The Greatest Christmas Wish

Clarence Edward Noble Macartney was born in 1879 and died at age 78 in 1957. He is most remembered for ministering 27 years at First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unlike most American preachers today, Rev. Macartney's preaching attracted mostly men “not only to his Sunday services but also to his popular Tuesday noon luncheons."*

In 1943, Abingdom Press published Great Nights of the Bible, a collection of sermons by Rev. Macartney. In that collection is the sermon “The Night of Nights" in which the great preacher explained why the night Jesus, the Man of Peace, was born must remain the greatest night in history.

In the sermon, Rev. Macartney relates an incident that took place the first Christmas after the start of World War I. He said “the colossal armies" of Germany, France, and Great Britain “had fought themselves to a standstill, and now millions of their soldiers were glaring at one another out of the trenches that gashed the earth from the North Sea clear to the Alps."

“In Flanders the German army lay confronting the British army" surrounded by the bodies of dead soldiers on both sides. “Then came Christmas Eve..." The fighters stood “on their platforms in the hostile trenches" as “the men in gray and the men in khaki watched for an attack of the enemy. But no attack came that night. At length the night passed, and the December sun rose. It was Christmas Day, the day of our Savior, the day of the Prince of Peace... The guns back of the German trenches were silent. A great stillness came down over both lines of battle."

What happened next remains humankind's brightest hope.

“Suddenly the British soldiers saw three gray-clad soldiers rise out of the German trenches. This time they came without bayonets and hand grenades. Slowly...they approached and passed the line of their own barbed wire, and stood unprotected in No Man's Land. In a moment, before the officers realized what was happening, men by the hundreds were scrambling out of the German trenches and the British trenches, and running forward into No Man's Land."

Rev. Macartney continued, “The soldiers who yesterday were seeking to kill one another now put out their hands in friendly clasp and greeting, and wished one another in broken English and in broken German a Merry Christmas..."

The soldiers then “passed the morning and afternoon of Christmas Day in brotherly friendship and mutual songs and the exchanging of gifts."

The preacher acknowledged that it was “only an interlude...in the chorus of war..." Yet he concludes, “it was one of those incidents which create hope within the breast of man, which make us believe, in spite of the clouds of war and hatred that now infest our planet, that love is stronger than hate, that light is stronger than darkness, and that with the birth of Christ there came into the world a power which shall one day overcome the powers of darkness and bring in everlasting light and everlasting peace."

That is the greatest Christmas wish: hope for world peace... Someday. In that day the simple message of that Man of Peace shall finally take hold of the hearts of collective humanity, and they shall together drop their weapons of warfare to sing with one voice, “Peace on earth".

* Source: Classic Sermons on the Birth of Christ compiled by Warren W. Wiersbe