Everyone says they want peace. Yet our homes, churches and nations keep sliding into conflict. Jesus called peacemakers blessed, but he never said peacemaking would be easy.
These seven stories about peace and war, retold in our own words, range from gentle parables to hard truths about what war really costs. Each closes with a takeaway for sermons, classes or personal reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- The King's Contest: Painting a Picture of Peace
- The Weight of a Snowflake
- The Hidden Cost of 'Smart' Wars
- A War Correspondent on the Myths of War
- The Priest and the Principal
- A Chair in the Shade: Monks Brawl at the Holy Sepulchre
- Martin Luther King Jr. on Loving Your Enemies
The King's Contest: Painting a Picture of Peace
A parable.
There was once a king who offered a prize to the artist who could paint the best picture of peace. Many artists tried, and paintings arrived from all over the kingdom. The king looked carefully at every one, but in the end there were only two he really liked, and he had to choose between them.
The first picture showed a calm lake. Its surface was a perfect mirror, reflecting the peaceful, towering mountains all around it. Overhead was a blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. Everyone who saw it agreed that it was the perfect picture of peace.
The second picture had mountains too, but they were rugged and bare. Above them was an angry, dark sky. Rain was pouring down and lightning flashed across the clouds. Down the side of the mountain tumbled a foaming, roaring waterfall. It did not look peaceful at all.
But when the king looked more closely, he noticed something behind the waterfall: a tiny bush growing out of a crack in the rock. In that bush a mother bird had built her nest. And there, in the middle of the rush of angry water and the noise of the storm, the mother bird sat on her nest, perfectly calm.
The king chose the second picture. Peace, he explained, does not mean being in a place where there is no noise, no trouble and no hard work. Peace means being in the middle of all those things and still being calm in your heart. That, he said, is the real meaning of peace.
Takeaway: Jesus promised a peace that the world cannot give (John 14:27). It does not depend on calm circumstances but on a secure place to rest.
Source: Traditional parable; author unknown.
The Weight of a Snowflake
A modern fable, retold from the German writer Kurt Kauter.
Tell me, a small coal tit once asked a wild dove, how much does a snowflake weigh?
Nothing more than nothing, the dove replied.
In that case, said the little bird, I must tell you a marvellous story.
I was sitting on the branch of a fir tree, close to the trunk, when it began to snow. Not heavily, not in a raging blizzard, but gently, like a dream, without a sound and without any violence. Since I had nothing better to do, I counted the snowflakes as they settled on the twigs and needles of my branch. There were exactly 3,741,952 of them. And when the 3,741,953rd snowflake landed on the branch, weighing nothing more than nothing, as you say, the branch broke off.
Having said that, the little bird flew away.
The dove, who since Noah's time had been something of an authority on peace, thought about the story for a long while. At last she said to herself: perhaps only one more person's voice is needed for peace to come to the world.
Takeaway: Your voice for peace may feel like it weighs nothing. But change often comes when one more ordinary person adds their weight.
Source: Retold from Kurt Kauter, New Fables: Thus Spoke the Marabou.
The Hidden Cost of 'Smart' Wars
Many people who remember the Gulf War of 1990–91 remember above all the "smart" bombs. Night after night, television screens showed grainy footage of laser-guided weapons striking their targets with astonishing precision. Military briefings gave the impression that a factory could be destroyed through its air vents while the buildings around it were left untouched. Watching, many of us took comfort in the idea that this would be a war fought with surgical precision, hitting only essential targets and keeping human casualties to a minimum.
The reality was very different. Sometimes the targets were wrong. On 13 February 1991, two laser-guided bombs struck an air-raid shelter in Baghdad's Amiriyah district. Coalition commanders believed it was a military command centre. In fact it was full of families sheltering from the bombing, and at least 408 civilians died in the Amiriyah shelter bombing, many of them women and children. Journalists who later saw footage of the aftermath described scenes of almost unbearable horror: bodies burned beyond recognition, among them babies and young children, and rescue workers overcome with grief.
