Lonely Exile: A Daily Advent Devotional
Part Five: Christmas and Politics
“…[O]nce you see the political meaning of Advent and Christmas, it seems so obvious.” - Marcus Borg + John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas
Text: Luke 2:1-3
Luke’s Nativity story might be one of the most familiar passages in all of the Bible.1 Whether you experienced it at church services, Christmas pageants, or from Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas, the beginning of Luke chapter two is familiar to so many of us. Especially in the King James Version.
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. Luke 2:1-3 KJV
And it came to pass…that Luke got some things wrong here. First, the empire would never ask people to return to their ancestral lands to be counted in a census. Like in the US today, a census would have counted people where they lived and worked. To do what Luke suggests here would create a mess when it comes to the purpose for the census: taxation. Joseph and Mary would need to be counted in Nazareth, because that’s where they lived and that’s where they would be taxed.
Second, the census Luke mentions that was conducted by Quirinius (Cyrenius in the KJV) happened, but not around the time of Jesus’s birth. Jesus was likely born sometime between 6 and 4 BCE. This census took place in 6 CE, when Jesus would likely have been a pre-teen. This census also led to a revolt in Galilee where Jesus grew up. No doubt these events played a formative role in Jesus’s young life. It just didn’t happen around the time of his birth.
What these two technically-incorrect-details help Luke do, however, is to introduce the central conflict of the story that’s being told. That conflict is between the Empire of Rome and the Kingdom of God, between the Pax Romana (Rome’s brand of peace made through retribution and violence) and the Peaceable Kingdom (God’s nonviolent, restorative justice). Ultimately, it was the conflict between the power of Caesar and the vision of Jesus.
The Christmas story is a political story. It’s also an economic story and, of course, a religious story. That’s because the ancients knew something we have forgotten: there are no nice, clean lines that divide up our lives or the world. Jesus’s vision was grounded in his understanding of God and the Kingdom of God, and that wasn’t just theological. It was also about how the resources of the earth are distributed, about the land and who owns it, and about who is included, and so much more. After all, Rome did not crucify nice guys who went around telling people to love each other. A religion focused on the afterlife is not a threat to the empire. It’s more like a boon for the empire, because, while we are focused on heaven someday they are free to create hell on earth. Jesus’s message was a direct challenge to Roman values, and that ended with Rome’s execution of another would be king. The problem of Rome hangs over the entire story.
If the Christmas story was a political/economic/theological challenge in the first century, we might ask about our own time. Are these stories still speaking a challenge to us today? Are they just nice, sweet, sentimental stories we recite each Christmas, kind of like ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, or do they still have an edge and challenge for our time?
Perhaps there’s an exercise that might help us make that determination. Over the next few days, read Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 again. As you do, every time you are tempted to understand a claim as being theological only, ask yourself, “What would this mean if the story also had a political/economic layer? I bet we’d all be surprised at what we’d discover, and the questions it would raise for us. By the way, this kind of insight doesn’t have to diminish the theological meaning. In my experience, if anything, it has enhanced and deepened that meaning for me. Paying attention to the political/economic layers of the stories in the Bible has helped me understand more and more the vision of God and God’s justice shared by the Torah, the Prophets, Jesus, and even the likes of Paul. I hope it’s helpful for you, too.
Questions for Reflection
If you do the exercise suggested above, here are a few questions:
What did you learn?
What surprised you?
How did (if at all) this new discovery change or add to your understanding of the story?
A growing number of scholars are raising the issue that Luke 1-2 don’t seem to be original to the Gospel. It is possible, for several reasons (style, themes, etc.) that this Nativity story was added some time after the original composition of the text.