Glory to God, Peace on Earth
All through my elementary and middle school years, Lynden Christian School performed a Christmas pageant. I was just a kid, so I remember little from those Christmas programs, but a few details are impressed firmly in my mind. The dark expanse of the middle school gym. The white squares of fabric, usually cut with a pinking shears from old sheets, and adorned with a red crepe bow stapled to the middle. But most importantly, the echoing choruses, which I can hear in my mind to this very day.
The third graders, in bleachers on the far right of the gym, would sing, in low alto tones.
Peace on earth, good will toward men,
Christ is born in Bethlehem.
Peace on earth, good will toward men,
Christ is born in Bethlehem.”
Then the fourth graders, also in bleachers but on the far left, would chime in in soprano voices:
Glory to God, Glory to God,
Glory to God in the highest!
Glory to God, Glory to God,
Glory to God in the highest!
Third and Fourth graders together, alto and soprano, Peace on Earth and Glory to God, all would echo back and forth across the middle school gym, catching all of us in the majesty of Christmas and the breaking in of the Son of God into our very earth.
I’m sure the Christmas programs changed up its songs and acts every year, but this aspect, the echoing choruses, always remained the same. I would not be surprised in the least if it goes on still.
Perhaps eight Christmas programs in the middle school gym is why the Incarnation has always captured my imagination. God became flesh. Christ in human form. Transcendence and Immanence intertwined.
I had always pictured the heavenly host of angels appearing in the sky, in the heavens themselves. Most artistic renderings of the event do depict the scene in this way, although a close reading shows that the text does not specify. Whether they were in the sky or on the earth, angels are beings associated with heaven, and Luke reports that they returned to heaven when they were finished.
Shepherds, in contrast, are closely associated with terra firma. Theirs is a vocation, as they lead their sheep to pastures of green grass, closely associated with the earth itself, in the best sense.
Thus, a scene in which angels and shepherds appear together is symbolic of earth and heaven coming together. Which is exactly what was happening with the birth of the Christ child, an event so momentous the angels were compelled to declare it:
“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” (Luke 2:14, NIV)
The birth of Christ is a glorious event in the realm of the heavenlies, the fruition of God’s majestic plan of salvation.
And the birth of Christ is a needed event for an earth crying out for peace, for shalom. According to Levine and Witherington, “‘Peace’ (Hebrew shalom; Greek eirene) is a palpable thing; it connotes reconciliation, calm, wholeness. It is something that one can actually ‘give’ to another, as we find in cases where someone’s presence or words serve not to end hostility, but to create a feeling of shalom.”1 Jesus Christ of Nazareth is that Someone whose very presence brings peace to the world.
Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Luke. New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 278.