"The Christmas Present of Great Price: Peace"
Knox, 5 December, 2010 © Scott McAndless
Jeremiah 33:1-9, Luke 1:68-79, Romans 5:1-11, John 14:25-27
The mall is so crowded. It takes her about an hour just to get a parking spot on the outer edges of the property. Then she has to push and shove her way through the masses. People talk about Christmas spirit. They talk about brotherly love and peace and hope. But wherever that Christmas spirit is, it doesn’t seem to be in the mall at this time of year.
Christine is absolutely desperate to get her Christmas shopping done. She knows that today is really her last chance. Once this day is over her entire schedule will be filled up with meetings and parties and baking and a yearend review and concerts and it just doesn’t end until sometime on the twenty-eighth. But, of course, like she always does, she has left the very worst people to shop for until the very last: that’s right, her kids. Her plan in coming here is to finish up in about an hour, zip back home and have twenty minutes to put up her feet and sip a small glass of sherry before she has to start to get ready to go out for yet another evening.
But as she struggles through the crowd-choked corridors between the stores, she can feel all her best intentions draining away like water from the nice warm bath that she will never be able to take. There will be no feet up on the coffee table for her, no leisurely time to get dressed and to feel good about how she looks.
It isn’t that there nothing that she can buy for her kids. The stores are just bursting with bright and shiny things. She knows that there are all kinds of things her kids would ooh and ah over for whole minutes at a time before discarding them forever. She even sees things that her kids have asked for. But nothing seems right – nothing seemed like it is enough.
But there has to be something, doesn’t there? I mean, there are millions of dollars of merchandise within a five minute walk of where she stands. But the very thought that the perfect gift is that close is no comfort. Instead it only makes her sense of anxiety rise and makes her feel certain that she will never find it – that they are maybe even hiding it from her intentionally!
At the very moment that that irrational thought hits her, she is passing underneath a speaker that is, of course, blasting out music at top volume. I think it is Plácido Domingo singing: “And in despair I bowed my head: ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, For hate is strong and mocks the song Of peace on earth, good will to men.” And that is all she hears. And wild and not so sweet the words repeat inside her head: “‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said.”
And she can stand it no longer. She flees the crowds. She just has to get away from the decorations and the packages and what seem to be the insincere greetings of Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. She goes past the food court and the janitor’s closet to the very farthest reaches of the mall where no one ever seems to go. There it is quieter. There is one shop back here – a little hole in the wall where nobody seems to go. Across the top of the door she reads only one word: Pearls. She doesn’t really know why she goes in.
The space is quite bare. There is almost no merchandise at all and what there is doesn’t seem organized at all. She wonders how the place makes any money. But there is a young woman behind the counter and she greets Christine cheerily (although, and Christine really appreciates it at the time, she says nothing about Christmas or even about “The Holidays”). “You look tired,” she says, “why don’t you take a seat.”
Christine looks around and is surprised to see a simple but comfortable chair in the corner. She sinks gratefully into it. The young woman is so friendly and kind that Christine is immediately at ease. And when the woman asks her why she is looking so tired and worn, she doesn’t take offence and begins to tell of her despairing search for the perfect present for her kids.
The young woman seems rather puzzled at her story. “But it doesn’t seem like this is about what your kids want,” she says. “There are lots of things that it seems that they like – for a little while at least. It is about what you want to give them and you seem to want to give them something impossible – something that will make this Christmas change everything.”
Christine sighs deeply. “You’re too young,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s like. The thing is, you can never win with kids – especially if you’re a mom. For example, everyone expects you, as a modern woman, to go out and have a successful career. But when you do that, you keep running into people that talk to you about how important it is for mothers to spend lots of time with their children. And you feel guilty. Are you neglecting them? Are a bad mother?
“But then, if you don’t try and have that big career – if you put a priority on staying home, you keep on running into people that tell you, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that you’re giving a bad example to your kids – that you should teach them the value of working outside the home and earning a living. And you feel guilty. You can’t win!
