They say the leprechaun’s secret hiding place for his pot of gold is at the end of a rainbow, an impossibility of course because a rainbow is an optical phenomenon that cannot be reached. Yet rainbows have featured in many cultures. The Romans, for example, believed rainbows were the pathway taken by Mercury, the messenger god. In Norse tradition only fallen warriors, royalty, or gods could cross the rainbow bridge.
A special rainbow features in tomorrow’s first reading from Genesis where God tells Noah that the rainbow is a sign of God’s commitment to his people: “I have set my bow in the clouds ... This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.” However, scholars tell us that the actual Hebrew refers to a bow, as in bow and arrow. Thus an instrument of war and death becomes a symbol of reconciliation and peace. (In previous verses killing had been condemned and those responsible were to be held accountable.)
We live in uncertain times. There has been talk lately in political circles of the possibility of war. Do we never learn? Consider what is happening to the people of Ukraine and Gaza where the maiming, killing and orphaning of children is especially obscene. To condemn it is not, as some imply, to condone the atrocities committed against Israel last October.
There is an alternative to war if we want it, according to Albert Schweitzer, theologian, physician, Lutheran minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954. Schweitzer had lived on the shifting frontiers between Germany and France in wartime and knew something of the cost of war.
His faith in Jesus Christ led him to write: “At the present time when violence, clothed in life, dominates the world more cruelly than it ever has before, I remain convinced that truth, love, peacefulness, meekness, and kindness are the violence which can master all other violence. The world will be theirs as soon as enough people with purity of heart, with strength, and with perseverance think and live out the thoughts of love and truth, of meekness and peacefulness.”
A young American soldier called Master Sgt Roddie Edmonds, did just that following his capture at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. He was the senior rank in a camp of 1,275 war prisoners. On arrival the Germans directed that at next parade the Jewish soldiers among them (some 300 men) were to fall out. The evil intention was clear. “We’re not going to do that,” said Edmonds, a Christian. “The Geneva Convention requires only name, rank and serial number.” Next day when the order was given “Jews fall out”, all 1,275 men stepped forward. “We are all Jews here,” Edmonds said to a furious commandant and even at gunpoint refused to comply. Thus one man who believed in and valued our shared humanity saved 300 lives.
In the Noah story a dove with an olive branch raised hopes having found dry land. A dove also features in tomorrow’s gospel account of the Baptism of Jesus, which an early Christian writer also saw as a symbol of hope, “bringing us the peace of God, sent out from the heavens”.
William Barclay insists that peace as understood by Christians is quite different from peace as understood by the world: “In the Bible the word peace, shalom, never simply means the absence of trouble. Peace means everything which makes for our highest good. The peace which the world offers is the peace of escape, the peace which comes from the avoidance of trouble, the peace which comes from refusing to face things. The peace which Jesus offers is the peace of conquest. It is the peace which no experience in life can ever take from us. It is the peace which no sorrow, no danger, no suffering can make less. It is the peace which is independent of outward circumstances.”
