You may have seen the movie “Joyeux Noel,” about the 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front.\u00a0 Young men from Germany, Scotland, and France stop fighting for a day or two in order to sing from trench to trench and then play soccer and even celebrate mass together.\u00a0 The Scots priest who led that worship service notes about it that it was a sort of altar by which even those who weren’t devout warmed themselves.\u00a0 He and his men — all the men on both sides of the No Man’s Land — are later disciplined by higher-ups who find human contact across walls of hate to be bad for discipline.<\/p>\n
The movie ends when the priest’s superior, a particularly unctuous and sanctimonious bishop, tells the new soldiers come to replace the fraternizers that they must remember that “The Germans are not like us.\u00a0 They are not the children of God.”\u00a0 An understandable sentiment in the heat of war, but a tragic one nonetheless.\u00a0 We choose what we see, whether the face of the human being behind the mask of the enemy, or just the mask itself.\u00a0 The choice is ours, and it matters.<\/p>\n
For some reason, Psalm 37 reminds me of this movie, just a bit.\u00a0 The elegant little acrostic, which works better than some do because it is more fluid, is a wisdom psalm.\u00a0 It edifies its reader or singer or hearer by painting a sharp contrast between the wicked and the good.\u00a0 Perhaps the text was designed to help young people remember more easily some basic moral precepts and their religious underpinnings.\u00a0 Many of the lines can stand on their own, almost as proverbs do.\u00a0 But together, they form a fairly comprehensive picture of well- and ill-formed human character.<\/p>\n
The contrast between good and evil here is sharp.\u00a0 The good trust God, avoid undue anger, find satisfaction even in a little, give generously and lend readily, speak about justice, and so on.\u00a0 The evil do the opposite in every respect.\u00a0 And the fate of each is sure.\u00a0 Perhaps most striking are verses 8-11 (the he<\/em> and vav<\/em> verses), especially the off verses, 9 and 11. (EXPLANATION ALERT: often in Hebrew acrostics some of the verses start with the successive letters of the alphabet, aleph<\/em>, bet<\/em>, gimel<\/em>, etc., but between each of these letter verses is a verse or two starting with some other letter but explaining the main verse that begins with the next letter in the alphabet; Lamentations 1 and 2 are good examples.\u00a0 I hope this explanation is not more unclear than what it explains!)\u00a0 Verse 9 says “For the evildoers will be cut off, but those trusting in Yhwh will inherit the land\/earth,” while verse 11 repeats and then expands on the idea by saying, “the poor will inherit the land\/earth and will delight in the abundance of peace” (Hebrew: shalom; NRSV’s “prosperity” is somewhat unfortunate as translations go).\u00a0 The New Testament’s Beatitudes clearly allude to verse 11 when they say that the “meek will inherit the earth.”<\/p>\n The text thus claims that, while we may see the profound evil that exists in human relationships and structures, as well as in every individual, evil is not the last word.\u00a0 It is possible to live as people of integrity and therefore to receive the validation of the Almighty.\u00a0 That is, the Germans really are like us, caught up in sin but also susceptible to redemption.\u00a0 We have before us real choices about good and evil, not merely a fated imprisonment in a world of woe.\u00a0 Morality is a hopeful thing after all.<\/p>\n So what do you see?\u00a0 The soldiers in the movie, and one may assume in the real trenches almost a century ago, learned to see in the scared young faces of the men across No Man’s Land a vision of themselves.\u00a0 We are together in our sins and in our redemption.\u00a0 The land’s ultimate owners will not be those who grasp it by force or deceit, but those who recognize its true lord and live as that lord made us to do. \u00a0 Maybe that is the thing most worth seeing of all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You may have seen the movie “Joyeux Noel,” about the 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front.\u00a0 Young men from Germany, Scotland, and France stop fighting for a day or two in order to sing from trench to trench and then play soccer and even celebrate mass together.\u00a0 The Scots priest who led that worship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n