Prince of Peace
Second Sunday of Christmas, Year A
Jeremiah 31:7-14 | Psalm 147:12-20 | Ephesians 1:3-14 | John 1:(1-9) 10-18
Art: “Tent City Nativity” By Kelly Latimore
“Prince of Peace” by Brian Volck
At the bright hub of the peaceful world,
no one – citizen, slave, or foreigner
in search of a happier life – lost sleep
over a doomed infant in a provincial barn.
From history, one learns the longer view.
So on that night, Augustus,
alone on a Palatine balcony,
looked knowingly on all he had made,
and saw that it was very, very good.
History makes sense to those who think they control it through the exercise of power. Whether consciously or not, such people are proponents of the so-called “great man theory” of history, developed in the 19th century by the Scottish intellectual Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, “The history of the world is but the Biography of great men.” Great men, he claimed, were “the soul of the whole world’s history,” whose various geniuses had decisively shaped the course of world events. Those who think they control history because they wield power often imagine themselves “great men,” making them doubly wrong.
The Christian story offers a vastly different understanding of history. While it does not regard history as unimportant nor discount the possibility of our understanding history nor even of participating in its making, it makes clear that those who believe they control history are caught up in a fool’s errand. God alone is sovereign over history, moving it—often despite appearances to the contrary—toward its consummation in God’s reign of shalōm. Those women and men among and through whom God works toward this end are rarely “great” in any conventional sense.
This perspective is exemplified in the first reading from Jeremiah 31, where the prophet foretells the restoration of God’s people from exile in Babylon. Their captivity will end, and they will return to the land of promise “With weeping… and with consolations.” Their mourning will give way to rejoicing, and “their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.” The rich imagery of the passage notwithstanding, what is most significant is the writer’s painstaking attention to making clear that the restoration it foretells is a gift, the work of the LORD, who “has ransomed Jacob and delivered him from hands too strong for him.”
The gospel text, from the so-called “prologue” to John, is less obviously concerned with history. It is theologically abstract and readily assented to, perhaps because it foregoes messy narrative detail. Yet if we keep in mind that the evangelist is telling the Christmas story, albeit “from the top down,” we find that John is no less concerned with history than Jeremiah. This is why I find it helpful to read the gospel text alongside Brian Volck’s Christmas poem, “Prince of Peace,” which reminds the reader not simply of the aforementioned messy narrative detail, but also the stark contrast between two perspectives on the story’s historical and theological meaning.
Insofar as the poem tells a story, its plot is driven by the conflict between its two principal characters, the Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar, whose perspective dominates the poem at the narrative level, and Jesus of Nazareth, who is by comparison portrayed as more or less insignificant. It plays on historical allusions; Augustus accumulated several titles during his reign, among them Divi Filius (Son of God) and Princeps Pacis (Prince of Peace), which serve in the poem to emphasize the strangeness of using those same names to refer to Jesus. Just so, by beginning with a dismissal of the shepherds of Luke 2 as “notorious liars” and ending with a description of a self-satisfied Augustus who “sees” the Pax Romana the way God saw Creation at the end of the sixth day—as “very, very good” (Genesis 1:31), the poem suggests a dismissal of Christianity that would make Edward Gibbon blush. Or so it would seem.
As it turns out, the poem’s apparent preference for Caesar and his empire is deeply ironic, meant not to dismiss the good news of the kingdom, but to remind us of its scandal, its contrariness to so much of what we assume about men of great power as drivers of history. This is how it might help us appreciate the lectionary texts: When the divine Word who is the author of life “became flesh and dwelt among us,” he did so not as the heir of an emperor, but as a “doomed infant [born] in a provincial barn”—in “godforsaken Judea,” of all places. That the world “did not know him,” and “did not accept him” is no great surprise given the much more immediate reality of the Pax Romana, which assured their safety and prosperity.
The unwritten conclusion of “Prince of Peace” is that Augustus’s smugness was unmerited and ultimately proved wrong. The “doomed infant” outlived him, and although the agents of his successor Tiberius eventually succeeded in killing him, their triumph was short-lived. The love through which the divine Word “became flesh and lived among us” became the love that raised Jesus from the dead; to paraphrase verse five, the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.
And so the scandal of the gospel is part of “the mystery of [God’s] will,” which is to “gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:10) through the faithfulness of one fragile human person, a Jewish peasant who began his life in a barn. The peaceable kingdom, which is the telos of history, is indeed within our grasp, not because self-described great men wield earthly power, but because its King entered history as “a doomed infant born in a provincial barn.”
Thanks be to God.