There went out a decree

Sometimes I imagine myself transported back in time, as a haunting from the future rather than the past, to the dreams of Gaius Octavius, more commonly known as Augustus Caesar. I imagine myself appearing in an otherwise placid dream of a man resting between sessions of the Roman senate, from days of commissioning yet more celebrations of his own part in the history of Rome in numberless statues and bas-reliefs. In my daydream, the sleeping dictator understands I come from the future to haunt his dreams, and asks me how he and his achievements will be remembered. I answer him: after your death, a religious movement will arise in Judea. About eighty years later, members of this religious movement will record its beginnings, and one of these accounts will mention your role in ordering a great census of the empire. It will record that your decree sent millions in motion, to the cities of their birth, and that among them were two very ordinary Galileans, a man named Joseph with Mary, his very young and very pregnant fiancee. It will record that she gave birth in Bethlehem of Judea, and lay her child in a manger for want of a proper bed. And that, Caesar Augustus, is how you will be remembered by millions in the hundred generations to come. You will be the man whose decree sent an expectant mother to give birth to a homeless child in a stable. 

Luke, did you know? At the end of the first century, when the Gospels were written, the Roman Empire must have seemed an unshakable fact of people's lives, an irresistible presence across Western Europe, the Levant, and North Africa. From the Danube to the Tagus, Anglesey to Alexandria, the rule of Rome, and the brutal legions and slave trade that undergirded it, must have seemed permanent. 

Gold solidus of Constantine

To us, the fall of Rome seems even more inevitable than its rise, one more wave in the endless cycle of empires rising and falling. The only real change in the roughly half millennium of Rome's ascendancy that mattered was the religious movement that would arise in the early years of the Roman Empire, and which would overcome it in the end. The radical ideas of the Jesus movement: the true Kingdom is one of love, and that loving service to everyone, including the poor and the powerless who can never repay what they receive for good or ill is the truest obedience to our Creator's will, would point humanity on a new course. However imperfectly and inconsistently, humanity is following the road which the birth of the child to Mary on that unrecorded day in Bethlehem set us on. 

None of this was visible at the time the Gospels were committed to paper. To consign the mighty Augustus to a minor supporting role in the true story of humanity must have seemed absurd. And yet, for one and a half millennia, the world has looked back on the empire of Rome and the rule of Augustus as a mere backdrop for the rise of a whole new way of looking at the world.

Christmas is a profoundly subversive holiday, today as much as in the days when the Gospels were written. A hundred and ten years ago, during another brutal war between ambitious and arrogant empires,  the young men sent into battle spontaneously stopped fighting on Christmas night. In a long tradition of radical obedience to the Creator's rule over the empires that pass like waves over the surface of history, they came together with the other young men whom empires had designated their enemies, and said no. Not this night.

Johnathan Kozol recorded the observation that children are "God's spies". Children come to us with new eyes and without property or position or self image to protect. Every birth carries with it the potential for a life to come into the world to shake, in ways large or small, the foundations of societies that imagine themselves invincible. The birth of one homeless child so long ago, the child who judges the nations for their heedless arrogance, their casual cruelty, their pursuit of the mirage of power; that birth has not lost its power to change the world.

Merry Christmas.