The Great Reversal

Isaiah 9:(1), 2-7; Luke 2:1-20

December 24, 2007

by Dr. Charles Parker

I. Introduction

The emperor Caesar Augustus stood at a critical juncture in Roman history between the end of the Republic and the start of the Empire. His rule as emperor brought to a close several decades of civil war and unrest, and ushered in a new age of peace and prosperity across the Roman Empire – historians call the Pax Romana. He was a strong and wise ruler for 44 years. He was careful never to claim divinity, as was often done by rulers in his day, but one term that was used regularly about him was, “Savior.”

So when Luke places in the mouths of the angel hosts the word “savior” for Christ, he is intentionally usurping one of the names of Augustus. He’s not drawing a contrast between Augustus and Christ, exactly; he clearly thinks very highly of Augustus. But Luke’s birth narrative in the Gospel is a contrast in expectations.

II. A Transitory Hope

Expectations during the reign of Augustus were huge: there was a good government, a growing economy, little war. It seemed as though life would just get better and better. But by the time Luke wrote his Gospel – sometime between 80 and 90 C.E. – all of the good work of Augustus was a faded memory. Between the time that Luke was writing about and the time he was actually writing, all the hope and optimism of the Augustan age had been shattered by a series of horrible, and some profoundly mentally ill, rulers: Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and – the man who was probably reigning at the time Luke was writing – Domitian, whose father had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and who himself was actively persecuting the Christians.

Now, Luke’s readers would, of course, know this history; some of them would have lived through it. They would have remembered the blissful, heady days of Augustus, and they would know the dark years of persecution and paranoia under Domitian.

So it was against this bleak backdrop of Domitian’s rule that Luke’s readers hear about the birth of a different kind of king: a ruler whose modest beginning, on the surface, didn’t begin to compare with the rich promise of the Augustan age. While “all the world” was hastening to respond to the word from Caesar Augustus for a census, this other ruler was being born in a small hillside cave, in an insignificant provincial town. Rather than being surrounded by courtiers and princes, he was greeted by the farm animals and poor shepherds.

III. The Great Reversal

So Luke’s message is that the places where we are apt to look for hope and promise are not the places that true hope and promise reside. Real prosperity will not come from the forces of economic growth, and real security will not come from the forces of military might. God’s great reversal is that rather than the obvious places that power seems to reside, real power resides in some very unexpected, and even counter-intuitive, places.

It’s easy to sentimentalize Luke’s picture of Mary and Joseph and the shepherds gathered around a softly glowing manger, but it’s not a sentimental truth; it’s a truth that strikes at the very heart of who we are and what we value and where we place our hope. Real power, it says, does not reside on Capitol Hill or in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or on Wall Street. Real power resides far from the spotlights and the press and public attention. It resides among those who seem the most vulnerable, because that is where God has chosen to be.

What that means, Friends, is that we need to be looking in different places than we normally do for hope and unexpected places for wisdom. It means that a diminutive, pacifist, Hindu sage can throw the mighty British Empire out of India or that a 26 year-old Baptist preacher can topple centuries of segregation in America. It means that you are more likely to hear a true word from God from your grocery store clerk or a homeless person you engage than from a high government official or a tall-steeple church preacher … wait, strike that last point.

III. Conclusion

Tonight we see that what real power looks like is an infant so weak he can’t turn over by himself; the creator of the cosmos weighing in at roughly seven pounds; the Word of God, unable himself to speak a word; the one who feeds us with his body, unable to feed himself.

The great reversal that we are drawn to this night every year is the paradox that God’s greatest act of power – a power that changes our lives, and has changed the very structure of the created order – occurs in such awe-inspiring vulnerability: a baby in a manger, a vagrant hanging from a cross.

What kind of plan is it for God to save the world through a vulnerable child, born to two poor peasants, from a small backwater village, in a remote province of the Roman Empire – as far from the center of power as it was possible to be? And yet, here we are, two thousand years later, preparing to welcome this vulnerable child into our lives once again. The Roman Empire and all its glory have been dust for fifteen centuries. But the voice of that small child shapes us now, and will continue to shape our world long after our own empire will be dust, until he comes again in final victory to bring an end to the age.

Amen