The Ideal of Peace on Earth

Peace on Earth is one of the most attractive ideals laid before us at Christmas. It was explicitly set out in the first part of the Angelic salutation to the shepherds, this prayer, which lays before us a vision of the world as it ought to be: restored and redeemed. 

The possibility of exactly this is what the coming of Jesus – even as a tiny child in Bethlehem – was all about. Thus was the birth of Christ indeed “a great and mighty wonder.”

Left to our own devices, the only peace we know in this world is incomplete or apparent and therefore only a pale comparison to the peace of the world to come. Even this peace is constantly disturbed from within and assailed from without. 

An important way of understanding why this is the case is to see that our unaided desires, or appetites, do not adhere principally to the true and finally good. We are constantly tempted to turn away from what is really good by those apparent goods and goals of our own devising. Hence, without the grace needed to discern authentically, there cannot be true peace. Instead, our passions tend to run amok and we are led constantly towards violence, discord, and war. The most we can hope to achieve in the face of our constant discord, quarrelling, and contention is a semblance of peace as interlude from incessant disruptions. *

Given these sad realities of fallenness, it was only with external intervention that the way could open for the restoration of each of us, and the world, so as to shepard the right relationship with God that he intended for us – wherein alone true peace is to be found. It was the coming of exactly this help in Christ, through the salvation he brought us, that we celebrate his birth. 

It is this which makes truly appropriate our sense of joy at Christmas.

In the more formal language of Aquinas, this can be seen in practical terms through love, or charity, as the efficient cause of peace – while wisdom is its formal cause: “To have peace belongs to charity,” whereas “to make peace belongs to ordering wisdom” (S.T. 45.6 ad 1). 

By God’s grace, the gift of wisdom enables us to judge rightly about the things of God; and together with that prudence, which is given in the Holy Spirit, we are enabled to undertake the activities of this life in the harmonious unity we know as joy. Thus, as an effect of charity, peace allows a reversal of our natural tendency toward destruction.

All of this points to the richness of meaning in the adult Christ’s dominical words: 

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. 

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

(John 14:27)

In his narrative of the nativity, one St Luke’s many great gifts is to convey throughout the growing sense of wonder at the gift which was given to us in the birth of Christ.  

In the very first chapter of Luke, the priest Zechariah understood the astonishing reality of just who it was of whom his son, John the Baptist, was the herald destined 

“to go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways” and 

“to give knowledge of salvation unto his people
by the remission of their sins,
through the tender mercy of our God;…
to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

In all, it is this which also gives such profound force and power to the regular blessing with which each Mass ends – throughout the year – and not just at Christmas. This expresses the perennial blessing made ours by the birth of Christ: 

The peace of God which passes all understanding 

keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God 

and his Son our Saviour Jesus Christ

And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost 

be upon you now and remain with you forever, Amen.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector

Footnote: 

* As St Augustine wrote in his great work on the Trinity: 

“For the soul, loving its own power, slips onwards from the whole which is common, to a part, which belongs essentially to itself. And that apostatizing pride, which is called ‘the beginning of sin,” whereas (by contrast) it might have been most excellently governed by the laws of God, if it had followed him as its ruler in the universal creature, (but instead) by seeking something more than the whole, and struggling to govern this by a law of its own, (the soul) is thrust on, since nothing is more than the whole, into caring for a part; and thus by lusting after something more, is made less.”

(De Trinitate Bk. 12, ch. 9, sect.14)