The Poverty of Christ
The birth narratives and political power
December 5, 2007
Logan Fidler
It’s the Christmas season, and since the reason for the season is Jesus’ birth in a stable at Bethlehem, I thought it would be important to reflect for just a few moments on what Jesus’ birth could mean. Though I think that the stories about Jesus’ birth are powerfully true, both Matthew and Luke constructed the birth narratives in their respective gospels for a theological purpose that goes beyond our tendency to take as true that which is historical. In fact, interpreting the birth narratives as strings of historical facts detracts from them altogether. We must first understand the birth narratives in their theological and political context, and in doing so learn how they challenge any sure beliefs we hold.
In both narratives we find a conflict between two lordships. In Matthew that conflict manifests itself as a rival claim: Who is the true king of the Jews, Herod or Jesus? We know that Herod certainly thought of himself as the king of the Jews and technically he was. Matthew also prompts the reader into making a connection between both Herod and Pharaoh (the one during the time of Moses), hearkening back to the conflict between the lordship of Pharaoh and the lordship of Yahweh in Exodus. It is Jesus who is true King and Lord in Matthew’s gospel not Herod or Pharaoh.
In Luke, this conflict is presented a bit differently. For Luke, who was writing to a primarily Gentile audience made up of Graeco-Romans, the conflict is between the lordship of Jesus and the lordship of Caesar Augustus, one of the greatest rulers in the history of the Roman empire. The birth of Augustus was retold in much the same way as Jesus’ was. The great Roman poet Virgil, who wrote the Aeneid, an epic poem about Rome’s origins, spoke of Augustus’ birth saying he would be “savior of the world,” bringing “peace and law.”
The Aeneid is called an articulating work of art since it focuses and holds up to the people the type of being they share. The Aeneid acted as an exemplar to the Roman people, showing them the virtues of being a Roman citizen. In addition to the messianic language found in the Aeneid in reference to Caesar Augustus, archaeologists found an inscription from 9 C.E. in Asia Minor that speaks of Augustus as “our God” and as a “savior” whose birth was “good news” – Gospel to the world. When Gentiles read Luke’s gospel and the language Luke uses about Jesus’ birth they would have seen it as a slam against the lordship of Augustus, proclaiming, as the angel did to the shepherds, that Jesus is the “good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord…” Jesus, not Augustus, was and is Lord.
As we consider some of the theological and political meanings of the birth of Jesus we must ask, what is Jesus to us? Jesus did not articulate what it meant to be Jewish like the Aeneid articulated to the Romans what it meant to be Roman; Jesus was not an exemplar held up to the Jewish people as an embodiment of their already held beliefs. Rather, he was a reconfigurer, taking beliefs that were marginal and making them central.
The birth narratives serve to remind us that Jesus was a reconfigurer from the very beginning of his life. Although he was Lord over Herod and Augustus, Jesus was born in a manger. Consider the profundity of this for a moment: Jesus, who Christians claim to be Lord of not only their hearts but of the entire world, was born in a manger. Christians forget all too often that Jesus is a reconfigurer, the one who made the lowly things high and the high things lowly. The importance of the birth narratives is that they allow us to consider the first coming of Christ, the lowly and impoverished Lord, who emptied himself to be the light of the world, and to allow that imagery of humility and poverty to obliterate the harmful ideologies and codifications that order our lives.
Poverty, in all its definitions, indicates a lack of something. A well known Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, in one of his Christmas sermons, says that to truly know the Lord our knowing must become an unknowing – an impoverishment or a lacking. In this unknowing, this lack, and this poverty, we can truly let the divine Lord of the world be Lord, where we can open our hearts to become the mangers where the true Lord of the world chooses to be born.
Now you go...
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