With two weeks to Christmas, it is easy to get completely snowed in by the hustle and bustle and forget to stop and reflect on the meaning of the season.
A potential new favorite film for me is Joyeux Noel, the story of the ceasefire of December 1914. In a terrible war that cost the world the untold promise of generations, Christmas almost ended the war before it could really get going.
I love this story for a variety of reasons.
1. It is a true story...perhaps not the personal stories added for human interest, but the events did occur. Gotta love it when real life is as good as any fairytale; in the Winter of 1914, in the fields of France, we saw a fairytale unfold, before a self-imposed reality reasserted itself.
2. Christmas nearly ends one of the worst wars in history. I am a major Christmas fan...that makes it sound like a sporting event or something trite...I am a firm believer that much of the good that we have experienced in the last 2000 years started with the promise of Christmas, and the world languished as it waited for the first Christmas. This story is just another example of how the hope which inherently abides with the season can be life changing, reaching across all sorts of boundaries.
This is the very message of Christ, which no amount of strife or self-inflated cause of man can ever fully quell.
3. As I mentioned, it's a real story. I am also a fan of the period...the possibilities of the young Century were still unknown, and the strife of the Old World final came to a head in a calamitous wreck of war and carnage...in the finest traditions of tragedy, we can only read and wonder what might have been if any one of a myriad of possibilities had happened instead...
4. The final thought of the story is not a happy one. The officers (and in the film, even members of the church) must actually work hard to get their men to get back to the business of war. While it is not a joyful thought, I think it is important to reflect on the deliberate choice to embrace vice and pain is a consistent theme in the tale of man. This stands in stark contrast with the hope and promise of Christmas...which is, I think, the point. We cannot save ourselves; in fact, left to ourselves, we will actually work hard to choose death and war rather than peace.
Christmas promises a hope which has not yet been entirely fulfilled. While the salvation of Christ is something we can appreciate, we are left to struggle in Middle Earth and have not yet known the joy of the deathless land, where peace and love are the law of the land. Christians should be careful, as we preach the peace of God that we recognize that this world is not and will not be free from strife. Tomorrow will be better than yesterday, but only because tomorrow brings us closer to the Lord, and further from ourselves.
The promise of Peace on Earth, and Good will Towards Men was both fulfilled 2000 years ago, and yet remains to be completed. Take joy in this season, and reflect on the depth of the promised redemption. Find peace, as we live a reality that is still to be realized in full, and love as we look to a day that completes an act of love that altered all of creation.
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