NILS VON KALM says the Christmas is a story about those on the margins…
Melbourne, Australia
As we set up our nativity sets and Christmas trees this year, and do our frenzied Christmas shopping, it’s important to remember that these acts – though fine in themselves – bear little resemblance to the revolution that is the story of Christ coming into the world.
What we call the Incarnation was political, spiritual, personal, and social. It was God turning everything on its head: upending the powers, turning society upside down, and subverting the occupying powers by claiming there is another ruler coming. No wonder Herod felt so threatened that he went so far as commissioning an act of brutal genocide on all children two years and younger so he could get rid of this threat to his power (Matthew 2:13-18).
A scene depicting the shepherds greeting Mary and Joseph with the baby Jesus. PICTURE: OlgaSiv/iStockphoto.
In short, Christmas is a story that should make those in power and anyone too close to them shudder in their boots. Herod certainly did. He knew what this meant.
This is why it is always a problem when the church gets too close to power. When are we going to learn that the way of Christ is always on the margins? When we get too close to power, we lose that cutting edge that the teenage Mary joyfully exclaimed in her Magnificat. “My spirit rejoices in God my saviour”, she cries out. “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:46-53). These are words of confident defiance in the face of oppressive power.
“[I]t is always a problem when the church gets too close to power. When are we going to learn that the way of Christ is always on the margins? When we get too close to power, we lose that cutting edge that the teenage Mary joyfully exclaimed in her Magnificat. ‘My spirit rejoices in God my saviour’, she cries out. ‘He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty’ (Luke 1:46-53). These are words of confident defiance in the face of oppressive power.”
It is little wonder then that in some countries over the years – namely, India, Argentina and Guatemala – the Magnificat was banned from public recitation for being too subversive. It has also been criticised by some Bible-believing evangelicals who didn’t know their Bibles for being a communist manifesto.
The Gospel is political. That’s a contentious statement for many Christians. But let me explain why it is political, what that means and what it doesn’t mean.
Politics is ultimately about what is best for people, about the type of society we want to live in. Under the Roman Empire in which Jesus lived, life was oppressive. Living under the ‘Pax Romana’ – the ‘peace of Rome’ – meant that you had freedom to worship anything or anyone you wanted to, as long as you paid ultimate allegiance to Rome. It was nationalism at its most stringent.
It was from Rome that we gained the terms ‘Lord’, ‘Saviour of the world’ and ‘Son of God’. They were terms reserved at the time to denote the authority and divinity of Roman Emperors, beginning with Caesar Augustus before the first century.
An example of how these terms were used to refer to Caesar Augustus was found on a government building dating from 6 BC It reads as follows: “The most divine Caesar…we should consider equal to the Beginning of all things…for when everything was falling [into disorder] and tending toward dissolution, he restored it once more and gave the whole world a new aura; Caesar…the common good Fortune of all…The beginning of life and vitality…All the cities unanimously adopt the birthday of the divine Caesar as the new beginning of the year…Whereas the Providence which has regulated our whole existence…has brought our life to the climax of perfection in giving to us [the emperor] Augustus…who being sent to us and our descendants as Saviour, has put an end to war and has set all things in order; and [whereas], having become [god] manifest [PHANEIS], Caesar has fulfilled all the hopes of earlier times.”
Another inscription, this time from 9 BC, and known as the Priene calendar inscription, pays similar homage to Caesar Augustus: “[S]ince Providence, which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a saviour [soter], both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things, and since he, Caesar, by his appearance [epiphanein]...since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good news for the world that came by reason of him…”
Do you see the parallels between these inscriptions and how Jesus is described in the Gospels? Do you see how Jesus would have been perceived as a major political threat to the power of Rome? When it is announced that there is in fact a new Lord and Saviour, and that Jesus proclaims that He is a king bringing His own Kingdom, that is a political threat to the occupying powers. This was a major reason Jesus was killed. Nice young men who only asked you to start a personal relationship with God didn’t get themselves killed by the Romans.
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This is a message we are reminded of again at Christmas. A new ruler has come into the world. There is to be an upending of the social order, and we are invited to decide whether or not we want to be part of it. It is a new social order where the first are last and the last, first, where the poor are lifted up, and where the excluded are included. It is a Gospel which lives on the margins of society. So, when the church wants to have more power in society, it is not just missing who Jesus is, it is actually being anti-Christian.
The Christmas story is not a nice, fluffy story with a cute baby in a manger and furry animals around a feeding trough. It is messy, subversive, threatening, and the greatest story of liberation that has ever been given. It is the freedom of the world. And it is announced to the equivalent of New Age astrologers and to an unwed, pregnant teenage girl. This is why we need to listen to young women who speak out, people like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai and any others like them. Our response to people like these brave young women says much more about where we are at than it does about them.
Women like these as well as the young Mary hold the future in so many ways. In situations of poverty, they are generally the hardest working and, with children, always the most vulnerable. It is no exaggeration that if hard work was all it took to get out of poverty, African women would be millionaires.
The story of Christmas shakes the very foundations of what our lives are based upon. If we dare to surrender to it and accept it, it gives the freedom our own lives and the world so desperately need.
Power in weakness, strength in vulnerability. This is the liberating story of Christmas; the story that upends the world.
