Peace in the Midst of Chaos – 25 December 2022 – Christmas Day

Like the Christmas story itself, the Nativity of Emmanuel, this story of the healing power of song never gets old:

World War I commenced shortly after Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was gunned down in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Before the fighting ended in 1918, 15 million lay dead and 22 million wounded on Europe’s battlefields. The war ended all the naıve notions of human progress that were popular in the theological imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Belief in human moral progress collapsed as progress in science and technology was put to use in making more effective killing machines for the battlefields of Europe. Human nature, as it turned out, had not progressed at all.

When World War I began, eighteen-year-old Alfred was sent to the Western front to serve in Scotland’s famed Black Watch regiment. After experiencing the horrors of trench warfare firsthand, Alfred eventually sustained a serious wound in 1916. But during the first year of the war, he also witnessed one of the few moments of peace in the midst of the most destructive war the world had ever seen.

On Christmas Eve in 1914, German and British troops began hanging candles and other Christmas decorations on the fronts of their opposing trenches and in trees that were still standing. The British troops reported hearing a familiar tune drifting over the shell-pocked landscape of No Man’s Land: “Silent Night, Holy Night, All is calm; all is bright, ‘Round yon virgin, mother and child, Holy infant so tender and mild. Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace.”

The British troops responded to the Germans’ caroling by singing carols back to them in English. Then, on Christmas morning, the two sides emerged from their trenches and met in the middle of No Man’s Land. They exchanged small gifts—whisky, cigars, and other soldiers’ comforts. Burials for the fallen bodies in the area were held; at one of these, soldiers from both sides read the Twenty-third Psalm to one another. Two groups of opposing soldiers even held a peaceful soccer match (which the Germans won 3–2).

When he died, he was the last living eyewitness to an event that has come to be known in history as simply “The Christmas Truce.” Alfred recalled this experience prior to his death: “All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted ‘Merry Christmas,’ even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.”

For Christians, the prophecy is fulfilled in the Christmas gift that comes in all the vulnerability of a newborn babe in a manger. –– Andrew C. Thompson

Homily Service 41, no. 1 (2007): 53–66.