An Advent Reflection on Peace
The Reverend Canon Tim Jones, Diocesan Director of Ministry, writes the second of four Advent reflections.
Thank God for youth workers. As a young teenager I used to love singing a Hebrew song that a visiting church youth worker taught us in school assembly: “Shalom Chaverim”. He carefully sang it through for us a couple of times, then asked us to sing it back to him. So hundreds of bored teenagers offered a tuneless, mediocre-at-best effort in response. But then he expressed his delight that we had done such a good job: the Jewish people, he explained, had endured so many troubles through the ages that their songs often began slowly, even sounding quite miserable, so our dreadful singing had actually captured this mood wonderfully and we should be proud of ourselves!
It can sometimes be quite easy, in our faith, to feel a bit miserable. We have always been praying for peace, whether in the intercessions at nearly every Sunday service, or in our private prayers when we’re watching the news. But in the face of our constant prayer, a global news service allows us always to be very aware of our human capacity for violence and war: even in times of relative peace there is always violence somewhere on a planet of several billion people. And these are not times of relative peace today; the wars underway in the Holy Land and in Ukraine command our daily attention, and it’s right that we pray for peace. War, with all the cruelty and hardness of heart that it brings, is a dreadful thing. Our prayers, if we let them, can right now feel a bit miserable in response.
The season of Advent punches through the December gloom. One of the things we pray for is real peace – God’s Peace. It's often assumed that peace is simply the absence of war and violence; we can imagine that if we just stop fighting then peace is restored. But when the Bible speaks of peace (and it speaks a great deal about peace), it is describing something very different than just a temporary lack of fighting. The Biblical concept of peace, whether in the Old Testament or the New Testament, is perhaps best described using the Hebrew word Shalom, that same word that I first learned from a brilliant youth worker. The word Shalom expresses God’s Peace, which is far more than just a lack of fighting. God’s Peace is about our whole being, each of us, and all of us together. It is that original blessing, the thing God made us for, a condition of profound tranquility, of justice and concord, of perfect loving harmony in our relationship with God and each other. It’s about our attitude, our ideas, our behaviour, our whole life. God calls us to that Peace, real peace, and invites us in our Advent faith to seek to live into it now as best we can. We prepare for Christmas by remembering our need of the Messiah, and his way of Peace.
The visiting youth worker at my school told us that faith in God can help us to know something of that Shalom-Peace. He explained that the Jewish people had learned ways to respond joyfully to God’s call towards his promised real peace. Although Hebrew or Yiddish songs might begin slowly, they would gradually get faster and faster, expressing the excitement and utter happiness that Shalom-Peace brings. And so he had us sing the song “Shalom Chaverim” – meaning Peace, Friends – over and over again, getting louder and louder, faster and faster each time, and we became more and more excited and raucous and joyful each time. Our teachers were probably really delighted that the assembly finished with hundreds of teenagers high as kites, bursting with energy and spirit, pouring out of the hall and into the classrooms for lessons!
The Peace of God which passes any mortal’s understanding, keep us in the love of God, this Advent-tide and always. Shalom Chaverim – Peace, Friends!