“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings glad tidings, announcing peace…” we hear in today’s first reading. It is hard not to linger over these words in a moment like ours, when the grey wolf, the ancient emblem of Mars, the god of war, seems to roam through every news broadcast from across the globe. And yet, paradoxically, peace has once again become a fresh and urgent longing. The desire for peace is beginning to mark the rhythm of a new era struggling to be born.
Not long ago, when I visited parishes in Poland to animate the missionary spirit of the local Church, I would speak of Africa as a continent rising to its feet. But in recent times we have been hearing more and more about the flames of war, not only beyond Poland’s eastern border, but also from Africa itself. Even in countries long considered stable, where peace and the spirit of ubuntu stand among the highest of values, people are beginning to express anger and deep frustration, escalating their unrest into open resistance and street demonstrations. And yet, the Good News of peace proclaimed in today’s Liturgy of the Word no longer strikes me as dissonant or naïve. Why?
This Advent, I found myself particularly moved by Pope Leo XIV’s pilgrimage to Turkey, and even more so to Lebanon, a country I know little about, yet one that kept returning to my mind as I preached Advent retreats to students at the Medical University of Lublin. The students surprised me by placing an icon of St. Charbel in the chapel. They had been inspired by the pope’s pilgrimage to his tomb in Lebanon. Though I had prepared a different theme, their gesture and our conversations drew me into their fascination. They were watching the papal pilgrimage with far greater attention than many priests I know.
I realized that I knew very little about St. Charbel, only what the Pope had said about him in Lebanon. But as I spoke with the students, another Lebanese figure resurfaced in my memory: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose book The Black Swan I had read years ago. He wrote that it was the history of his own homeland that inspired his famous metaphor of the Black Swan, those unusual events that should not occur, and yet do occur, reshaping our reality and sometimes redirecting the course of history. And once they happen, they force us to reinterpret even those elements of life that once seemed obvious and unquestionable.
Moments like these compel us to re-examine our deepest assumptions, our habits of mind, and the very lens through which we interpret the spiritual depths of our experience. Yet perhaps it is not simply about experience alone. For as Taleb reminds us, the turkey who is fed each day at the same hour, who grows fatter and is given ever more feed, may conclude, reasonably and based on experience, that humankind is the best friend a turkey could have. And he believes so, Taleb writes, until the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving (perhaps the turkey had a US citizenship). Then the impossible happens. I quoted to the students that striking line: “The hand that feeds you may be the hand that wrings your neck.”
Taleb was inspired by the history of his country, a land that had known thirteen centuries of peace, despite political domination by Syria, despite its mosaic of cultures, despite the coexistence of many Christian rites and rival branches of Islam. Many believed, this long peace to be the fruit of some distinctive feature of their culture. And yet it all ended in a single afternoon.
As I preached those Advent retreats, I understood more clearly why the Pope chose Lebanon for his first journey. Christianity does not shield us with illusions. The God-Man came to proclaim peace; He overcame sin, but He did not eliminate sinful people, who must from time to time confront the consequences of their choices.
And there is something more. We may look upon the coming of Jesus as an event that bears every mark of a Black Swan, a divine interruption that reshapes the world and forces us to reimagine reality itself. The people of Israel expected a Messiah powerful enough to subdue the mighty and establish a new order. Instead, He comes into a poor family on the margins of an empire. He is born of a Woman who “had not known a man”; something that, by the logic of human experience, should not have happened. And yet it did. And those who believed, simple people whose humble lives had taught them to keep their hearts open even to the impossible, received a lesson that Love is greater than the power of the mighty, that Love is God.
Today’s Gospel from St. John is precisely an attempt to ponder and articulate the meaning of this great mystery. In theology we call it theology from above, an invitation to lift our gaze, to interpret earthly realities in the light of divine initiative. But such theology is never meant to be merely repeated. It is meant to stir us, people of the 21st century, shaped by experiences vastly different from those of Jesus’ contemporaries, to rediscover and rearticulate the meaning of God’s entry not only into human history, but into our personal history.
If we fail to do this, we risk becoming like the turkey who speaks of peace on the Wednesday afternoon before a feast, whatever feast it may be, depending on where we stand on the day when “the axe is laid to the root.”
By: Tomasz Podrazik, M.Afr.