by Steve VanWinkle
“…and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
I can’t help but hear the voice of Linus every time I read this snippet of the proclamation by the heavenly host on the first Christmas. I remember watching Schulz’s cartoon as a boy in our living room, usually cast in the warm glow of our Christmas tree. It was, for me, the official beginning of the Christmas season that seemed never to arrive.
Indeed, all the significant year-end holidays had their official herald with a Peanuts special: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown sent me scurrying for my costume as Halloween inched closer. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving made me pause to be grateful that I never had to worry about mom or grandma serving up toast on the fourth Thursday of November.
Ironically, the place I was most likely to get up and scrounge for a Christmas cookie or piece of Christmas candy during A Charlie Brown Christmas was during Linus’s recitation of Luke 2:8-14 in that hollow auditorium that bore a remarkable resemblance to the one at Meadow Lane Elementary where I went to school.
As Charlie Brown grappled to understand what “Christmas is all about,” my answer was the same every year: “Look around, you stupid Charlie Brown…there are lights and gifts and Santas and winterscapes and anticipation all around you…that’s what Christmas is all about…stop being so philosophical and enjoy the simple avarice Christmas brings to us all.”
Of course, I wouldn’t have said avarice as an 8-year-old, but it’s the word I would have wanted to use, had I actually known it.
Luke’s account of the birth of Christ, which Linus offers in answer to Charlie Brown’s quest, held almost no significance to me whatsoever as a child. In a kid’s mind, the Bible and all things religious were just busywork to get to the tree and the jewels beneath. Christmas is all about presents, I would have concluded, and I would have mentioned days off from school, and anything comprised of more than 85 percent butter and sugar in a close race for second and third.
The Bible, no matter where quoted, was nothing more than a formality — an homage — paid to God in order to enjoy all pageantry and decorations and goodies and, well, basically anything except Luke 2:14 and its declaration of peace and good will.
Now, as my childhood recedes further into the shadows, I look at — and watch — things in ways far different from that kid lying on the shag carpet glued to a cartoon. Not so long ago, watching this old cartoon with my own kids, I choked up at precisely the place in the show where I was most bored when I was a boy.
Linus walks onto the slats of the auditorium stage like he has done since 1965, lays his blanket down, and begins to quote Luke 2:8-14. His voice is Linus-like and echoes through the empty auditorium; there is no Vince Guaraldi track and no edits to the text he quotes. He recites from memory the King James text that ends with these words:
“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men…”
As an adult, this announcement is sweet poetry, and with older ears, I hear in Linus’s voice a summons to memories of past Christmases, family, and innocence.
As a Christian I also now understand the power of these words. This miraculous birth ushered real hope of real peace for a creation at war with its Maker. Being middle-aged and far removed from the shelter of my childhood, I know this Ultimate War of mankind against God has lead to countless other wars and has been the fountainhead of bloodshed, destruction, tyranny, and tragedy for millennia.
But, Christmas is God offering a peace treaty with the world, and that declaration of peace has a power in itself unequaled by any desire of man or treaty of nations. In those words are encapsulated the hope of every soldier, every parent, and every combatant in every year mankind has occupied the surface of the earth.
Most importantly, even when spoken softly by a cartoon character in an empty auditorium, the primary message of “peace on earth” is the summation of every impossible hope dared not spoken by people lost in sin: Peace with God.
Christmas’s message of “peace on earth” has a power all its own. It is at once an absurd idea and an unutterable hope. And its promise is more than strictly future, as this hope has occasionally overpowered the violence and misery humanity has sentenced itself to, and it reveals what can be and what one day will be. One such occasion occurred 95 years ago this Christmas…
By all accounts, the trench warfare of WWI was an amazing failure, with people dying as much from disease and infection as from bullets or explosions. When viewed from above, muddy, filthy trenches were carved in the ground like evil, twisted snakes and brought near-certain death to anyone nicked by lead or punctured by dirty steel from artillery shells. WWI trench warfare introduced humanity to emotional plagues such as shell shock, physical plagues such as skin-blistering chemical warfare, and it is the namesake of such ugliness as trench mouth and trench foot.
Between opposing trenches lay ghastly No-Man’s-Lands with the appearance of being forged in the furnaces of hell itself: Trees were reduced to charred sticks or blackened stalagmites lurching from ground swept clear of vegetation, leaving only grayish black dirt and occasional pools of stagnant water teeming with the rot and disease of decomposing corpses. Thin, menacing clouds of residue from flame-throwers, mustard gas, and artillery slowly oozed its way over the dead landscape day and night.
December 24 descended upon the most nightmarish of all the trenches located near Ypres, Belgium, in 1914, bringing with it the impossible hope of Christmas peace. Nightfall was always when hostilities between trenches were at their peak, as no one wanted to be exposed in No-Man’s-Land during daylight. On this evening, however, instead of bombardments from the German lines, what fell upon the Allies were…carols. Christmas carols. In the midst of the ugliest war to date, the lyrical phrases and melody of “Stille Nacht,” (that would be “Silent Night” for you and me) replaced the booms of German bombs in Belgium on an icy Christmas Eve in 1914.
Looking up from their festering trenches, the Allies saw candles lining the German ditches, and Christmas trees with candles adorning the branches stood in the place of mortars. The Allied soldiers returned fire by shouting Christmas greetings and carols of their own to the men who had made valiant efforts to kill them only hours before.
Witnesses say German soldiers climbed out of their self-made hell and dared cross No-Man’s-Land, not with espionage in mind nor weapons in hand, but with wishes for a Merry Christmas to their enemies. Throughout the night, soldiers from each side exchanged impromptu gifts and shared a makeshift Christmas dinner. They went to church together Christmas morning.
The rifles lay useless on the ground, and the artillery cooled from lack of need. Wounded soldiers were exchanged and the dead properly buried as good will swept across the battlefield, displacing the thin clouds of poison and death. For one glorious period in a putrid war, swords were beaten into plowshares.
And somewhere unseen above must have been an echo of the first Christmas Eve’s message bouncing off the stars that night…
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men…”
The event known as The Christmas Truce of 1914 would last for days, as neither side would fire on the other. Soon, the commanders would hear of this invasion of peace into their war and order hostilities to resume. They would learn from this event, and later they implemented ways to keep soldiers in battle from perceiving their enemy as human beings. But, what can never be undone is that for one evening, at least, and in more than one place, Christmas’s declaration of peace overcame war, rendering it obsolete.
Which is what it does every day in the Ultimate War. Christmas holds out the hope of peace on earth through the cessation of hostilities between God and mankind. The Christ Child that is Christmas brings peace to all who receive Him by turning away God’s wrath from the lives of sinners, effectively and fully bringing peace to the Ultimate War of people at enmity with God.
The power of God’s declaration that peace would come to earth through the birth of the Savior has wonderfully, if not as often as we would have liked, interceded in the affairs of men on this globe. When it has, it reminds us that peace is coming one day as inevitably as war comes to us in our day and overrides cynicism and misery and weeping with a hope that seems absurd but refuses not to be embraced.
The Christmas message of peace on earth offered through Christ is irresistible enough to silence weapons of war, subtle enough to fill the empty auditorium of a kids’ cartoon, and powerful enough to offer an end to mankind’s long, Ultimate War with God Himself.
It is the Ultimate Christmas Truce.