Few verses are more popular at Christmas than Luke 2:14: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward man.”
It’s a heart-warming verse that Christmas cards have simplified to mean “Peace on Earth.”
It’s also what Linus quoted in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965) in his classic drop-the-mic moment during a speech after Charlie Brown yelled, in frustration: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!” Charlie was decrying Scrooge-like commercialism.
Boy, were those the good old days when commercialism was all we had to worry about.
In today’s chaotic world, you don’t think much about commercialism destroying the “true meaning of Christmas” for being too busy trying to keep Islamists, Marxists and political psychopaths from destroying the country.
The chaos has created an ambient sense of alarm – a constant ear buzz that warns us that something’s way out of whack.
We’re feeling like Asaph, who wrote in Psalm 82.5: “All the foundations of the earth are unstable.”
When institutions that we thought were unshakable start to shift too much – and for too long – it leaves no choice but to let go of the stuff that’s crumbling and to cling to immoveable things.
“Peace on Earth” is one of those crumbling things. Given the times, it rings a bit hollow. And it’s OK to let it go because Jesus never really said it. You don’t have to look it up in the Bible. Just look at the Earth.
The kind of peace Jesus brought was a personal reconciliation between God and man, not necessarily peace between man and man.
In fact, because of who Jesus claimed to be – the Son of God – it created fundamental divisions between man and man, man and governments, man and learned culture, and between man and his most intimate relationships, family.
Why?
Like the poor creatures born in “Plato’s cave” who believed that shadows were real people, some men, cultures, governments, and families are deeply committed to completely false things. The division comes when it’s clear that “shadows are not people,” but others demand that you believe it anyway – or else.
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” Jesus said to His disciples (Matthew 10:34). “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword [division]. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
Make no mistake, when you put what was happening in the context of the times, there was no greater disrupter in all of history than Jesus Christ, a figure who shook the foundation of civilization to its core.
Why? Because men had come to believe things, for millennia, that were false. Because He came to tell hard truths – to “make the crooked places straight,” as Isaiah foretold. And because He came with the highest authority, Son of God Who created everything.
That didn’t sit well with some people.
Jesus never wished for division. Division came because of the way people, sects, and governments responded to what He was telling them. Hard truths. If this man really was God’s Son, as He claimed to be, that shifted authority away from the “crooked things” they had anchored themselves to for centuries.
“Multitudes” followed Jesus, especially after he raised Lazarus from the dead. Jesus threatened the authority, not of Jews in general, but of the tyrannical religious leadership of the day. They were control freaks. They had such Jesus Derangement Syndrome that walking on water, even raising the dead, was never enough.
“Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council and said, ‘What do we do?’” According to John 11:47, 53. “For this man does many miracles. If we let him alone: and the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation. … from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death.”
That’s what happens when you stick to the truth: hate and division.
Jesus, history’s greatest Disrupter, knew what was ahead but kept going anyway.
Even after the crucifixion, Jesus’s followers threatened Roman authority by simply speaking the truth. Rome called Christianity “the Jewish religion” back then. Beginning mostly with Nero, Roman dictators persecuted and killed Christians for the next 100 years.
Nothing’s changed.
Today, as America “slouches towards Gomorrah,” as Robert Bork once put it, Christianity has become our most fundamental source of division. Rather than securing “peace on Earth,” it threatens the tyrannical authorities in America who want to impose abortion, transgenderism, and other perversions on all Americans through the force of law.
That makes “peace” impossible.
It also threatens the tyrannical authority of Islamist and communist groups and states throughout the world that rely on extreme fear against Christians, or any group, that challenges their control.
Christians are peaceful, but when they’re forced to obey laws that conflict with God’s immutable laws, a more muscular faith kicks in. Unity at the cost of a weak peace is not peace.
What Jesus brought over 2,000 years ago was not “peace on Earth” but the good news that “men of good will” can now have peace with God, even when the world churns in chaos.
With that kind of peace, Jesus never let fear of men, governments, culture, family or friends interfere with sticking to the truth, just because it was hard.
Even Linus, if you look closely, drops his trusty security blanket at the moment he quotes the angels urging the shepherds – who were “sore afraid” – to “fear not.”
That’s the Christmas message we should take into the new year. Drop the fear. With all the ruthless forces imposing themselves on the most fundamental truths that we hold sacred, now is not the time for a misguided, milquetoast, misunderstood “peace.”