Christmas in a Time of War
by George Weigel, First Things:
Composed in the wake of 9/11, “The Dream Isaiah Saw” quickly became a contemporary Christmas classic. The hymn’s powerful evocation of the peaceable kingdom on God’s holy mountain, described by the greatest of Hebrew prophets in Isaiah 11:6–9, is, in some respects, wrenchingly difficult to hear at Christmas 2023. For once again, after Hamas’s attack on Israel, “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are not” (Jer. 31:15)—the Old Testament text used by Matthew to weave Herod’s slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem into the master narrative of salvation history.
Playing on the similarity between “son” (hyiós) and “pig” (hys) in Greek, the emperor Augustus once said of the brutal vassal who had murdered three of his own sons that “it is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.” What the terrorist brutalitarians of Hamas did on October 7—swooping in on a music festival on paragliders, beheading infants, indiscriminately slaughtering children and grandmothers, raping and then killing the victims—and what Hamas has done since, using toddlers as hostages behind which to hide and scurrying into tunnels whose entrances are concealed beneath babies’ cribs, is the twenty-first-century, high-tech version of Herodian ruthlessness.
With one important difference, however. Herod the Great’s lethal actions were not the result of religious conviction but of a mania for absolute power within his Roman satrapy. Hamas’s barbarism, by contrast, is motivated by religious conviction—warped religious conviction, to be sure; false religious conviction, undoubtedly; but religious conviction, nonetheless. Yes, Hamas has a political program, and its slogan, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” is as despicable a euphemism for exterminationist anti-Semitism as was the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to Die Judenfrage (the “Jewish Question”). But what turns people into deranged Hamas murderers and “martyrs,” who by all accounts enjoyed killing 1,400 innocents on 10/7, is the vile belief that what they were doing was the will of God.
It was not; it could not be. Only a fundamentally distorted understanding of “God” could lead to such a wicked conclusion. The God of the Bible cannot command the murder he forbade in the Ten Commandments, because the God of the Bible is a God of reason, and reason cannot contradict itself. The God of the Qur’an, however, is a God of will, who can command whatever he chooses and demand submission to that command as the ticket to salvation. Taken to extremes, that false idea of God as Absolute Willfulness is what makes Hamas, Hezbollah, and their exterminationist anti-Semitism possible, and what gives these hopeless political movements their staying power.
What shall we make of the burning Holy Land, during a Christmastide when we celebrate the angelic announcement of a messianic birth that marks the inbreaking of the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah 11:6–9?
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