Simeon’s song of praise, the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29-32), whether it is the version in our Gospel reading or the familiar form from Evensong, sounds so safe and reassuring. It is a traditional text to use at funerals as the coffin is taken out of the church. Its words seem particularly apt: ‘Now let your servant depart in peace’; or put another way, it is safe to die now because what has been hoped for has been fulfilled. We are given the image of Christ as a light to lighten the nations (v32).

It doesn’t feel very much like the nations have been enlightened at the moment. War with the Iraqi regime seems to be really a matter of time. As Kirsty Wark said on Newsnight recently, “not even the grand old Duke of York marched 30,000 troops up a hill just to march them down again”!

The legions stacked up against this are impressive: the Archbishop of Canterbury and many of the senior bishops of our Church, the Pope and RC bishops in USA, many of the Aid agencies, international statesmen like Nelson Mandella and the Secretary General of UN. Are all of these to be dismissed as naive idealists? Perhaps a quick recap of where we are might help.

Comparisons have been made with 1930s appeasement towards Hitler. That seems cheap and simplistic, and misses the fundamental differences. The links with oil are now startlingly apparent. Some have pointed out that this conflict was planned 5 years ago when key figures in the present US administration decided that they needed to get their hands on Iraq’s oil reserves because in 20 years time the USA will be importing 70% of its oil needs and Iraq has some of the richest untapped supplies. There is a desire to break the hold of OPEC, and if the Iraqi regime is toppled many other countries, including ourselves, want to be part of the carving up of this oil! So France, Russia and China, who have been promised access to Iraq’s oil by Saddam’s regime, are opposing the war and other countries excluded at present seem to be for it! Fighting to control scarce resources is not new but under just war theory it is an aggressive act, not one of self-defence, and therefore not morally justified.

Bolted on to this, and with a horrible plausibility, is the threat of a rogue state having access to weapons of mass destruction and the further threat of these getting into the hands of terrorist groups. Fear is an inflammable element when placed next to the sparks ready to ignite the oil war. But this is speculation at the moment and there is nothing yet to link Iraq with an active threat. So the absence of such evidence puts this war on very dangerous moral ground. It is to attack because we fear they might one day attack us and that is not good enough. It is an infringement of all we base our concepts of justice on.

Added to this, we have a UN report estimating that several million Iraqi people will be displaced by any war in the region. There is the knock on effect on Islamic militancy and the breeding of more terrorists, not less, and the further destabilising of an unstable area. These make this war no quick fix solution to say the least.

So where does this leave us holding our candles on this Candlemas day, as we celebrate Jesus being heralded as the light of the nations? How do we bolt on this theological acclamation to a world of dark politics and posturing? As is so often the case ‘bolting on’ won’t do. The Christ of the Gospels challenges the very assumptions on which so many of our actions and thoughts are based, and this is no different. His light searches very deeply to strike at the ground rules on which this conflict is built.

Various phrases from Jesus’ teaching come to my mind about ‘those who live by the sword die by it’ and ‘taking the plank out of our own eyes before picking at specks in others’. A war over oil which is not connected to the failures of sustainable development and the Johannesburg Summit fails to grapple with some very fundamental issues (specks and planks). Longings for more oil are themselves flawed. A culture that decides that the best way to resolve conflict is by the rule of force fails to deal with the pains and disagreements beneath the surface that can return to bite us (living and dying by the sword). The ‘light to enlighten the nations’ calls for a new politics and longer term solutions than just sending in the troops, than gunboat diplomacy. This is why the aid agencies, who are intimately involved with longer term solutions and whose programmes will be disrupted, are against the war.

That is all well and good, but in the real world surely hard decisions have to be made and evil has to be combated. September 11th showed that nowhere is really safe from nuclear fission material getting into the wrong hands - assuming there are right hands for this stuff to get into! I am not a total pacifist and realise that sometimes things get so bad that war is the only practical option - though it is always based on failures and is a sign of deep failure. There is evil that needs combating, but as soon as we start using words like ‘evil’ the danger is we fail to see our own complicity and contribution to the conflict! States claiming the moral high ground have a way of deceiving themselves about their own righteousness and previous, even current sins. All soldiers are sent to fight under the shadow of the cross and the need for redemption which it reveals.

It looks as if war is very likely, though nothing is inevitable and it is always possible that those marching troops into this can pull back from what has the marks of being a disaster. The issue for us now is how do we win the peace, by which I mean how do we allow true peace to win the peace? We win it by allowing the light of Christ to guide the way we relate as nations, as siblings in the same family of nations. We do this by recognising that our interests are served when they are shared with others not through them being in conflict with others and where they are conflictory then they are not really our interests at all! Issues of fairtrade and how global corporations operate are linked to issues of peace and justice.

This is not macho and is not going to get the adrenaline pumping like an action film of special forces in operation behind enemy lines. Peace is not something that can be imposed by force. It has to be fostered and nurtured and that takes long term commitment to the international bridges that sustain and make it. There needs to be a genuine commitment to find our interests are fundamentally linked to the interests of all other nations. The alternative often just breeds bitterness and that is a breeding ground for terrorism and hatreds that feed terrorists of the future.

So the Christ-light that we hold in our lighted candles is not one to bolt on to the way we act at present, it is one that strikes at the very assumptions we build our world politics on at present. It calls for a fundamental rethink of where our interests ultimately lie and we find that they have to be shared with all our brothers and sisters around the world. The light of Christ shines so brightly on the nations that it goes beneath the very ground on which we stand, the ground we fight to defend and advance.

© Ian Black 2003

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