Pax and Shalom (Advent #16)

And so this is Christmas.

Actually, it isn't. It's Christmas Eve in Australia, but I suspect that, with the busyness of a typical Christmas day, there won't be much time for blogging. So I have decided to end my Advent series here, on Christmas Eve, with this, my sixteenth post.

And Christmas Eve, I think, should be a time to reflect. That's the value, if there is any, in John and Yoko's Christmas classic, the horridly named "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". It causes us to ask the question: are things any different this Christmas than they were the last? John and Yoko certainly don't bring Jesus into it, but He's everywhere in the assumptions of the song. If war should be over and peace flourishing, then why is Christmas any more of a time to wonder, and to mourn, at the lack of peace in our world? Surely only because Jesus came to institute a world of peace, and we have not yet found the reality of that.

Unfortunately, I think we've missed the point of peace.

Many great Bible teachers today, Tim Keller being perhaps the most obvious one, will tell you that God's people were supposed to be a people of peace, shalom peace, deep, abiding peace - most importantly, peace with God. The trouble was, humans couldn't easily live in peace with God, because He is utterly righteous, and they were, and still are, utterly not. So for Israel to be a people of shalom, God had to declare peace with them. Then they could live in peace with Him.

And sometimes that succeeded, and mostly it didn't. Not because God's peace failed in any way, but because Israel failed to live in the terms of that peace. They continually took it for granted, and continually taunted a righteous God with their sins.

The real shame of Christmas 2011 should not be that we have not yet come to live in a world where humans live in peace with each other, but that we still do not know our creator and therefore do not know His Shalom.

You see, when the angels appeared to the shepherds and made that glorious declaration that we love to put on our Christmas cards, they meant far more than we might think:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” (Luke 2:14)

Firstly, it isn't quite the same as mere goodwill to all men - generally respecting and liking each other. Far from it. Those words were spoken to a people who were crushed under the yoke of Roman oppression. Did the angel want the shepherds simply to give Christmas cards to the Roman centurions or offer them a cup of tea or a swig of brandy? Was this little more than a cosmic declaration of the kind of good-old-chap chummery that we hear about in stories of enemy armies having a cease fire over Christmas, and the like?

No, it was peace bought with man and God: peace bought by God coming into the battleground to negotiate the terms of peace. And the terms of peace? Here we have to look ahead, to Easter. Here we have to look to the cross.

If John and Yoko and the rest of us really want peace on earth, we need to look to the glorious God in whom we will find the deepest peace. But we need first to accept that we are the problem, and then humbly accept that He is the only solution.

Many will not be willing to accept this - not this year, not the next.

But if, perhaps, you are reading this, then you possibly already know this, or are willing to think about it, or believe it with all your heart. And then, perhaps, you too can help declare the arrival of a peace that may not look like we expect and may be far more humbling for us to find, but a peace which is the deepest, most significant, most sustainable peace that we can ever find.

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”