Advent with Luke #9 – A Decree Went Out
Probably because I had a charismatic high school history teacher who loved ancient Rome, and then a mesmerizing college professor who gave spellbinding lectures on the Romans, I’ve been obsessed with them, and have dragged my kids to visit Roman ruins in Italy, France, England, Israel, Jordan, Greece and Turkey, prompting their humorous chorus: “The Romans were everywhere!” I took my son to Switzerland. After several days he said “Ha, no Romans here!” But about an hour later we made it to the village of La Turbie, where a massive monument, the Tropaeum Alpium, boasts of the achievements of Caesar Augustus. Noah moaned.
Augustus boasted a lot, with the same objective that led him to issue that famous “decree” that “went out” in our Christmas story (Luke 2:1). The decree (the word sounds ominous!) was intended to tax people, draft them into far off Roman wars, and to enable bureaucrats to manage and take advantage of them. Luke winks as he reports this, knowing we’ll understand Augustus was unwittingly fulfilling God’s plan that Christ would be born, not in Nazareth where Mary was very pregnant, but in Bethlehem, to fulfill all prophecy – the divinely intended place.
Luke calls his story the “evangel,” the “good news.” Augustus had dubbed his boasting “evangel,” “good news” for the world. His fake good news is being turned upside down by the real thing in Jesus, not a powerful potentate but a vulnerable infant in the middle of nowhere, in a cow stall, as there was no room in the uber-modest inn in Bethlehem. Father Robert Barron, in The Word on Fire Bible, points out “the contrast between this unspeakably primitive setting and the palace of Augustus on the Palatine Hill in Rome.” Indeed.
Barron continues, reflecting on Jesus being “wrapped in swaddling clothes”: “Augustus was certainly considered the freest man in the world… But the son born to Joseph and Mary is wrapped up, tied, confined.” But can we see the beauty in his being wrapped, confined? Jesus was “bound by his Father’s will and tied to the good of the world.”
And then, as Jesus was laid not in a basinet or prissy cradle, but in a manger, a stone trough used to feed animals: “Augustus was the best-provided-for person in the world.” Jesus, the least? “The baby King is not fed, but laid in the place where the animals eat; he is offered as food for the world.”
The modesty of Jesus’ first home, not a home at all, hardly even a home away from home, a place we’d categorize as homeless, reveals to us God’s holy intent for us to honor those who are homeless, or far from home – and for us who may have comfy houses to take note of our sense of not feeling entirely at home in that house or in this world. G.K. Chesterton’s poetry about Bethlehem speaks: “Only where He was homeless / Are you and I at home.” And, “To an older place than Eden / And a taller town than Rome / To the place where God was homeless / And all men are at home.”
Earlier in this series, I shared my quirky thought that Jesus came, not under one of the weakling Roman emperors, when he could have snuck in more safely and with better odds of success. But no, God did what God did when the greatest of all the emperors ever was on the throne to make God’s point about who’s really God and who isn’t – and what power really looks like.
Which takes me back to my son’s “The Romans were everywhere” remark. They were astonishingly successful – but they weren’t everywhere, and where they were didn’t stay Roman forever. I’ve visited the tomb of Augustus in Rome. Despite his and his entourage’s claims that he was a divinity on earth, he died and stayed dead. Jesus, on the other hand, mocked and put to death by that same seemingly omnipotent Roman state, did not stay dead, but was raised, and lives now. He is, literally, everywhere. Even if you don’t believe in him. He’s there, with you. And all the others. Even the Romans.