TWO KINGS

Christmas - Mass at Midnight

          Why did God come to us as a baby? Wouldn’t it have been more fitting for him to come as a powerful adult, descending on clouds of glory?  That was how Jesus’ own people expected him to come – which explains why most of them didn’t recognize him.  He chose instead to come as a weak, defenseless, and vulnerable infant. Why?

          In a book published over sixty years ago called Mere Christianity the English writer C.S. Lewis says this: “Jesus came as a baby because he needed to slip quietly, even clandestinely, through enemy lines.” The world to which Jesus came was not the world his Father had created. That beautiful, perfectly ordered world had been spoiled by human sin. Conflicts and wars, between individuals, groups, and nations, were never part of God’s plan. So at Christmas God’s Son was entering enemy territory. To escape detection he came as a tiny baby. He came to fight and overcome all the evil forces which had spoiled God’s world. He would not fight, however, with the weapons wielded by the rulers of that world.

          Who were those rulers? Luke identifies them for us: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus ... when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Bethlehem, the town where Jesus was born, was then part of Syria. Caesar’s decree ordered a census. We read in the Old Testament about David taking a census of God’s people. God was displeased. Why? A census was an act of power. It enabled a ruler to control people: to decide where they could live, to tax them, to draft them into his army. God wanted David to serve his people, not to dominate and manipulate them. God alone was to be their ruler.

          One way of understanding the Bethlehem story is to read it as the story of two kings: Caesar Augustus, the far off ruler in Rome, king of the whole known world of that day; and then this tiny baby. He too was a king – but an utterly new kind of king. Consider the contrasts:

– There was “no room in the inn” for this baby king and his parents. Imagine what the hostel for travelers must have been like in that backward little town in Bethlehem. We’re not talking Motel 6 here. We’re not even talking about accommodations such as one finds in shelters for the homeless in any large American city today. The inn at Bethlehem was more primitive even than that. Even there, however, there was no room for this king. He was born in a shelter for animals: a stable, or perhaps a cave.

-- Where was the other king, Caesar Augustus? He was in one of his many palaces, all of them places of luxury. He was like the man in the Cole Porter song who sings:

“I’ve a shooting box in Scotland / I’ve a château in Touraine /

I’ve a silly little chalet / In the Interlaken valley /
I’ve a hacienda in Spain / I’ve a private fjord in Norway /
                  I've a villa close to Rome /

I’ve a shanty in the Rockies / I’ve a castle on the Rhine 

So wherever I may go / It’s such a comfort to know /

                That I’m never far from home.”

Yes, Caesar had the good life: protected, comfortable, secure, surrounded by every luxury imaginable.

– The newborn king in that cave at Bethlehem was wrapped in swaddling clothes, unable to make even the small movements of a newborn. The ancient Church Fathers say that the swaddling clothes remind us of his burial wrappings. He was laid in a feeding trough for animals.

– Caesar Augustus was the most powerful man in the ancient world. He wore only the finest clothes. To eat he could have anything he wanted. He drank only the finest wines. The infant king lying now in the feeding trough would often be hungry. At the start of his public ministry he fasted for forty days. He had come, however, to feed the whole world. He is still feeding his people today – with his powerful word, with his body and blood in the Eucharist. .  

– Wherever Caesar appeared, crowds gathered to cheer him, or at least to gawk and gaze. The only people who showed up for the birth of the infant king were some shepherds. How cute and nice they look cute on our Christmas cards and crèches in church. In Jesus’ day, however, shepherds in Jesus’ day were lowlife. They grazed their flocks on other people’s land. Their irregular life made it impossible to keep the dietary and other laws which were so important for Jews. Shepherds then were something like street people today – not nice people. Grown to manhood the baby would continue associating with people who weren’t very nice. “This man receives sinners,” his critics complained, “and eats with them.”

          The baby king in the feeding trough would die a criminal’s death – on a cross, an instrument of torture. Today we find a crucifix in every Catholic church the world over, and in many other churches as well. Not so in the Church’s early centuries. For Christians then the crucifix was a horrifying symbol of Caesar’s power, too frightening to display: “You mess with us,” it said, “And this is what we’ll do to you.”

          Over Jesus’ cross Caesar’s representative, Pontius Pilate, put up a sign in the three main languages of the day: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. “This is the king of the Jews,” it said.  It was a joke, of course, a taunt.

          Had the story ended there, Caesar would have won. But it did not end there. On the third day his tomb was found empty. He appeared, alive again in flesh and blood, to his frightened disciples who, when the chips were down, had all forsaken him and fled – all, that is, save his mother and some other women disciples, with the only male friend who remained faithful: “The disciple whom Jesus loved,” John’s gospel calls him. Those to whom the risen Lord appeared had every reason to be frightened at his reappearance. “We killed him,” they must have thought. “And now he’s back!” Back for vengeance? No, that was Caesar’s way, the way of the world, we call it; the way of those who say, “Don’t get mad. Get even. You send one of ours to the hospital. We’ll send one of yours to the morgue.”

          What is the first word Jesus says to those who have let him down and run away? “Shalom - Peace.” And then he breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit” – the love that binds me to my heavenly Father, and Him to me. Through compassion and non-violent love the risen Lord restores order to the Christian community and through them to the world.

          That is what enabled Paul to write in his letter to the Romans, chapter 8: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Trial, or distress, or persecution, or hunger, or nakedness, or danger of the sword? ... Yet in all this we are more than conquerors because of him who has loved us. For I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities [there’s Caesar again], neither the present nor the future, nor powers, neither height nor depth nor any other creature, will be able to separate us for the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” 

          I said earlier that we don’t know where Caesar was when Jesus was born, save that he was in one of his many palaces. If you go to the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples, however, the local guides will tell you that on the night Jesus was born, Caesar was in his palace there on Capri. Part of it is still standing. That night Caesar couldn’t sleep. All night long he paced up and down on the palace terrace. By dawn he’d worn out his sandals. 

          History or legend? There is no need to answer the question. What matters is what the story tells us. Something was happening that night which would change the world, forever. That, friends, is the heart of the gospel: that because of the baby king born that night, good is stronger than evil; light has shone in the darkness of our world and overpowered it; God’s mercy wipes away even the greatest sin; this world, with all its horrors, is still God’s world; God and his all-powerful, compassionate love are ours for the taking.

          Or, to quote Paul a final time, from the fifth chapter of his letter to the Romans this time: “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5).

In this holy night the baby in the feeding trough, and the man on the cross, are asking us just one thing: that we surrender to that love.