Few verses are more popular at Christmas than Luke 2:14: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward man.” It’s a heart-warming verse that Christmas cards and decorations have simplified, for decades, to mean “Peace on Earth.”
It’s also the one that Linus quoted in A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) in his classic “drop the mic” moment during a speech after Charlie Brown yelled in frustration: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!” Charlie Brown was decrying Scrooge-like commercialism.
Boy, were those the good old days when that was all we had to worry about.
In our woke world, you don’t think much about commercialism destroying “the true meaning of Christmas” anymore because we’re too busy trying to keep political psychopaths from destroying the whole country. It’s creating an ambient sense of dread – a constant rattling that reminds us that things are way out of whack. We’re feeling like Asaph who wrote in Psalm 82.5: “All the foundations of the earth are unstable.”
When foundations and institutions that we thought were unshakable start to shift too much – and for too long – we instinctively let go of the stuff that’s crumbling to hold on to what’s immoveable.
Peace on Earth – at least the way most have understood it – is one of those crumbling things. Given the times, it rings hollow. And it’s OK to let it go because Jesus never said it. It’s not what the Bible teaches. You don’t have to look it up. Just look at the Earth. The proof’s in the pudding.
The kind of peace Jesus brought was a personal reconciliation between God and man, not necessarily peace between man and man. In fact, because of who Jesus claimed to be – the Christ, the Messiah, the one and only Son of God – it elevated conflict and division to biblical proportions between man and man, man and governments, man and learned culture, and between man and his most intimate relationships: Family. Some men, cultures, governments, and families can be deeply committed to things that are completely false, and they demand that you fall into line. Or else. Love them, then build boundaries. God comes first.
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” Jesus said to His disciples as he sent them out as “sheep among wolves” (Matthew 10:34, NIV). “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword [division]. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
Make no mistake, when you put what was happening in the context of the times, Jesus was history’s greatest Disrupter. He brought deep division in the most intimate of relationships. No one shook the foundation of civilization to its core more deeply than Jesus Christ. Why? Because men had come to believe things, for centuries, that were false. Because He came to tell them the truth – hard truths – to “make the crooked places straight,” as Isaiah foretold. And because He came with the highest authority – Son of the God who created everything.
That didn’t sit well with people.
Jesus never wished for division. Division came because of the way people, groups, religions, and governments responded to what He spent three years telling them. Hard truths. If this man really was God’s Son, as He claimed to be, that shifted authority away from the crooked things they had anchored themselves to for centuries. “Multitudes” followed Jesus. That was threatening. He kept talking anyway.
Jesus threatened the authority of the tyrannical religious leaders of His day. After His crucifixion, His followers threatened the authority of a Roman government that would persecute and kill Christians for over a century after Nero. Today, it threatens the tyrannical authority of Islamist states and groups, some of whom strategically create an atmosphere of extreme fear by killing Christians in the most grotesque ways when people who grew up in strict Muslim cultures convert to Christianity.
And Christianity now threatens the tyrannical authority of groups and governments in America that want to impose abortion, same-sex marriage, gender identity, critical race theory, arbitrary lockdown mandates, and a cornucopia of other legal perversions on all Americans – particularly Christians – regardless of who they ultimately answer to.
One of their tools? Cancel culture. It’s been difficult for me to respect this high-schoolish term; this malignant wart that grew out of social media. What we call cancel culture is really something more deeply inhumane that’s old as dirt. It’s threats, intimidation; it’s creating an atmosphere of fear to force people into violating their deepest convictions. It’s punishment. And it’s getting old.
Christians are peacemakers, but when you all but force them to defy God’s will, you’ve breached sacred territory. Under the cover of equity and civil rights, wokeness pressures Christians to put other things first. Christians are instinctively law-abiding people. But when you force them to obey laws that conflict with God’s immutable laws, don’t be shocked when a more muscular Christianity kicks in.
That doesn’t sit well with some people.
The woke response to people who refuse to violate their consciences is the sticking point. A tyrannical response makes division inevitable. It’s as old as “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This is where Jesus, Earth’s greatest Disrupter, brings the idea of peace into balance: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth? I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
In 2015, the woke crowd even punished Linus, a cartoon figure, when students at W.R. Castle Elementary in Kentucky were prohibited from quoting his biblically based speech in their performance of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Remember that?
“As superintendent of Johnson County Schools,” said Thomas Salyer, “I recognize the significance of Christmas and the traditions and beliefs associated with this holiday. In accordance with federal laws, our programs will follow appropriate regulations.”
Bah!
It took a bill from the Kentucky Senate in 2017 to turn that around but Linus had it exactly right in the cartoon. And if you look closely, Linus drops his trusty security blanket at the moment he quotes the angels urging the shepherds – who were “sore afraid” – to “fear not.”
The Christmas message should remind us to do the same. Drop the fear. Something sacred is being destroyed in America. With all the ruthless loss, suffering, and death that the woke crowd and their protectors have unleashed on good, hard-working, law-abiding people in this country, now is not the time for a misguided, milquetoast, misunderstood peace.
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