As Christmas approaches, we prepare to receive into our midst the Prince of Peace, the infant Jesus the Lord. And he is preceded by John the Baptist, who proclaims his coming.
The prophet Malachi, last prophet of the Old Testament, proclaims the coming of the great prophet of the New Testament, John the Baptist in striking terms. “See,” he says “I shall send my messenger to clear a way before me.” And then, in words which give us a dramatic perspective on the Presentation of the infant Jesus he says, “And suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his Temple.”
That is exactly how it happens. The infant Jesus appears in the Temple, lying in his mother’s arms, the very image of gentleness and peace. And out of the massive crowd in the Temple, old Simeon finds him and recognises him as the Messiah.
But Malachi’s next words turn this gentle, peaceful image on its head. “Who will be able to resist the day of his coming? For he will be like a refiner’s fire, like the fuller’s alkali. And he will purify the sons of Levi, and refine them like gold and silver.” These images are quite different. The purification of noble metals with the blazing heat of a furnace; the washing white of stained cloth with powerful bleaches. Hardly the sorts of images we associate with the gentle scene at the manger, or for that matter of the infant Jesus lying peacefully in his mother’s arms! They remind us more of Jesus driving the moneychangers and sellers of animals out of the Temple, or coming to judge us at the end of time.
But they bring home to us the wonderful truth behind the manger; because it is these images that bring real hope to our fallen world. In the war-torn world today, it is peace for which we most long. We have United Nations and peace-keeping forces and peace missions and so many other attempts to bring peace to our world. But the wars go on. How many wars are being fought even as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace?
God wants us to struggle constantly to bring about and maintain peace. But peace, unlike war, does not “break out,” as some people like to say. It is a precious, hard fought commodity, difficult to attain, even more difficult to keep. There will never be a definitive solution to the wars between nations, or within nations, or between people, until we have accepted the solution of the Prince of Peace, until it has become a reality in the hearts of the human race: “And he shall purify the sons of Levi.”
Until we have turned back to God, until he has, “like the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s alkali”, purified the sin from our hearts that sets us at war against each other, there will never be true peace on earth. All through Advent we are called to “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand,” to “prepare”, in our hearts, “a way for the Lord.” In Christmas we celebrate the birth of that hope amongst us, that living hope who died for us, that we might be purified.
Yes, if only we long for it with all our hearts, he shall “purify the sons of Levi.” And we are the sons of Levi. The child in the manger, the same child whom his mother presented in the Temple, is our only hope. But what a hope!
If we seek true peace, “a peace the world cannot give”, then we, too, will seek him out as the shepherds and the wise men did at the cradle, as Simeon did in the Temple. And the gift we will bring him is a humble and contrite heart. And we will seek his mercy, his love, his purification, that we might be true messengers of the Prince of Peace, that we too might go before him to prepare his way, that the hearts of all men might be changed. May it be so. And may his peace descend upon us all this Christmas, and may it spread out to all the earth, that he may truly be, in our hearts, the “Prince of Peace.”
Fr Phillip