For months the true picture was hard to see. Footage of the shelter's aftermath was heavily restricted in many Western broadcasts at the time, and it was only later, as journalists and media critics examined what had been edited out, that many viewers began to grasp what had happened inside. The contrast between the neat crosshairs on our screens and the reality on the ground could hardly have been greater.
Terrible as that was, it was only part of the story. Precision-guided weapons made up only a small fraction, under ten per cent, of the bombs dropped in that war. Large numbers of the weapons used were cluster bombs. A cluster bomb is a container that holds many smaller bomblets. Dropped from a plane or fired by artillery, it opens in mid-air and scatters its bomblets over a wide area, saturating it with explosives. Tens of thousands of cluster bombs were used in the war, releasing millions of bomblets across Iraq and Kuwait.
Cluster bombs created another deadly problem. Not all the bomblets exploded when they hit the ground. A significant proportion lay unexploded in fields and sand until someone stepped on them or picked them up. Human Rights Watch and other observers later reported that unexploded munitions killed and injured many people, including American soldiers during the war itself. When the fighting ended, the bomblets did not go home with the armies. They stayed in the fields where children returned to play, and according to reports cited by the journalist John Pilger, they went on to kill well over a thousand civilians in the years after the war.
And the story does not end there. It is not only weapons that kill people in war, but the disease and hunger that follow. The bombing of Iraq destroyed power stations, water treatment plants and roads. That disabled the enemy army, but it also stopped clean water flowing, hospital equipment working and medical supplies moving. Estimates of the total number of Iraqis who died as a result of the war and its aftermath vary widely and remain disputed, but by most accounts the human cost, especially for civilians, was far greater than the television images suggested.
None of this is to deny that wars are sometimes fought against real evils, or that those who serve in them often act with courage. But it is a reminder that every war, however justified it may seem, is paid for in human lives, and very often by those who had the least to do with starting it.
The "clean" war shown on our screens was never as clean as it looked.
Takeaway: Whatever we believe about when war may be justified, we must never let clean images hide its human cost. Christians are called to see the faces behind the footage.
Source: Information reported by Human Rights Watch and in John Pilger, Hidden Agendas (Vintage, 1998).
A War Correspondent on the Myths of War
Chris Hedges spent much of his adult life as a war correspondent. He covered conflicts in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, the Middle East, Sudan, Yemen, Algeria, the Punjab, Romania, Kuwait, Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Along the way he had more than his share of terrifying experiences. He has written of being caught in ambushes on lonely Central American roads, being shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in Sudan, beaten by military police, deported from more than one country, held prisoner by Iraq's Republican Guard during the uprising after the Gulf War, strafed by fighter jets in Bosnia, fired on by snipers and shelled for days in Sarajevo.
Through it all he gained an insight into war that few of us ever will, and what he saw disgusted him. Out of that experience he wrote War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and in 2003 an article for The Nation about the way the press and popular culture glamorise conflict.
In that article Hedges argued that war is venal, dirty and confusing, and perhaps the most potent narcotic humankind has ever invented. In modern industrial warfare, he pointed out, most of those who are killed never even see their attackers. There is nothing glorious or gallant about it.
If we really saw what wounds do to human bodies, he wrote, and how killing is far more like butchery than the clean, neat deaths of Hollywood films, it would turn our stomachs. If we saw how war turns young people into killers intoxicated by violence, how it gives soldiers licence to destroy not only things but other human beings, and the perverse thrill that destruction can bring, we would be horrified. If we understood that combat is often a constant battle against a consuming fear most of us have never known, a battle that soldiers often lose, the grand abstract words of war, such as glory, honour and patriotism, would seem not just hollow but obscene.
And if we saw the deep psychological scars of slaughter, the way it maims and stunts those who take part in it for the rest of their lives, we would keep our children away. It would be very hard to wage war, Hedges concluded, because war, when we face it truthfully, exposes the darkness that lies within all of us.
Takeaway: Peacemaking begins with honesty about violence. When we stop romanticising war, we are better able to pray and work for peace.
Source: Chris Hedges, "The Press and the Myths of War", The Nation, April 2003.
The Priest and the Principal
A story is told about a conflict counsellor who received a phone call from a Catholic parish priest. The relationship between the priest and the principal of the parish school had deteriorated so badly that the two men could no longer talk to each other.
