the West. I was taught in school that this was the war that disabused the West of their own civility in war—with the introduction of chemical warfare, machine guns, and far more powerful artillery than the world had seen up to this point. And yet, for a few days, from Christmas to New Year’s Day, the war ceased. This moment has continued to capture the cultural imagination, in part because of how unlikely—surreal—this event was.
“The Christmas Armistice,” the Twelfth Doctor says in 2017’s Doctor Who Christmas special, Twice Upon a Time, “Never happened again, any war, anywhere. But for one day… one Christmas, a very long time ago, everybody put down their weapons, and started to sing. Everybody just stopped. Everyone was just kind.”
An official peace wasn’t for lack of trying. British suffragettes wrote an open Christmas letter addressed “To the Women of Germany and Austria” advocating for peace, while Pope Benedict XV begged for an official truce, which was soundly rejected. How and where the peace broke out is still ambiguous; the Christmas truce lacks a single hero or a sacred site. We don’t know if it started in a single place, or simultaneously in multiple places. But, in our memory, the Christmas truce has kept a single desire at its core: a desire for peace of the most literal and personal kind, where weapons were laid down and people greeted one another as people.
And as the Doctor recounts, in most places it began with nighttime singing from the trenches, then shouted greetings and eventually ventured between the lines. In daylight, they buried the dead who languished in no-man’s-land, and in some cases, buried their dead together, with a service of prayers and a recitation of a psalm. There are accounts of soldiers, who only hours or days ago were shooting at each other, were now playing football (soccer) and exchanging gifts.
This event sticks in our cultural memory because it is a refusal of a nameless and faceless Other. As we know, this truce did not hold; they went back to war, and it would continue for another agonising four years (and it must be said many others continue[d] to be faceless and nameless in the West). And as the war dragged on, suggests historian Modris Eksteins, “The enemy became increasingly abstract. You don’t exchange courtesies with an abstraction.” The Christmas truce was also not seen consistently as a good thing. By the following December, there were active official communications from higher command to discourage any repeat of the Christmas truce, as higher-ups on both sides were increasingly uneasy about any fraternization. More recently, when Christian Carion tried to film “Joyeux Noël” (2005; a movie based on the Christmas truce) in France, he was told he could not shoot at a military reservation because a general told him, “We cannot partner with a movie about rebellion.”
Peace is not natural, nor does it come without cost. For the soldiers in the trenches in Christmas 1914, historian Tony Ashworth suggests this truce was some small way of having agency over their own existence, while journalist Michael Juergs points out that it might have been also motivated by the fact that the soldiers “always had to look on the [no-man’s-land, seeing their] own [futures], which is to lay dead there.”
Not only is peace unnatural, peace is subversive. Mary, in the Magnificat, sings about how the kin-dom is subversive, telling us for whom the Mighty One intervenes: it is those who have been erased by abstraction—the humble, the hungry, the ones who desire, no, need, the justice, love, and mercy of the law of the LORD. He sees them, in all their personhood and makes them known. They are not meaningless statistics or subjects under an objective gaze. This peace isn’t passivity, certainty, or security. Rather, this peace recognizes injustice and knows that the King, with his upside-down, inside-out kin-dom, is about to arrive, destroying the dividing wall of hostility (Eph 2:14) and putting it to death, so that we might have life—and life to its fullest—to see and have as our future.
Indeed, it is the kin-dom that the prophet Micah, echoing the prophet Isaiah, announces.
Swords into ploughshares.
Spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation.
War will cease.
Fear will be no more.
And, because of who the LORD is, and by his authority and power:
We will all stream to where the LORD is.
We will all learn the ways of peace.
We will all walk in the paths of wholeness, conciliation, shalom.
We will all sit under our own vine and fig trees.
We will all be one.
Nothing about peace is easy, nor should it be—whether in belief or in action, many things discourage us from the way of peace. But maybe we should take a page out of poet Yehuda Amichai’s book: let’s not make injustice easy, either. Let’s go the extra mile: let’s remind each other of what it means that Jesus is our Peace, let’s partner in restoring the imago Dei with the Spirit, and let’s sing along—proclaim, even!—with Mary what the Mighty One has done… and continues to do.
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