Isaiah 9:6, ‘For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called...Prince of Peace.’

God With Us, born into the heart of our darkness, given into the midst of our strife with one another and the midst of our enmity toward God—born and given into this context as our Peace.

Bearing in Himself the fullness of the animosity between man and man, and the fullness of humanity’s deicidal hatred for God, and the fullness of divine wrath against sinful humanity, bearing all these in love (as True Man and True God) in His cruciform Body on the cross and harmonizing all of these in His anastasiform Body by the resurrection, He reconciles man to man and man to God in Himself, so becoming our Peace.

May we be given the grace to remember and to feel in our marrow that our Peace is supremely a Person. Our peace is not found in the removal of this pain or this threat or this trial, it is not found in the answer we are hoping for, it is not found in the relationship we are longing for, it is not found in any change of circumstance—internal or external. Peace is an objective Person and to know Him, to belong to Him, to be united as one flesh to His Body by the Spirit and simply to ‘be’ in this place of merciful, mastered, transformative belonging—is our experience of Peace.

So, may the crucified and risen Jesus—in whom we know the God of all reality in truth and so as Peace—be deep and sustaining peace to His Bride in this season. A Blessed Christmas to you all.