Christmas Eve; 24 December 2022; Christmas I (RCL); Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 26; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-20.
The passage we hear from Isaiah is one of the most familiar to Christians in what we call the Old Testament, thanks in no small measure to G. F. Handel. All those royal titles have been applied to Jesus through the long history of Christian biblical interpretation. Isaiah certainly had something else in mind.
At least in its current placement, this poem forms part of the block of material that began with Isaiah giving Ahaz a sign he had not asked for — “Look, the young woman is pregnant.” That sign had to do with the Syro-Ephraimite war. Syria and Israel hoped to force Judah into an alliance against Assyria, and Isaiah promised Ahaz that the threat was short-lived (until the child can tell right from wrong). The reference to the destruction of the implements of war suggests that the Assyrian threat has passed. The rest of the poem reads like the announcement of the birth of a crown prince. The people of Jerusalem are looking forward to a period of peace and stability. It’s easy to see how Christians would have fastened on this passage in reference to Jesus, and its liturgical situation on Christmas eve reinforces that reading.
Luke’s story is incredibly dense with detail. There is no evidence of any such census being taken during the reign of Augustus (at least not Empire wide), and a census would have counted people (for purposes of taxation) where they lived, rather than in ancestral cities. But Luke has to arrange his story so that the birth of Jesus takes place in Bethlehem, David’s city, where Micah declares the birth of the new king to happen.
But Luke situates his story in the horizon of imperial political history: Augustus is Caesar, and Qurinius governor of Syria (an old enemy of Israel). By having the holy family in Bethlehem, he situates his story within the horizon of Israel’s religious and political history, as well as its messianic hope. And the reference to the shepherds in the field recalls the anointing of David. Samuel had come to Jesse’s house at God’s instructions to anoint one of Jesse’s sons to replace Saul. All of Jesse’s sons had passed before Samuel, and none was the one chosen. Samuel asks Jesse, “Are all your sons here? We won’t sit down to feast until they are all present.” Jesse replied, “There remains yet the youngest, but he is in the field with the sheep.”
Luke also makes a specific reference to Roman political mythology. We tend to think of the angel (you know, the one’s we put on the tops of our Christmas trees) as female, with gossamer wings. But this is a soldier. When he is joined by the other angels, the Greek reads, “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army.” And the angel’s announcement, and the hymn sung by the military chorus all make reference to an inscription to Caesar erected by the Greek cities of Asia Minor after Augustus ended the civil wars that had wracked the Republic. They declared his birthday the birthday of a god, and marked it as New Year’s Day (it’s why we call August August). And they proclaimed him the savior of the world, who brought peace to those with whom he was pleased. Luke is writing an explosive story. This child is the new crown prince.
And he adds one more element. We are told there was no room for the family in the inn. The word really means something like a guest room. The word occurs exactly two other times in the New Testament. Once in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus instructs two of his disciples to enter the city where a man with a water jar will show them an guest room where they can prepare the passover which would be the Last Supper. Luke uses it one more time with exactly that reference. Luke wants us to make the connection between Jesus’ birth and his last supper.
And in case we missed the connection, Luke tells us three times in these few verses that the child was placed in a manger (the Greek word is phatne, which comes from the root phagein, which means to eat, must as the French word manger means to eat). In the guest room at the Last Supper, Jesus gives himself to his disciples as food. In Luke’s infancy narrative, Jesus is given as food for all of nature.
So much of the social and political and religious life of the ancient world was structured around sacrifice and the resulting meal that it makes sense for Luke to present Jesus as a sacrificial meal. Jesus is replacing all of the social, political, and religious institutions from the bottom up. One of Caesar’s chief titles was Pontifex (bridge builder), which carried the connotation of high priest of the Empire. In Luke’s Gospel, we encounter Jesus at a meal almost as often as all other settings put together. These few short verses should help us understand just how explosively dangerous the early Christians understood their eucharist to be, and why the Empire placed such heavy penalties on participation in it. They were claiming to replace everything that could be called Empire with something entirely new in the celebration of the sacrifice of Jesus.