The Subversiveness of Christmas
(The Fourth Sunday of Advent)
“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register.” Luke 2: 1-2
Caesar Augustus was The Son of God: he was the heir, and adopted son, of Julius Caesar, who was officially declared a God in 42 BC, although his divine status had been accepted by the Roman people soon after his death, when a comet appeared in the sky during the funeral games held in his honour by Augustus in 44 BC.
The Son of God, Octavian, became Caesar Augustus - the first Roman emperor who transformed the republic into the Roman Empire. Following the devastatingly long civil war of the Roman Republic, The War Actium, Caesar Augustus brought peace to the Roman state that had been plagued by a century of civil wars, marking the beginning of the Pax Romana (‘Roman Peace’) - a period of relative internal peace and stability. And, of course, Caesar Augustus, The Son of God, was praised for bringing his peace on earth:
“You oh Caesar have wiped away our sins” - Horace
“Augustus Caesar, Son of God, the saviour of the human race.” - Virgil
Sound familiar?
I wonder if the inclusion of Caesar Augustus in The Good News of Luke’s Nativity story was deliberately added for the dramatic juxtaposition it provides. I find the reference to Caesar especially poignant in light of The Priene Inscription, found in the Provincial Assembly of Asia, written 9 BC:
“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 Savior, has put an end to war and has set all things in order; and whereas, having become God manifest, Caesar has fulfilled all the hopes of earlier times… the birthday of the God Augustus has been for the whole world the beginning of good news concerning him.”
Perhaps in this context, we can appreciate the possible subversiveness of Luke’s ‘Good News’ – which begins with a different kind of birthday, of a vastly contrasting vision of ‘God manifest’ and ‘Saviour’: a baby, born in a manger, in rather scandalous circumstances, in a stable.
And yet, Christmas is even more subversive than that. For Christ is not just born in Bethlehem, two thousand years ago, but in our very hearts, minds, and bodies – here and now.
It’s that wonderfully imaginative, compassionate, and creative force within us. It is generous, generative, gracious, and kind. We sometimes listen to it – and often adopt its wisdom with our children, partners, and friends. And no principality, power, past, present, future can separate us from its loving peace.
No Emperor
No King
No Doctrine
No Tribal Gathering
No Wound
No Conviction
No Priest
No Building
No Death
No Grief
No Terrible Mistake
No Thief
No Betrayal
No Sin
No Accident
No Ring
No Fool’s Errand
No Red Herring
No Traditional Telling
No Progression
No Regression
No Session
No Heaven
As St. Paul writes in his letter to The Romans:
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
We are The Suns of God (pun intended). Divine Lights in the Darkness. But so often we orientate our lives around other burning spheres of gas and fire – spinning our lives around the whims, wishes, and worldviews of other powerful people in our complex solar systems. And sometimes we get frozen out like Pluto, or sometimes we get burnt like Mercury, and sometimes we get things just right, and have our little moment in the Sun on Planet Earth. Either way, it’s not The Spirit of Christmas.
Christmas is not about whirling and whirring around someone else’s orbit; it's not about trying to catch some rays of recognition; or bowing our knees to those little emperors – it’s about being born again – like the physical Sun in our bleak mid-winter sky - which, of course, is the reason why Christmas is celebrated around The Winter Solstice in December.
You can see why – quite literally. To the immediate eye of experience, our Sun appears to have been slowly dying since its powerful peak in the middle of June – and has been disappearing and dying until its darkest day in December. But, from this day forth, it appears like a new Sun is being born – and will slowly grow from the depths of this darkness to a marvellously warm, strong, and meandering midsummer flame.
It is the birthday of our Sun today, internally and externally. And what better way to celebrate than to reorientate our life around the inner Light of Life – that same Divine Spark that awakened Jesus of Nazareth, just like it says in that classic Christmas reading:
“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.”
So, as I say to my tutor group each morning, in the secondary comprehensive school I teach in, before they head to their lessons, to a very mixed response:
Shine like the stars you are
