There are seasons when I step away from news, social media, current events. Seasons when the darkness and division seem too overwhelming, the daily assault too hard to absorb.
Leandro Bassano, Annunciation to the Shepherds, Italy 1600
This is one of those seasons. I pray for Israel, and Gaza, for hostages and hospitals and families with no safe place to hide. I pray for the people of Sudan in the horrors of disease and war. I pray for Ukraine, and Russia. I pray for our national leaders in the divisive politics of the day. And I turn off the news and avoid the social media posts. There is too much grief and division, too much confusion and accusation. My heart can't hold it all.
I stumbled this week on the work of Jürgen Moltmann. I've been reading Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. Moltman's essay, The Disarming Child, is the last entry in the collection. It begins with this passage from Isaiah:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.… The people will rejoice.… For the yoke of their burden and the staff on their shoulder and the rod of their oppressor thou hast broken as on the day of Midian. For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time forth and for evermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.
—Isaiah 9:2-6
Moltman experienced darkness as a child in Germany in the 1940s He was drafted into military service in 1943 at the age of 16 and served in an anti-aircraft unit during Operation Gomorrah, a joint British-American bombing campaign in which over 10,000 bombs were dropped, and over 40,000 Germans killed, in one week of round-the-clock bombing on Hamburg, Germany's second largest city.
After the war Moltman spent time in a succession of prisoner-of-war camps where he encountered the Bible, the Christian faith and the hope of forgiveness and reconciliation.
He describes that time in his essay:
A people in darkness . . . This phrase touched me direclty when in 1945 we were driven in endless and desolate columns into prisoner-of-war camps, the sticks of the guards at our sides, with hungry stomachs and empty hearts and curses on our lips. But many of us the, and I was one, glimpsed the light that radiates from the divine child.. This light did not allow me to perish. This hope kept us alive.The book of Isaiah predicts and describes the Babylonian captivity. a period of Jewish history when Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar II. Jerusalem was destroyed and many Judeans were exiled to Assyria.
But for the prophet, Assyria is more than just Assyria. She is the representative of the power that is hostile to God, and this makes her at the very same time the very quintessence of all inhuman oppression. The prophet looks at the specific pllght of his people, but talks about a misery experienced by people everywhere. That is why his words and images are so wide open that prisoner in every age have been able to find in them their own fate and their own hope.In our Christmas services we celebrate that hope, but we sometimes miss how radical and political that hope is:
the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.... The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.
Moltman talks about the zeal of nationalism, of power, of revenge. He saw that zeal in the German nationalism that led to World War II. We see it now in US politics, in the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. Anger, bitterness, division, hate: they beget more of the same, until violence breaks out and the cycle continues.
Isaiah foretold a a different future, a new kind of leader. Moltman continues:
He will establish “peace on earth,” we are told, and he will “uphold peace with justice and with righteousness.” But how can peace go together with justice? What we are familiar with is generally peace based on injustice, and justice based on conflict. The life of justice is struggle. Among us, peace and justice are divided by the struggle for power. The so-called “law of the strongest” destroys justice and right. The weakness of the peacemakers makes peace fragile. It is only in the zeal of love that what power has separated can be put together again: in a just peace and in the right to peace.
I find myself caught by that phrase: the zeal of love. That love brought God to a take on human form, to live as a refugee, a stranger, a wanderer condemned to die a disgraceful death. That zeal invited followers who gave their lives to share it, and still shines across centuries and continents, in places of sadness and anger and loss.
That zeal invites us to live as people of light and love, as agents of both peace and justice, as new people, following the child we celebrate. Moltman's own life was changed by that zeal of love, and the call to follow:
We can follow him, even today making visible something of the peace, liberty, and righteousness of the kingdom that he will complete. It is no longer impossible. It has become possible for us in fellowship with him. Let us share in his new creation of the world and – born again to a living hope – live as new men and women.
The zeal of the Lord be with us all.
Excerpts from The Disarming Child, from The Power of the Powerless by Jürgen Moltmann, English translation copyright 1983 by SCM Press Ltd. Reprinted in Watch for the Light by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, lnc., and SCM Press, London.
