Friday, 25^th of December 1914: The great war has been raging throughout Europe for several months and has already demanded thousands of lives on both sides. It is a war that has come down to trench warfare – trenches on both sides of the battlefield, and in the middle 100 meters of no-man’s land, a place where no one would ever willingly go, especially at Christmastime. This Christmas morning dawns in complete and utter silence. Not a single gunshot is fired. Instead, Christmas songs begin to ring out from the trenches on both sides. One German soldier shouts: “Merry Christmas Englishmen!” triggering an onslaught of Christmas wishes shouted across to each other. Then, slowly and carefully, men from both sides begin to climb out of the trenches, not to attack and kill one another as they had been doing for the past several months, but to celebrate the birth of Christ together, embracing each other and exchanging gifts as friends – a brief moment of peace in a terrible war. The next day the shooting resumes and the war continues as fierce before. 

These events have become known as the Christmas truce, an unofficial and unauthorized truce between England, Germany and France. It didn’t happen this way everywhere on the front line, but in various places all over the western front, the soldiers put down their arms and celebrated the birth of Christ together. For me this is a beautiful illustration of the power of Christ. Imagine being in the middle of this terrible war, one of many men pursuing the sole grim goal of killing each other day after day, with enormous losses on both sides. How would you feel if your friend fighting next to you was killed just days earlier and now you’re embracing the same enemy who possibly killed your friend, just because it is Christmas day. This shows the power of Christ and why he came to this earth, to bring peace even in places like the first world war. 

But unfortunately this peace didn’t last. In some places there was peace for several days, but across most of the front the war raged on again the next day. This also shows the brokenness of man. We live in a broken world and we also have to deal with our own brokenness. But God did not leave us without hope. Through Christ, he came to live with us in our brokenness and to bring peace to our world, a peace not just between us humans, but also between humans and God, a peace that is not of this world and therefore is not dependent on our circumstances. So, even when we don’t see a way out, and don’t know how there can ever be peace, we have to keep our focus on the Prince of Peace from Isaiah 9:6 and let him fill us with his peace. If Jesus could do it in 1914, he can still do it today.