Peace

Today is the fourth Sunday of advent. This Sunday is supposed to symbolise Peace. Now of course that depends on your tradition, I know that my church does it differently and that’s OK, but I’m just doing it this way.

I find it ironic in a sense that we’re celebrating peace today. We here in Canada have it pretty peaceful, but elsewhere around the world, countries, friendships, and families are being torn apart in brutal, bloody wars.

I think about the first Christmas day all those years ago, Israel was under the Roman “Peace”, as you can probably guess, it wasn’t very peaceful. The Jews expected that if the Messiah came then, he would rid them of the Romans and give them back their independence.

Jesus, the Messiah, was born. A little baby boy, born in a stable, a carpenter's son. He never brought them worldly peace. A few years after He left, Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple torn down, and most of the Jews scattered and killed. His followers didn’t fare any better either; most of them were killed in violent ways.

Why then do we celebrate peace? Jesus didn’t seem to bring peace!

That’s something I’m still trying to figure out. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’ll do my best.

Really, the only thing that I can give is that this is a peace that is to come. We can look for the days that Revelations describes. We need to remember that just because the Bible was written thousands of years ago doesn’t mean that its narrative doesn’t continue today (That was a lot of negatives in one sentence and I got a bit lost in all of them. Basically I’m trying to say that the Bible narrative continues today.).

For those of you who were expecting some ground-breaking revelation about how Jesus has brought world peace today, I’m sorry. We can’t deny the fact that world-peace doesn’t exist, and I don’t have an answer as for why. I’m still just a human who is also still looking for answers.