the Fourth Wednesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
In the Footsteps of Peace
by Xenia Chan
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.
Thank you for reading the New Leaf Advent Reader, a collection of reflections from writers across Canada. If you are enjoying the reader, sign up to receive the readings in your inbox each day here: SIGN UP
And please share this reflection with your friends and family who might also enjoy it.