Now it will come about that

In the last days

The mountain of the house of the LORD

Will be established as the chief of the mountains,

And will be raised above the hills;

And all the nations will stream to it.

And many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,

To the house of the God of Jacob;

That He may teach us concerning His ways

And that we may walk in His paths.”

For the law will go forth from Zion

And the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

And He will judge between the nations,

And will render decisions for many peoples;

And they will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

Nation will not lift up sword against nation,

And never again will they learn war. Isaiah 2:2-5

​The War to End Wars

Every year we remember those who gave their lives for our country and reflect on what it would have been like if those brave souls had not died for us. In WWI, men were sent to the trenches with a gun and a prayer book, a prayer book that brought a little peace before being shot to pieces, to lie mangled and mutilated awaiting a merciful death. Those who come back from wars don’t talk about what they’ve seen, yet relive it for the rest of their lives. A war veteran on Radio 4 this year said, “I can see in my mind’s eye, rows and rows of white stones, all the hundreds of my friends and others that gave their lives for what the country is today. I’m sorry, the sacrifice wasn’t worth it …”

​But without WWII, born out of the defeat and shame of the “war to end all wars”, would the trajectory into where we are now have been much different? Since WWII there have been 250 major wars with a loss of 50 million lives. The Red Cross estimates that there are over 120 armed conflicts today, so the peace that we pray so ardently for isn’t going to happen without a change of heart encompassing the whole of humanity. Theologians from the time of St Augustine to the present day have tried to make sense of our propensity for evil. We must look deep within ourselves and seek to understand our own part, our own complicity in sin, and our own part in initiating and perpetuating war.

​The morals of war are difficult in theology, seeming to justify the unjustifiable. That said, it is easy to see that we cannot reverse what started a war but we can temper division and conflict, by going back to the very roots of our Christian faith. “Thou shalt not kill” comes to us as a seeming impossibility when confronted with the reality of one’s own imminent violent demise, or that of one’s dear ones, but Jesus tells us succinctly that we must love our neighbour, all of us, all of them. It isn’t a personal mission, it’s a communal one. Jesus came to save all of us, everybody, which is why Christianity isn’t just about personal salvation it’s about salvation for all. Christianity is a life-long mission, each of us on his/her journey to a closer relationship with God and, through God, the whole of humanity.

​Loving one’s neighbour isn’t easy when our “neighbour” is trying to kill us, but that is what we must do. It is the only thing that can fuel a “war to end wars”.

​Let us pray that like the combatants who came out of the trenches to play football on Christmas Day we can come to learn that our “enemies” are more like us than we care to think. Like the sniper in the Ukraine who said, “they’re good guys like the rest of us”, we recognise that simple truth but, unlike the sniper, let us thank God that are job is not to shoot them. Let us pray we see the face of Christ in our enemies and they see the face of Christ in us, for we are all God’s children.

​Let us listen and learn to understand more the political, economic and social/psychological determinants of war, and in so doing recognise the part that we play in fuelling war.

​Let us advocate for peace and the non-proliferation and sale of weapons, not afraid to speak out against false rhetoric and war mongering.

​We pray for the strength and commitment to love our brothers and sisters wherever they are and, in so doing, feel the pain of their suffering.

Let us pray:

• Blessed Lord as we approach the coming of the infant Messiah shower us with Your mercy for our sins as individuals and in community.

• He came that we might live and yet violence and wicked abuse still sickeningly seem to rule. Make our focus and our pride not be what we win on the battlefield but in our total surrender to Your divine will for peace amongst all.

• Save us from ourselves, Release the Holy Spirit within us like a bomb and in Your mercy, hear our prayer as we declare PEACE through Christ.