Is Christmas really a holiday of peace? In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says something that suggests otherwise, when He reveals to His apostles a rather shocking “mission statement.” Christ seems to suggest to His followers that He is not the “man of peace” that they perhaps had taken Him to be. Instead Jesus seems to be bringing violence into the world:
34 “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I came to turn a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 36 and a person’s enemies will be the members of his household.
In the context of this chapter, Jesus is indicating that the announcement of His Gospel, through the disciples he has chosen (vv. 1-15), will cause great social division. It is, after all, an announcement that will entail a proclamation of Jesus’ full divinity, as well as a recognition of His full humanity. This division, this “sword,” that Jesus brings will sunder deep loyalties and split natural affections. These lost loyalties and affections, moreover, will not only be among the Jews–the covenant people of God. The entire Roman world and, by extension, all of humanity will experience this division on account of Jesus. It is a division that will result in great pain among people of every tribe, tongue and nation: first among Jews, and then Gentiles of every type. Its reach will not be limited by geography, biology or ideology. The division will be all encompassing.
Yet, were we instead to turn to Luke’s Gospel this Christmas season, and read about an earlier time in Christ’s existence, we would find the following report:
8 Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. 10 Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. 11 For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”
13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
14 “Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”
This angelic announcement of the incarnation, alternatively, suggests that Christ’s coming will bring peace, peace simpliciter, and not conflict or division. This apparent contradiction warrants more investigation. After all, in simple terms, one might reasonably ask the question: has Christ come to bring peace, or to bring war? The answer, perhaps ironically, is both, even if at Christmastime we often neglect the sense of the one to focus exclusively on the other.
Christmas: The Miracle of Incarnation
It has been well noted by Christians throughout the ages, that of all the miracles God has performed, be it the parting of the seas, the manifesting and multiplying of food and drink, or the casting out of evil spirits; of all these, no other miracle can come close to miracle of the incarnation–to the historical reality of the infinite God becoming a finite man, the act of pure Spirit becoming mortal flesh.
If there are miracles, then this one is the greatest of them all. There are two reasons why. One is the sheer metaphysical profundity of the act itself: the necessary Creator of all contingent reality becoming part of His creation. It is too much to fathom, on the one hand, and exactly what we might expect, or desire, on the other. Thus, this event eclipses any concerns over how God might manipulate the secondary causes (i.e. laws) of Nature, or even bring Nature into being. The second reason has to do with the purpose of the event: the ultimate intention of this great, metaphysical mystery.
The purpose of Christmas is still fairly well known to us due to cultural heritage, and a recent uptick in popular interest. It is well known even if that purpose is often disregarded as mere myth or ahistorical fiction. The purpose itself living on even after so many believed its historical roots had long been killed. The single purpose is, naturally, that Jesus Christ has come to save people from their sins and, consequently, to rescue them from eternal death and to eternal life. More than anything, it was for this that Christ was born. Any other purposes are but additions to this one great purpose. One might even be tempted to call this theological purpose a kind of “savior” theology. And one would be correct to do so.
However, even among the faithful, what this purpose means and how it is to be received is hotly debated. After all, how can the incarnation bring both peace and conflict to the world? How can Jesus be the vehicle of reconciliation as well as the sword of division? The first of these verbal pairs sounds very much like our view of Christmas today: Jesus’ birth being all and only about peace and reconciliation and love. However, according to the Gospels, the incarnation is not only about these and, in some significant way, is in direct contrast to them.
I Bring Not Peace, But A Sword
Leon Morris, commenting on Matthew 10:34-36, admits that
Up to this point in this Gospel there has been a good deal of comforting teaching…and many kindly actions of Jesus in healing those oppressed in various ways.
Morris, PNTC Commentary on Matthew, 265
However, now Jesus will instruct his followers in a way that might give them pause about their loyalty to Him. Jesus first reminds the Apostles that He has come into the world to do something that will have global ramifications. Jesus’ “I came to” alludes to His own preexistence, His existence prior to his human birth (Morris, 265-266). Jesus does not say, like some of us might, that he “was born” to do something (to run, to be wild, for a time like this, etc.). Instead Jesus says He came to do something.
Thus, the purpose of Jesus’ mission, which entails division, has existed in the divine mind of the eternal Person of God for, well, for eternity. Thus, God knew that God’s physical presence in the world would cause division and sow conflict all along. It is God coming into a certain kind of world, a world of sin, that engenders discord among men:
The peace he came to bring is not simply the absence of strife; it is a peace that means the overcoming of sin and the bringing in of the salvation of God. And that means war with evil and accordingly hostility against those who support the ways of wrong. So it is that Jesus says that, far from peace, he comes to bring a sword, that is, conflict.
Morris, 266
The peace of God thus comes in the form of Christ’s war against evil. The peace of God, the peace of Christmas, is not a peace brokered through comprise with the world, or through political negotiations with the enemy, or a via reconciliation with wrongdoing. It is a peace that comes by the sword and a peace reconciled through violence.
The Sword is the Spirit
Nevertheless, the violence that Christ brings is not physical. It is spiritual, relational, intellectual and emotional. Because of this, however, it certainly has physical consequences. The most profound of these will be Christ’s own, physical death. In this passage in Matthew, however, Jesus lets us know that to accept His Gospel, which is also to accept the One who is both Messenger and Message, will likely cause physical separation among His followers. That physical separation can occur even among the most intimate of relations. Jesus represents this separation by what, at the time, would have been understood as the closest human relations possible, the relations of the natural family. To accept Christ, therefore, may mean that “the fundamental unit, the family, would be divided, and [that] this might affect anyone” (Morris, 267).
