An angel had appeared. The glory of the Lord—a mountain-consuming cloud of fire—had enveloped them. News of a miraculous new birth that would change the world had been announced.
On a forlorn hilltop of sleepy shepherds, resting sheep, and the occasional wolf, the gospel had been announced to a humble gathering of Jewish sheep herders in a most spectacular fashion, as recounted in Luke 2. After the heavenly messenger had told of a savior for the whole world, a baby in a manger, what more could be said?
Apparently heaven had one more thing to add:
And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:13-14).
Heaven could no longer contain its joy. There once was a time when such visions of heaven were the privilege of prophets. Isaiah had witnessed such a scene. Ezekiel had been granted a glimpse inside heaven too, minus the singing angels. But now heaven had been opened up to earth.
Singing the glory to God in the highest is the familiar language of praise. But why “peace on earth”? The words of the angels have become so familiar to us that we fail to appreciate the strangeness of them. But it’s not necessarily obvious that peace is the first thing to be proclaimed for all the earth. After all, as one Church Father later noted, Christ Himself said he brought not peace but a sword to earth (Matthew 10:34).
In commenting on this, the great medieval poet Dante contrasted the message of peace with what the world might expect: “[H]ence to the shepherds sounded from on high the message not of riches, nor pleasures, nor honors, nor length of life, nor health, nor beauty; but the message of peace” (Monarchy, Book 1).
So why peace?
For one Church Father, the messenger helps us understand the message. Formerly, angels had looked with condescension upon mankind, estranged as we were from God. But now, in the Incarnation, God had become one of us. In this context, the message of peace could be read as a salutation, a greeting from the angels to us. As that Father, an 11th century Byzantine interpreter named Theophylact, puts it, “On earth peace to men, because those whom they had before despised as weak and abject, now that our Lord has come in the flesh they esteem as friends.”
Notice that the angels have not lost sight of God: He is praised first. Only after rendering glory unto Him do the angels welcome humanity to heaven. This dynamic points to the broader significance of their message of peace: through the Incarnation, heaven and earth have at last been reconciled to each other.
This is the main point for St. Cyril of Alexandria, who writes:
This peace has been made through Christ, for He has reconciled us by Himself to God and our Father, having taken away our guilt, which was the ground of offense also. He has united two nations in one man, and has joined the heavenly and the earthly in one flock.
Peace on earth, as it is in heaven—true universal peace, such, one might say, is a valid way of describing Christ’s mission on earth. Certainly, this ideal is at the fore of Luke’s mind as he is retelling the story of the shepherds. Hence, his allusion at the start of the chapter that “in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled.” This was the era of the Pax Romana—the Roman empire of peace established after centuries of empire-building and decades of civil war.
Luke is therefore contrasting the work of Christ with that of Caesar Augustus. Augustus sought to establish a world empire of peace while Christ’s empire was on a far grander scale, one stretching from earth to heaven. The Roman peace was won at a steep price: the blood of so many soldiers spilled through so much warfare. The peace of Christ would be won through the spilling of much blood—Christ’s as well as that of the martyrs. There would be spiritual wars too, ones fought with the weapons like the sword of the Spirit, as Paul tells us in Ephesians 6.
In fact, one can’t help but notice that in his inventory of our spiritual armor, Paul notes Christians ought to have their feet shod (or “fitted”) with the “readiness of the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15).
So Christ indeed brought both peace, but also a sword. An entire spiritual armory, in fact.
We can now hear the angelic chorus anew, as a message of peace, but one tinged with a measure of sorrow and foreboding of the suffering to come. Luke tells us that the shepherds “feared with great fear” when the angels and the cloud of fire first appeared to them. Perhaps the words of this angelic chorus should have inspired a bit of trepidation as well, had the shepherds grasped the full implications of its message.
