Evening Telegraph (First Edition)

Let’s hear peace message

THE thought – “Jesus really is the most remarkable individual who ever lived” – occurred to me on Saturday night.

I was sitting with my family at a Christmas service in a church tucked away, off the beaten track, on Bright Street in Lochee. My thought process was: How did this remote life, born into the most shameful set of circumstan­ces in a most foul-smelling and unpleasant location, end up altering human history to such an extent as to amass a global following of over two billion professing adherents? Surely this is either madness or it is magnificen­t.

The late C.S. Lewis, an atheisttur­ned-apologist, reasoned: “Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or he was himself deluded and selfdeceiv­ed, or he was divine.” Fleeing an infanticid­al king allied to the Roman Empire, Jesus was equivalent to a modern-day asylum seeker born to a refugee family and disdained due to his status as the product of teenage pregnancy.

Indeed, Jesus epitomises everything we would consider divisive, yet in a time of division his message was unique – it was for peace and it was for everyone. Most contentiou­s of all, he was a Jew whose birthplace is modern-day Palestine. You wonder what he would make of his heritage as well as his homeland today?

The shortest verse in the Bible, I think, sums up how he might respond – “Jesus wept”.

There is a story in the ancient book of Joshua, in which the commander of God’s army comes down before a siege on Jericho – a city in the modern West Bank. Joshua asks: “Are you for us or for our enemies?” The commander – of an army – ironically responds: “Neither”. The implicatio­n? God is peace.

At that Christmas service, an unfamiliar carol was sung. If I have heard it before, I certainly have never heard it, as I did two nights ago, in light of the ongoing conflict in Israel and

Palestine. The carol – “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” – contains some words which moved me – “O come, thou rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan’s tyranny; from depths of hell thy people save, and give them victory o’er the grave. O come, O King of nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind. Bid all our sad divisions cease and be yourself

our King of Peace.”

As it turned out, both his own people as well as those under whose occupation he was living turned on him and consorted together in his crucifixio­n – the most brutal form of execution ever recorded. Yet, while they nailed his broken and bruised body to the cross, he prayed

God would have mercy on all of them, both the oppressors and those oppressed. The place of his birth and family to whom he was born, reveals a God literally inserting his skin in the game for both sides in his life, death and with a view towards reconcilia­tion and resurrecti­on.

Who are his own that he should free them? Both the Jews and Palestinia­ns. He was born to the least, into a land that was last and his message was for the lost.

Living in austerity rather than prosperity, the Prophet Isaiah said 800 years before his birth, unto us a child would be born. He also said he would be stricken in order to bear the burden of the many.

This is the one whose birth we celebrate in a week’s time and his message of peace is more timely than it ever was. Indeed, bind in one the hearts of all mankind, including both the Jews and Palestinia­ns.