Revolutionary Love

Rereading the Christmas story

Dec 25, 2023

pink candles on gold candle holder — Photo by KaLisa Veer on Unsplash

It is difficult for us to appreciate the revolutionary character of the Christmas story. It is so familiar and so often sentimentalized, and we are so far removed in time from its original context, that it requires an act of imagination to grasp its meaning and significance. It is a story about how God turned the world upside-down. It is a story about a stunning advance in the evolution of human consciousness. It is, above all else, a love story: the story, as St. John’s Gospel puts it, about how much God loved the world.[1]

In Luke’s telling, the birth of Jesus is the scene of a divine break-in. God sneaks in, under the cover of darkness, while we are unaware, and liberates us from our bondage to sin and death through the power of revolutionary love. This love is revolutionary because it is indiscriminate and unyielding. As the beneficiaries of this love for some 2,000 years, it is hard for us to understand just how much it scandalized the sensibilities of the ruling elites of the ancient world.

That world was marked by deeply entrenched social hierarchies that were thought to be natural, immutable, and divinely sanctioned. Only a very few were considered to be persons in any meaningful sense. “Persona” from which our word, “person” derives, means mask or face. To have a persona was to have a face before the law – to be recognized as possessing rights and privileges appropriate to a human being. Slaves, non-citizens, criminals, the poor and colonized people, and in most cases women and children (except as extensions of their husbands and fathers) had no legal standing. They were not persons, legally speaking. A slave was non habens personam: literally someone without a face.[2]

One could do just about anything one wished to someone lacking a persona, and just about anything was done to them. They existed for the use of others. This was a world in which the exposure of unwanted children, feeding prisoners to lions as midday entertainment, mass crucifixions, and exploitation of the poor were perfectly normal. To consider these sacrificial victims as persons, much less to lavish love on them, was thought to be, at best, an eccentric predilection, and at worst, an outrage against nature and the gods. It was an age of immoderate cruelty deemed to be nothing other than the necessary maintenance of law and order. To believe - much less act – otherwise was seditious.

Try to imagine just how scandalous the birth of Jesus appears in such a world. Pagan culture could imagine apotheosis, a human becoming a god; at least if one were a hero or emperor, meriting the favor of one of the gods. But the one god, or even a god, becoming human? Why would a god want to do that? It is insanity. And if a god should deign to do so, why would they choose to be the offspring of an unwed, indigenous peasant woman from among the colonized people of a provincial backwater of the empire? And why would shepherds, known to be rough, vulgar, country rubes, be the first to receive the good news of this event? Such people were considered beneath contempt.

This is a story in which the faceless are given a face. They are treated as fully human and as agents of God’s work in the world. St. Paul named what was at stake in this birth in the sharpest possible way when he wrote,

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.[3]

God chose to become incarnate as one of these faceless people and share their condition, so that in them we might see reflected the very image of God. Belief in the dignity of such people, “entered ancient society rather like a meteor from a clear sky,” as David Bentley Hart aptly describes it. “For this reason,” Hart goes on to note,

It is all but impossible for us to recover any real sense of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition, and of either sex.[4]

The implications of this revolutionary love were only slowly understood, even by the Church. But by the fourth century we find St. Gregory of Nysaa, perhaps the greatest theologian of the patristic age, preaching a sermon during Lent in which he unambiguously and forcefully condemned slavery as an institution.[5] There are no faceless people. All bear the image of God. We are still working out the implications of this truth.

The story of Jesus, beginning with his birth, turned the world upside-down. It marked a radical shift in our understanding of God and human beings. It inaugurated, as Nietzsche correctly understood, a “revaluation of values,” a revolution in human consciousness. We think of revolutions as sudden irruptions, marked by violence. Revolutionary love, however, works gradually.

The execution of Jesus, a seditious slave, was reversed by God in raising him up and vindicating his solidarity with all the faceless people of the earth; galvanizing a movement that continues to give a face to the faceless victims of our day.

This is the good news of Christmas: the tidings of great joy that our Savior, the one bringing healing, has come into the world in an outpouring of revolutionary love that is still flowing through history, through the church, through you and me.

God is with us, reflected in each and every face.

Awakened Heart

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