Saturday, December 25, 2021
/Christmas Day
Text: Luke 2:1-20
Theme: Christ’s birth is a confrontation
The Rev. Clint Brown
“Upon you…while still living among us, we already bestow divine honors…and confess that nobody like you will arise hereafter or has arisen before now.”[1] Words of exalted praise and adoration, a fitting tribute to offer to a king, and especially appropriate on this day when we celebrate the birth of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords…except that they were not spoken about Jesus. These are the words of the poet Horace, penned to recognize not the Word made flesh, but to bestow divine honors on the Roman Emperor Augustus, during whose reign Jesus was born: Caesar Augustus who, as this quote makes clear, was already considered divine while still alive. In telling the story of the birth of Christ, it is easy to overlook the fact that before it mentions angels, or mangers, or shepherds, Luke’s account mentions Augustus and Quirinius. The context for the birth of Christ is Empire, and the Roman Empire’s omnipresence stands in the background of the entire Christmas story. The imperial machine is pulling all the levers. With its long arm it reaches into the lives of the lowliest of its subjects and decrees the movement of whole populations. The registration or census referred to is itself a mechanism for exerting domination and control. Yes, the context for the birth of Christ is Empire, and it is in the confrontation between the divine Augustus and the divine Jesus that the true message of Christmas is to be found.
To fully appreciate the events of Bethlehem, we have to rewind the clock some thirty years and travel almost a thousand miles west to the town of Actium on the western coast of Greece. Here, in the pivotal year of 31 B.C., the last great naval battle of the ancient world was fought, securing for Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, victory in the civil war that had bled the Roman Republic for twenty years. On a long September afternoon, Octavian’s galleys defeated the combined forces of Marc Anthony and Cleopatra, giving the couple no other recourse but suicide. With their deaths, all claimants to the imperial throne had been dispatched. At last, there was peace. Around the entire Mediterranean, a collective sigh of relief went up. Octavian had brought order to the chaos, and, as the adopted son of the divine Caesar, he well-deserved the epithet “son of god.” Surely this one was touched by divinity, and, in no time, not just the poets but also the ordinary folk were acclaiming him “savior of the world.” By his victory, it was said, he had brought “peace on earth.” And so, Octavian took for himself a new, more appropriate name to better reflect his elevated status. He would call himself Augustus, the august one, an appellation that, in current usage, carried with it a faintly religious connotation. Augustus was a level up from humanus; literally translated, Augustus means the “One Who Is Divine.”[2] And just in case you thought that this was ancient history with very little bearing on your life now, just think that every time you date a check or fill out a school registration form in the month of August, you are still acknowledging the greatness of Augustus.
With this background firmly in place, we begin to see that there is a whole lot more going on in the Christmas story than our cute nativity scenes may suggest: Son of God. Peace on Earth. Savior of the World. Even the word “good tidings” or “glad tidings” appears, which becomes in our literature the word “gospel.” Long before these became the stock phrases of Christmas pageants and Christmas cards, they were the terms of imperial propaganda, and so Luke is being deliberately provocative in using them. He knows exactly what he is doing. The Christmas story is a scandal. It is the beginning, just the beginning, of what will remain ever after a confrontation between the kingdom of God, on the one hand – in all its apparent weakness, insignificance, vulnerability – and the kingdoms of this world on the other. “The Roman vision incarnated in the divine Augustus was peace through victory. The Christian vision incarnated in the divine Jesus was peace through justice. It is those alternatives that are at stake behind all the titles and countertitles, the claims and counterclaims.”[3]
For Christians, our difficulties with the Roman Empire have long since evaporated. There is no longer a literal empire with which we have to contend, at least for most of us anyway. In one of the supreme ironies of history, the Empire that had apparently neutralized the threat of the Jesus movement by crucifying its founder was itself converted when the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the state religion less than 300 years later. But make no mistake. We do live with empire. Its spirit is alive and well in all the corrupting influences which underlie so much of how we live and how the world operates, which show up in how poorly we treat one another and how we build towering edifices not to peace and kindness and the just distribution of wealth, but to greed and pride and open rebellion to God. In that sense, empire is always with us, vying for our allegiance, wooing us with its seductive promises. Empire is the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God; the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God; the sinful desires that draw us from the love of God.[4] All that we renounce in our baptismal covenant is what the Incarnation confronts, and it demands a decision. It demands a taking of sides. Will you crown the king of empire or will you crown the King of Love?
[1] Quoted in Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 63-64.
[2] Borg and Crossan, The First Christmas, 61.
[3] Borg and Crossan, The First Christmas, 166.
[4] BCP, 302.