The counsellor agreed to help. He spoke to each man separately and gave them both the same task. Before we meet together, he said, I want you to write down what you think the problems are in your relationship.
At the first meeting, the priest and the principal sat on opposite sides of the table, barely looking at one another. The counsellor asked them to read out their lists.
The priest went first. I feel that the principal resents my presence in the school, he read. I would like to play a much bigger role, but I feel I can't. I would especially like to be more involved in religious education, but I feel pushed out.
Then the principal read out his assessment of the problem. I feel that the priest doesn't want to be involved in the school, he said. I can't understand why he feels that way, because we desperately need him, especially in religious education.
For months, each man had been sure the other was rejecting him. In fact, they wanted exactly the same thing.
Takeaway: Many conflicts are not about what the other person wants but about what we assume they want. James tells us to be "quick to listen, slow to speak" (James 1:19).
Source: Traditional story; author unknown.
A Chair in the Shade: Monks Brawl at the Holy Sepulchre
Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands, by long tradition, over the place where Jesus was crucified and the tomb where he was buried. In July 2002 it became the scene of an ugly fight between the monks who look after it.
The church is shared by several Christian communities. In 1752 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree, later known as the Status Quo, setting out which parts of the building belonged to which of six groups: the Latin Catholics, the Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Orthodox, the Syrian Orthodox, the Copts and the Ethiopians. The arrangement has largely held, but disputes have never entirely gone away.
One of the longest disputes concerns the small rooftop monastery of Deir es-Sultan, which the Coptic and Ethiopian churches have argued over for centuries. According to the account reported at the time, control of the roof changed hands more than once over the years, and since 1970 the Ethiopian monks have occupied it. To assert their claims, both sides have long kept a monk on the roof at all times.
On a hot Monday in July 2002, the Coptic monk on duty moved his chair a little way out of the sun and into the shade. The shade happened to fall on the part of the roof the Ethiopians regarded as theirs.
The Ethiopian monks took the move as a deliberate provocation. Harsh words led to pushing and shoving, and then to an all-out brawl, with chairs and iron bars thrown. By the end, eleven monks had been injured. One was unconscious in hospital, and another had a broken arm.
News photographs of the aftermath showed bruised and bandaged men in religious robes, a sad sight in a place of pilgrimage visited every year by Christians from all over the world.
How tragic that a church built as a memorial to Christ should become the scene of such bitter conflict among his followers. It is a long way from Jesus' command to love one another and turn the other cheek, and from his prayer that his followers might be one.
Takeaway: It is painfully easy to fight over the place where Jesus died while forgetting what he died for. Jesus prayed that his followers would "be one" (John 17:21).
Source: Reuters, 29 July 2002.
Martin Luther King Jr. on Loving Your Enemies
Few people have had more reason to hate their enemies than Martin Luther King Jr. He received death threat after death threat. He was maliciously accused of being a communist. His home was bombed. He was arrested and jailed many times for insisting that Black Americans should have the same civil rights as every other American.
Yet one of his most moving sermons is titled "Loving Your Enemies". It was published in his 1963 collection Strength to Love, much of which King prepared while he was in jail.
In it King argued that hate multiplies hate, creating a descending spiral of violence. Hatred, he said, does as much harm to the person who hates as to the one who is hated. But love is different. Love, King insisted, is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend, because it has a creative and redemptive power that hatred can never have.
Takeaway: Loving our enemies is not weakness or approval of evil. It is the hardest and most powerful way to break the cycle of hatred, exactly as Jesus taught in Matthew 5:43-48.
Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963); David Garrow, Bearing the Cross (1986).
Final thoughts
A painting, a snowflake, a bombed shelter, a reporter's warning, two men with lists, a chair in the shade and a sermon from a man who was hated. Together they remind us that peace is fragile, conflict is often foolish, and love is stronger than both.
For further reading, Sopranu reviews John Hersey's Hiroshima and the war film Apocalypse Now, two unflinching looks at the human cost of war.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Which of these stories will you pass on?
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These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.