The assumption here is, of course, that family members love each other. Certainly it was understood, even in Christ’s day, that this is not always the case. But among any people bound by some kind of love, when the spiritual, intellectual and emotional being of person is transferred to another, this can appear as a betrayal of love, especially if that love is grounded in other, worldly realities. Thus, family loyalties, tribal bonds, kinship, political affiliations and economic ties– all relations that might unite two or more people in a bond of affection will now be subjugated to the new bond that one of those members has forged with Christ. This is spiritual division–a sword of the Spirit that first separates the believer in Christ from their old nature of sin, and then from others still bound by their sin natures, worldly loyalties and social identities.
Given this understanding of how God’s peace comes to the world, and for what purpose Christ has come, we can make better sense of Luke’s report about what the angels said to the shepherds as they watched their sheep by night. James R. Edwards first clarifies that the heraldic message of Luke 2:8-14,
Does not proclaim a mystical union of heaven and earth. Rather, it celebrates two sovereign works of God: one in heaven, and one on earth. Rather than being mystically amalgamated, God’s activity is praised in both: glory in heaven, and peace on earth; glory to God, and peace to humanity.
Edwards, Gospel of Luke, 78
However, the peace that is extended to mankind does not necessarily reach all men. Verse 14, which in older translations reads “and good will among men,” as in the NKJV above, is better translated as “peace among people with whom He is pleased,” (NASB) or even “peace to those on whom his favor rests” as the NIV puts it (see Edwards, 78). Thus, as Bruce Metzger says, the meaning of the angelic imperative is
‘Not that divine peace can be bestowed only where human good will is already present, but that at the birth of the Saviour God’s peace rests on those whom he has chosen in accord with his good pleasure.’
in Edwards, 79.
In juxtaposing these two passages we now get a much fuller and, perhaps, less culturally sanitized meaning of Christmas. Christmas, the incarnation of God, means that the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, has come into human history to save those whom God has already elected from their sins. In doing this, the elect who are saved will experience separation from the world. This separation may include separation from their families, their friends, their racial or ethnic tribes, their previous ideologies and beliefs, and their professions, to name a few. It most certainly will entail a separation from their prior selves, from their self identity.
At the same time, however, the peace of God that resides now in the world, and that is messaged through His people, is not a passive or tolerant peace. It is a peace that brings continual intolerance and perpetual war against that which opposes it. It is a peace that is not okay with the status quo of a sinful world.
A Gospel of Intolerance
One consistent protest against Christianity throughout its history has been the charge of intolerance. The main protestors in this have been either religious pagans or non-religious secularists. Muslims, for example, hardly care about Christian intolerance, and one of Islam’s more modern critiques of the West has been specially related to Christianity’s apparent tolerance of pretty much everything.
For Pagans, however, there is a genuine sense that Christianity is inherently intolerant. That is not to say that the Roman paganism into which Christianity was born was itself entirely tolerant of all other pagan beliefs and practices. It was not. Some non-Roman pagan practices, like those of the Celtic Druids, were not only frowned upon, but explicitly banned by the emperors. Various types of magic and divination also found sanction under imperial rule. Barbarians were still barbarians, even if some of their gods could be integrated into the Roman civic religion or into the private religion of the mystery cults.
Christianity, however, was unlike these other religions. It could not be assimilated into Rome, because Christianity demanded that Rome ultimately be assimilated to it. Thus, as Arnaldo Momigliano points out, the conflict between Christianity and Rome was unique–it was unlike any other religious conflict Rome had ever had (cf. Momigliano, 178-201).
The reason was simple: Jesus Christ had not come to reconcile the pagan gods with Himself. He had come to conquer them. The incarnation was not the beginning of a spiritual peace accord: it was an open declaration of war. As the spiritual played out concretely, i.e., in the realm of politics, this meant division:
The novelty of the conflict [between Rome and Christianity] explains the novelty of the solution–not tolerance but conversion. The emperor had to become Christian and to accept the implications of his conversion. It took about eighty years to turn the pagan state into a Christian state [312-396AD].
Momigliano, Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 197-198
The world historical result of Christ’s birth was, by the end of the 4th century, the conquest of the largest pagan empire ever known to man. Yet it was a conquest that came not through physical violence, not through an actual sword, but through the sword of the Spirit (this is, of course, not to say that it stayed that way).
If Christmas had been about God’s tolerance toward the world, then Christians never would have experienced the persecutions of Rome. But because Christianity is about conversion, and not tolerance, not only did the early Christian communities experience the cruelties of the imperial cult, as Jesus indicated they would in one of His more popular sermons ((Matt 5:10-11), but in their sufferings, so like their Lord, they brought peace to pagans favored by God.
Christian Conversion, not Pagan Compromise
Christmas is an intolerant holiday. The birth of the Son of God is little like the Christmas myths and folk tales that have grown up around the holiday itself. Pagan religion, then and now, can compromise with the world because for the pagan the world is god. But Christianity can never compromise, because Christ does not compromise with the world. He cannot because He does not compete with lesser deities and other created beings. Instead, Christ overcomes the world by converting it to that which He had always intended it to be. And the way that Christ overcomes the world is, first, by overcoming us.
Therefore, this Christmas don’t compromise: convert!
17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
18 “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
Merry Christmas!
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