In February of 1945, during the final months of World War II, a decorated Soviet commander serving in East Prussia was arrested by Red Army intelligence officers. Letters to his friend had been intercepted containing criticisms of Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party. He found himself swept up with untold multitudes into the secretive Gulag system, where he would shuttle through their murky network of labor camps for the next eight years. His name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and he was 27 years old at the time of his arrest.
In this arrest—which he called “an unassimilable spiritual earthquake”—his perception of enemy and friend was wrenched disfigured. He listened to the celebrations of the German surrender on the streets from his mirthless cell. It was enough, he wrote in his account The Gulag Archipelago, to cause one to “slip into insanity.”
Is anything more tantalizing than peace? Is anything more tormentingly elusive? Nevertheless, Advent arrives perennially with songs and sacred texts brimming with sentiments of “peace on earth and goodwill to men!” (Luke 2:14) The angel choir sang these lyrics to shepherds stationed above the hamlet of Bethlehem, yet the glad tidings they hastened to herald soon beckoned atrocities of a jealous despot and days of weeping without comfort.
The abolitionist poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow took up the phrase in his poignant poem, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” writing on Christmas of 1863 while the tolling bells of Civil War deaths were temporarily spelled by “old, familiar carols”:
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men!
The bloodiest war of our nation’s history raged on. His wife of 18 years had only just died. His son had only just returned home from the front seriously wounded. And Longfellow was doing his own battle with these wild and sweet words.
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men!It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearthstones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men!And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men!”
The battle for Advent peace is nothing if not fierce, for we must heed every prophetic voice denouncing facile and farcical counterfeits. Jeremiah decried the deceptive words of priest and prophet alike who dressed deep wounds superficially announcing “Peace! Peace!” when there is no peace. (Jer 6:13, 14) The land was rife with injustices and greed in his day, leaving scarce space for peace. As the civil rights slogan asserts, “No justice, no peace!”
Martin Luther King Jr. reproved moderate Southern clergy condemning his desegregation campaigns in Birmingham for being “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” He wrote these words from a jail cell; the confinement of many with the gall to suggest our current order bears little resemblance to actual peace, Advent peace.
You may know that the Hebrew concept of peace (shalom) is weightier than what our English word captures; conveying wholeness, security, health, harmony and, yes, the absence of all strife. It’s root verb denotes “restitution” or “restoration,” which implies a prior state of harm as well as a necessary cost. Any would-be Prince of Peace must reign against all harms and their roots no matter the cost. No justice, no peace.
So as we marvel at Isaiah’s Advent oracle foretelling a child born to our race, a son given to our situation whom we would name “Wonderful Counselor,” “Mighty God,” “Everlasting Father” and even “Prince of Peace”—One whose domain of peace would increase ad infinitum—we must also expect “justice and righteousness” to be the hallmarks of this kingdom. This irenic epithet, in effect, may be the signature presentation of Advent’s foretold boy: breaker of oppressive yokes and cudgels, burner of blood-soaked boots and cloaks, peace-monger to the nth degree unto the obsolescence of all tools of injustice or combat. Yet, with Longfellow, we are nagged by the ridicule of a world so filled with evidence to the contrary.
In our days we sing, “Isaiah ’twas foretold it,” yet find ourselves scanning the millennia since his oracles were supposedly fulfilled in the coming of this child become the Prince of Peace, asking with brutal honesty, “What do we behold?” Precious little justice. Precious little peace. What gives?
In a word, us. Or rather, it is us who cannot give abode to such thoroughgoing peace. But oh how Advent implores us.
The angel’s chorus actually announced, “Glory to God in the highest heaven / And on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” The favor of God would alight as peace upon the earthly who know it; a portable, durable and communicable peace, yet not without complexity. Jesus, the Prince of Peace to whom Isaiah pointed, told his followers we were to go about on this earth seeking worthy receptacles for this peace—hearts and homes, families and communities wherein our peace might multiply—saying, “If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it.” But what of unworthy dwellings? we ask. He anticipated that, “But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you.” (Mat. 10:13) This peace endures in worthy habitations yet finds them lamentably scarce; inns and hearts alike seldom prepare him room.
