Born Into a War

A war poem is where this sentence lives. Chapter eight has just ended in the dark: they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish. Chapter nine opens on two northern territories, Zebulun and Naphtali, the first parts of the country stripped by an invading empire, and those are the people who walked in darkness and have seen a great light.

In the Advent of 1943 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in a cell in Tegel military prison in Berlin, awaiting a trial that never properly came; he was hanged at Flossenbürg in April 1945. In a letter from that cell he wrote that a prison is a fair picture of Advent: you wait, and hope, and do what you can, and the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside. That is this passage read from inside the conditions it describes.

Now watch the shoulder. Two verses earlier the oppressor's equipment is broken: the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor. A staff on the shoulder is what a defeated people carry. Then, in verse six, the government shall be upon his shoulder, and the part that bore the rod is given the weight of the rule. In between sits verse five, which nobody prints on a card: every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire. Uniforms as firewood. That is what has to happen before the last name in the list, The Prince of Peace, means anything.

Before you hear the line sung this week, read the five verses in front of it. It takes ninety seconds, and it puts the child back where he was announced, at the dark end of a country that had already lost.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 359 is Goodness Laid Up for You (Psalm 31:19).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two