When Caesar Augustus decreed that the world should be enrolled (Lk 2:1), he could do so only because of the Pax Romana. The undisputed reign of Rome put entire kingdoms—like that of the Israelites—in their thrall, but it also kept the chaos of war at bay. And so, when Christ later prophesied that, in the last days, “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” (Mt 24:7) a prior breakdown of the world’s extant order was assumed. In our day there is the historical anomaly of the Pax Americana fading ever further from view, and “wars and rumors of wars” (Mt 24:6) have become a dreadful but enduring facet of the news cycle; larger, engulfing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East linger or loom, and every new upheaval on the globe’s far side seems to spur new cycles of domestic unrest at home.
Such is the Christmas Season in the Year of Our Lord, 2023. Has the world simply forgotten the message of the Prince of Peace? Or does the spectre of another global conflagration—an apocalyptic Third World War—actually serve as a reminder of the unearthly strangeness of the angel’s announcement: “Peace on earth to men of good will” (Lk 2:14)?
Dissension mars human history from its very beginning: Genesis witnesses to both the fatal discord of Eden, as well as the fratricide that unfolded in mankind’s first generation. Thus, when the angels greet the humble shepherds with songs of praise and tidings of peace, they announce something wonderful, radical, and, above all, strange. For Rome could pause the world’s endless wars only through the merciless expansion of their imperial rule. The Christians of the early Church, however, conquered that empire of unparalleled power by the shedding of no blood but their own. In their holy indifference to death, the martyrs do not showcase the mastery of that ultimate lesson of the ancient philosophical schools—which was, according to Socrates, to practice for death; instead, they carried “always in their bodies the death of Christ” (2 Cor 4:10), and, in doing so, they already lived in His peace.
This, indeed, is the mystery which “passes all understanding” (Phil 4:7), this peace of God, which comes from Him directly: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, do I give unto you” (Jn 14:27). Indeed, in some mysterious sense, this gift is God Himself. In other words, Christ is not simply the source of Peace, but He Himself is that selfsame miraculous gift. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that, “with us, the super-human is the only place where you can find the human;” so too, it is only in the human infant, who is also the Almighty, that each one—man and God—is fully revealed. And it is in the Person of this Man-God that the divine attribute of peace flourishes in our midst.
Christ came not only into mankind’s chaos of conflict and contention, but into human nature itself. In descending into the depths of our weakness and limitations—an act which we recall every time we look at the Child in the crèche—Christ has turned a world which has been broken by sin into one where peace itself (that is, where Peace Himself) can enter, reside, and reign.
Little wonder, then, that a world which disposes of life in the womb with thoughtless brutality should now be menaced by war. When the child is rejected—because there is no room in the Inn or no room in our hearts—peace, too, departs, just as Christ said that it would: “If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you” (Mt 10:13).
This Christmas, let us make our own hearts and our family hearths a dwelling place for peace: Let us give this miracle a habitat in our lives and among our dearest kin, so that this otherworldly gift can find, once again, a humble haven—even if only in the manger of the inner chambers of our selves and of our homes.
We, at The Interim, wish you and your families a joyful, hopeful and peaceful Christmas, and many blessings in the year to come.