This fact is confounding if not devastating, yet it is the antinomy of Advent. This peace for everybody is not for everybody. Most claim to welcome it, but find true peace too costly to quarter.
Solzhenitsyn gave voice to this very fact,
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
The Prince of Peace comes laying siege to peaceless pieces of human hearts like ours. Solzhenitsyn notes, “From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb. And correspondingly, from evil to good.” Advent is the quaver; the tremulous shift from evil to good, from enmity to peace. But tracts of our heart must always suffer destruction or, rather, conquest; must surrender to the Prince and his peace.
The thing any student of Advent knows is that having made a home for the Prince of Peace, there’s no telling who he will have in tow. In his day, it was tax-collectors and Zealots, prostitutes and Pharisees, Samaritans and Centurions, lepers and lawyers, beggars and barons. He was blending a family for the ages; a motley clan of any and every imaginable persuasion.
Yet his vision was unblinking,
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. (Matt. 10:34-36)
What a thing for the Prince of Peace to say! But he knew from experience, just as you and I know from experience, that kith and kin are often most hostile to true peace. Many have little identity apart from common foes and jingoisms against the other and their existential threat to ‘our way of life.’ Many of us have even been the other in our own homes. Advent’s child would disabuse us of such chauvinisms and NIMBYisms, or die trying.
And here we come to the cost. Jesus offered one further jarring image to his listeners, “Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” (Matt. 10:38) Why call to mind such a macabre instrument and institution? Surely peace would never exact such a toll! But, as we understand, it was no hyperbole. The jagged lines of hostility lacerating the world as we know it, sneering crookedly at all peaceful intonations, shredding human hearts like razor wire would rend its way through soul and body of this Prince for peace.
Isaiah ’twas foretold this also, “the chastisement that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Is. 53:5) Theologian Jürgen Moltmann described him as “the disarming child” who, through his bold and costly incarnation, would reunite peace and justice by “the zeal of his ardent love,” realizing a new order beyond what any human might imagine or enact: “The future is wholly and entirely God’s initiative.”
It was this toll of peace made Longfellows’s tolls finally ring true.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, goodwill to men.”
The toll is always wild and sweet—let’s say bittersweet—for we of his ever-expanding, ever-lasting realm of peace. There will be swords and scourges, scorn and sneers aplenty meant to drown the song and deride the lyric, but they never will! With peals and quavers alike, Advent defies endless war, defies injustice, defies negative and nuclear peace, and even defies death. He is the Prince of Peace and costly but real peace he brings to the heartsick of every generation, and will never fail to do so:
Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men.
Solzhenitsyn’s own “unassimilable spiritual earthquake” would, in time, assimilate him into the realm of Advent’s peace. He wrote:
In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.
The fervent bedside testimony of one Dr. Kornfeld, a fellow Gulag prisoner, issuing through the darkness of night as Solzhenitsyn convalesced from cancer surgery became his inflection point. These would be the doctor’s final words. Solzhenitsyn awoke to news his herald of peace had been murdered in his sleep. He reflected on how Kornfeld’s “prophetic words were his last words on earth… directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance.” These final words of testimony “touched a sensitive chord” in Solzhenitsyn’s heart and birthed a poem concluding,
And now with measuring cup returned to me,
Scooping up the living water,
God of the Universe! I believe again!
Though I renounced You, You were with me!
Decades later, giving a commencement address at Harvard within earshot of Longfellow’s Christmas bells, he would declare, “No one on earth has any other way out—but upward.” It’s true. But it is only true because the peace of God first came downward into our gloom, darkness and captivity; a liberating child born to us whom we would come to call our Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace.
This is the wild, sweet and irrepressible toll of Advent. And let all aspiring peace-mongers cling to the promise of Jesus, our Prince of Peace, as to the sally of a belfry rope:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. (Jn. 14:7)
Matthew Podszus 