Carols & Context: Silent Night

 

 203 years ago on Christmas Eve, the carol ‘Stille Nacht’ made its debut in St Nicolas parish church in Oberndorf, Austria.  The lyric had been written 2 years earlier by Catholic priest Joseph Mohr, but on Christmas Eve of 1818m he brought his poem to schoolmaster and organist Franz Xaver Gruber and asked him to compose a tune for it.  It was to be played on guitar at that night’s mass (the church’s organ was feared damaged by flooding).  Gruber obliged, and the rest is history.

  In fact, history is a big part of ‘Stille Nacht’ – which would be known in English as ‘Silent Night’.  It speaks of a tranquil scene, of “heavenly peace”.  Mohr wrote the words in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars (the year after their end).  His native Austria had been a major combatant in that conflict – the Austrian Empire opposed Napoleon’s forces.  It is estimated that over half a million Austrians were killed in action over these years of fighting – more than any of the other powers involved.  Joseph Mohr’s adulthood had been lived in the shadow of these wars, until they finished (he was around 23 at that time).  So it seems to me like Mohr might have cherished peace.  And he may also have been acutely aware of its fleetingness, its fragility in this word.  Austria spent much of the nineteenth century in some war or other.

  Just shy of a century after its debut, ‘Stille Nacht/Silent Night’ was performed in another famous context: the 1914 Christmas truce in the First World War.  The story goes that German and Allied troops emerged from their respective trenches and sang the carol in their own languages (they also played football together).  Again, how poignant it must have been, to sing of a silent night, instead of hearing gunfire every night; and how they might have longed for heavenly peace, instead of earthly war.

  The world they were living in may have seemed a far cry from the one the angels described on the first Christmas:

 

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours [or, peace, goodwill among people]” (Luke 2:14)

 

  That day, that silent night in Palestine, 2000 or so years ago, was a snapshot, a glimpse, a note, of heavenly peace.  It was delicate, and it didn’t last, but every now and then, we can still catch glimpses like that, we can still hear echoes of ‘Silent Night’: ringing out in juxtaposition with the shots on battlefields and in our streets; sounding a noble countermelody to the noisy, polarized and polarizing rhetoric in Houses and homes; and as the peaceful resolution of the discord of imperialism and insidious ideologies.  One of the great problems of our age is our inability to disagree well, to hold difference.  Peace is possible – but it’s gentle and easily disturbed.  Maybe that’s why the dove is a common symbol of peace.

 The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) has this beautiful vision of a future peace – a vision so important that either God said it twice, or two different prophets used the same quote:

 

                “[The LORD] shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4; cf. Micah 4:3)

 

  I wonder if Jesus, the “holy infant, so tender and mild”, slept in heavenly peace because he dreamed of that day?  And in his living and his dying, he showed us the way.