“And it’s the same thing with giving gifts. If you just give them a little, you feel bad because you’re disappointing them and maybe depriving them. If you give them a lot, you’re spoiling them and it’s going to be your fault when they turn out greedy and rude and lazy because everything has always been handed to them on a platter. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much trouble finding the right things, because anything I give them is going to make me feel bad.”
The young woman doesn’t say a thing. But she suddenly gets up and goes behind the counter where she rummages around for a few moments. She pulls out an old cardboard box covered in dust. It doesn’t look like much but, when she opens it, Christine gasps at the sight of a beautiful pearl. “I don’t know what gift your children need,” the shopkeeper says, “but I’m pretty sure that this is the one that you need. It is the pearl of peace.”
“But, it’s so precious and so rare,” says Christine. “It can’t be for me. I don’t deserve that.”
“That’s exactly why you need it,” is the reply. “It’s clear enough that you have little peace this Christmas. In fact, peace seems pretty rare in general at this time of year even though it keeps coming up in the music. But you especially seem to need it, so I want you to have it. It is my gift to you.”
“But surely this is a pearl of great value,” replies Christine. “And this is a pearl shop. You can’t give the merchandise away. But, now that you show this to me, I do think that it something I desperately need. Tell me what this pearl costs and I will buy it – we are fairly well off, you know.”
“I don’t care how well off you are, you don’t have enough money to buy this pearl. Oh, you can have it, but you’ll have to give up far more than your money. Anyone can have peace, but the price is high. A man named Paul once wrote, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.” He was saying that anyone can have peace, but one thing is necessary. You have to be justified – that means you have to be made right – right with God, right with yourself and right with the people who matter most to you.
“But, Christine, you don’t seem to be right with any of those people. And it’s not really even because of what you have done or failed to do. I mean, sure, you’re not a perfect mother. But there aren’t any perfect mothers. There are always things that you can do differently or better. And, whenever you set your priorities, you always feel like you’re short-changing something or someone somewhere. Even when they couldn’t really do anything differently, lots of people end up feeling guilty anyways.
“What you need is to be able to put all of that aside – any legitimate guilt for the things that you have truly done wrong, but also all the unnecessary guilt you carry around despite the fact that you’ve really done nothing wrong. Because, in some ways, it doesn’t matter whether the guilt is legitimate or illegitimate – if you’re carrying it around with you, it will destroy you either way.
“But Paul was saying that you don’t have to carry it around – that you can be free of it. And it’s not because you’ve changed things by giving the perfect Christmas present or by recapturing memories of some Christmas past. He was saying that the only way that you can have it is to receive it as a gift. That’s what he means when he talks about ‘this grace in which we now stand.’
“You see, it’s not that easy for you or for any of us to receive things that are given by grace. You always figure that you have to pay for them in one way or another. If people won’t take money, then you’ll just find another way. You’ll feel obligated or you’ll expect them to demand something from you in return down the road. Either that or you’ll feel unworthy and inferior and maybe even guilty for having received something that you didn’t earn.
“That’s the cycle that you’ve got to escape from because the obligation and expectation and guilt get piled on one another until there is no peace. So you need to learn to receive without any of that baggage going with it. And that doesn’t just cost you a lot, it costs you everything. You have to let go of your very sense of how the world works.
“And Paul also says that there is only one thing that can activate such grace in your life and that is faith: “we have gained access by faith into this grace.” Now faith doesn’t just mean that you have to believe certain things about God or about Jesus. What it means above all is that you are learning to put your trust in Jesus – which only makes sense. For how will you receive a true gift from anyone – how can you not fear obligation or judgement or guilt – unless you have learned to trust completely in the one who is giving the gift to you.
“That is what this pearl represents: justification, the power to lay down all your burdens and the guilt that (whether it is based on reality or not) weighs you down. And it really does cost everything to receive it. You can’t receive it until you let go of all of your burdens and your guilt.
But it is worth it. For out of forgiveness and justification and learning to receive what God gives by grace comes true peace. And that is what you need most.
Christine returned home that night refreshed. It seemed that she might just be able to face a new week ahead of her after all. She had her pearl of great price – and gazed upon it with great appreciation. But she knew that it was what she had left behind when she received it that had truly given her peace.