A little verse by Mary Coleridge keeps running through my mind. It begins with a pretty Christmas picture and ends with a kind of threat: “I saw a stable, low and very bare/A little child in a manger.… The safety of the world was lying there/And the world’s danger.” The poem begins with all the happy memories of a child’s Christmas and progresses, as we progress in our later years, to another kind of understanding.
I find myself a little suspicious of those who write autobiographies that are perfectly clear and specific about what they experienced and what they understood in their childhood. My memories are not so sound, and with the best of will and the hardest effect at remembering I end up with many blanks; but I usually do gather some overall impressions out of the confused and usually rosy glow. Christmas, for example, was always a good thing, but a confused thing: fireplaces and candy canes, Christmas entertainments and those awful church goodies (pure delights then), whisperings and surprises. There was the morning of the bicycle, and that time I awoke early in the morning to go down for a first peek only to discover that my dad was just on his way to bed. Later came that awful day when a bunch of us were seated on the front steps of somebody’s house, doing whatever youngsters do on front steps, clustered about with tricycles, balls, dolls, sticks, and cookies, and little Josephine Hunter (how her name sticks in my mind) told me there was no Santa Claus. I dashed home to get the straight story from my mother, who had some kind of lame excuse about the spirit of Santa Claus and the spirit of Christmas and the Spirit of God and his great gift of Jesus, which had to do with all the Christmas gifts. It simply wouldn’t do then, but it worked out better later. Under the tree we had a train mixed up with a crèche and some sheep on a hillside behind the railroad station, and a series of doodads that broke up before Christmas dinner, but a Christmas dinner that was good for food and a delight to the eyes. Then there was the day that girl from our second grade caught fire in her flannelette nightgown on Christmas morning and the Christmas day a wounded soldier was a visitor in our home. You took the bad with the good, but it was mostly good.
The big change in Christmas comes when you begin to notice that most of your Christmas gifts have become “useful” instead of fun. (Of course, money was always both useful and fun.) Then comes the biggest change of all: your own children appear on the scene, and you begin to give instead of get. That becomes the best of all. Somehow in your anxiety to give and make happy in the giving there is a great insight into a loving Father, who loves us with an everlasting love and would shower gifts on us continually and surely must want us to be happy and grateful. One can continue to grow up into an appreciation of all that.
But other things come to mind. The Christmas-card picture of Christmas always has shadows in the background. There were no halos there, and maybe the manger was cold and dirty. One thing we are sure of is that Herod used this homey occasion for his slaughter of the innocents: all kinds of babies were killed and mothers pierced to the heart. The flight to Egypt makes a nice picture, with the little burro and all, but it was a flight in fear. The return to Nazareth was under the threat of continued cruelty in those cruel days, and as the boy Jesus grew up in that little country town his mother’s heart was often pierced—long before the cross—as she pondered his destiny. The baby was called Jesus (Joshua, Jason—Saviour) because he would save his people from their sins, but he could do it only along the Via Dolorosa, and they nailed his fine, pure body to a tree, and his mother was there. It is all a strange, strange story, but men have come to see that it is THE story; it is the plot of history, the meaning of things for the whole of the cosmos.
This one whose birth meant that many others would have to die for him, this one who promised wars and rumors of wars, this one who died in agony between two thieves, who brought out the best in men and also their worst—this one was called the Prince of Peace. It is a strange title for such a one, for one who lived and died as he did, who set so many desperate currents loose in history. Did something go wrong somewhere or have we read it all wrong?
The Prince of Peace: “The safety of the world was lying there/And the world’s danger.” Our trouble is that we want the Peace without the Prince. Neither men nor nations will have him rule over them, and that is the world’s danger, because that one who called himself the Way did not allow for any other way and we refuse to follow that Way. From the garden of Eden to the gardens of upper suburbia it is still a question of obedience: we will not obey and so we are shut out of Paradise. It is not that God would keep Paradise from us—he longs for us to have it as any loving Father would; but he cannot give it to us apart from the only Way in which Paradise is possible. We are fighting against God and so fighting against our highest felicity (in his will is our peace), and it is not that God will not but that he cannot. Our disobedience is not only against the basic essence of our beings, our creaturehood, our dependence and contingence, but against the structure of everything, against the stars in their courses, against the way things are, really are. As H. H. Farmer once said, “If you go against the grain of the universe you will get splinters.”
A friend of mine who likes to twit me about my religion delights in throwing up the condition of the world today after two thousand years of the Prince of Peace. I am shut up to only one defense. We cannot have the Peace without the Prince, and we still refuse to have him. The Bible is clear: “Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end,” but we still want his peace without his government. Note how Paul speaks of the armor of the Christian and how specifically and directly one may have the helmet and the shield and the sword, but when it comes to peace he speaks of our feet being “shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.” And there are the “things that make for peace.”
Peace is likely the prayer of every sensitive heart in these awful days, but the hope of peace seems farther and farther away as larger and larger combinations of power challenge one another with greater and greater engines of destruction. If only they would not “learn war any more,” if Africa or Palestine or Russia or China would only settle down, maybe then we could have some peace. But “from whence come wars and fightings among us? Come they not hence, even of our lusts that war in our members?” Would a multiplication of my own heart to the hearts of all men bring peace or war? Where does the problem lie? Am I myself a center of peace or of discord? How quickly do I flare up and over what inanities? What bitterness do I nurse, what resentments do I harbor? It all moves out from men to nations: we cry peace and there is no peace.
The Great Commission seems such an old and ordinary program in the midst of all the other programs clamoring for attention, all the utopias. World missions seems a weak and ineffective kind of effort over against atomic power and space flight, and in human terms it is. So was a babe in a manger and a boy in Nazareth, and a poor rabbi on a cross. But the foolishness of God is wiser, the weakness of God is stronger. If you can believe that, you will still hold on to that kind of Prince with that kind of Way until the Peace comes. If you cannot so believe, the available options seem to have pretty well run out.
JOHN III
Dusk’s
rooftop;
night and house
cast in questioning blue.
Cricket’s abrasive song rebirthrebirth rebirth.
I ascended the gravelly stair.
Strange truth
shone in his eyes
when I first saw him—
authority,
different from my bickering order.
Without greeting
he set before me
the strangest thing …
he spoke of spiritual
labor pains—
the meaning plagues me.
Marvel not,
he said,
the body of wind can be had
but must be born.
MATT BROWN
George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”
