The Revolutionary Politics of the First Christmas

I stood at the back of the Cathedral at 1:30 on Christmas morning, shaking hands with the midnight worshippers on their way home. I had been preaching about God coming into our lives at Christmastime, especially in the form of the weak, the vulnerable and the homeless.

Most of the congregation were happy, but one man had something to get off his chest. “You should stick to the script!” he said to me. “Christmas has nothing to do with asylum-seekers!” And off he marched before I could splutter out the obvious reply: The Christmas story in Luke’s gospel climaxes with Jesus in a feeding-trough because everywhere else was full. Matthew’s version ends with Joseph and Mary whisking the baby off to a foreign country because the authorities wanted to kill him. Putting these together, the heart of the story is precisely Jesus the homeless asylum seeker.

Anyone who knows the history and culture of the first-century Jewish world would see the point. Matthew introduces his Christmas story by listing Jesus’ ancestry, all the way back to Abraham, highlighting King David on the way. It’s obvious where this was going: Jesus was the true “king of the Jews” — at a time where there was one of those already, Herod the Great. That’s why Joseph had to take Jesus and Mary away in a hurry. The same is true with Luke’s story, in which the Roman Emperor, the self-styled “son of God” Augustus himself, issues an order in Rome which causes a very different “son of God” to be born in a very different “royal city,” Bethlehem. The original, historic Christmas stories are about power. They are about the kingdom of God breaking in, dangerously and unexpectedly, into the kingdoms of the world.