Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 359 · December 25
Born Into a War
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
Today's verse sits inside a war poem. Chapter eight of Isaiah ends in darkness: "they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish." Chapter nine then turns to two northern regions, Zebulun and Naphtali. They were among the first parts of the country to be stripped by an invading empire, and of the people living there Isaiah says, "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light."
As Advent drew near in 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in a cell in Tegel military prison in Berlin, waiting for 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 good picture of Advent: you wait, and hope, and do what little you can, but the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside. That is how this passage reads to someone living inside the very conditions it describes.
Now watch the word shoulder. Two verses earlier, the oppressor's tools are broken: "the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor." A staff across the shoulder is what a beaten people carry. Then, in verse six, "the government shall be upon his shoulder." The same word now carries something new, the weight of ruling, and it is laid on the Child. Between those two verses sits verse five, which nobody prints on a Christmas 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." The soldiers' bloodstained clothes become firewood. That has to happen before the last name in the list, "The Prince of Peace," can mean anything.
Before you hear this line sung this week, read the five verses in front of it. It takes about ninety seconds, and it puts the Child back where He was announced, at the dark end of a country that had already lost. Then read the verse after it, because it tells you how the story ends: "Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end." The door that could only be opened from the outside has been opened. God sent His Son into the dark, and His peace will never end.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 359 is Goodness Laid Up for You (Psalm 31:19).