Christmas, after all
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
The birth of Jesus takes place amid imperial occupation, census mandates tied to Roman rule, the threat of a client king, and flight into exile. Politics shaped the life of Jesus’ family and the story itself. The Christmas story names God’s presence in the political order—and its transformation.
Contemporary celebrations often set this aside. The season becomes a time for family gatherings and acts of giving, rather than engagement with questions of power, justice, poverty, and rule. Yet the nativity accounts place the event squarely within struggles over authority and human flourishing. Faithful observance cannot ignore the structures in which the story unfolds.
Then, Bethlehem lay within the Roman Empire. Today, Bethlehem is a Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank. The celebration of Jesus’ birth now unfolds amid military control, displacement, and constrained life. The point is not identity between past and present, but continuity: Christmas names a hope born where ordinary people live under forces they do not command. Politics is not an intrusion into the story. It is part of the story. One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.
The Bible itself would agree with Aristotle’s dictum, “Man is a political animal.” The question is, who will “he” serve? Caesar or Jesus? The earliest Christians saw it all too clearly. They called Jesus “Lord” precisely in a world where Caesar claimed that title.
The gospel was not about putting a better ruler on the throne, but about challenging the rule of thrones themselves—imagining a world ordered not by force and fear, but by mutual care, shared life, and dignity for those at the bottom. Even Jesus resisted the title pressed upon him: “Not everyone who says, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father.” The prayer he taught ends with a declaration, not a slogan: “On earth as it is in heaven.” No cross as a flag. No flag as a creed. Christian nationalism is heresy.
Bethlehem today might be anywhere ordinary people live under the weight of powers they did not choose—Gaza, Kyiv, or any place where homes are broken, futures narrowed, and fear sets the terms of life. The point is not to trade one empire for another, but to see again what the story keeps exposing: whenever force claims necessity and flags claim holiness, the gospel stands with those who bear the cost. It challenges civilization’s deepest habit of drawing lines, fixing boundaries, and enforcing hierarchies.
What Jesus was saying and doing was as unacceptable in the first century as it would be today—there, here, or anywhere. Some form of resistance, exile, or execution could surely have been expected. What could not have been predicted and might not have been expected was that the end was not the end. Those who had originally experienced divine power through Jesus’s vision and example continued to do so after his death. In fact, even more so, because now this power was no longer confined by time or place. Some of Jesus’s own followers, who had initially fled from the danger and horror of the crucifixion, talked eventually not just of continued affection but of resurrection.
The political theorist Hannah Arendt remarked, “Faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence, Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box.”
Artists and musicians have done more than doctrine and formal belief to advance the spirit of Jesus. Among the more recent is Charles Widor, the French organist who wrote one of the beloved organ pieces, featured below. Here it is played by the internationally acclaimed Paul Jacobs on one of the great organs of our time. Called after the donor the “Hazel Wright Organ,” it is located in the inglorious beauty of the former Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California—happily taken over by Roman Catholics under more faithful leadership and now called Christ Cathedral.
Christmas anticipates the new life promised at Easter. “Alleluia is our name.” (Augustine).
As the secular Hannah Arendt wrote, “It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”
Notes and reading
Nativity in the Gospels—The birth narratives appear in Matthew 1:18–2:23 and Luke 1:26–2:40; Mark has no infancy account (begins at 1:1–11). John offers a theological prologue to the Incarnation rather than a birth story (John 1:1–18, esp. 1:14).
“The Wise Men Guided by the Star”—Gustave Doré (1832-1883), a prolific engraver, artist, illustrator, and sculptor, working primarily in wood and steel engraving. His work is considered among the most important in the field of engraving.
Frederick Buechner (1926-2022)—Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973), “Incarnation.” Buechner (pronounced BEEK-ner) was an American writer and theologian. He has been an important source of inspiration for many readers, writers, preachers, and theologians.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)– The Human Condition (2nd ed., 1998). V, “Action.” Arendt is known for her work on totalitarianism and what she called the “banality of evil.”
Stephen Nissenbaum—The Battle for Christmas: A social and cultural history of Christmas (1996). Critically acclaimed, though, like many works that reinterpret familiar traditions, it has attracted debate and diverse assessments. Nissenbaum is professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and adjunct professor of history at the University of Vermont
Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)—French organist-composer who shaped the symphonic organ tradition.
Paul Jacobs (b. 1977) —American virtuoso who has brought the concert organ to major halls around the world.
“Crystal Cathedral”—a triumph of spectacle over substance, made famous by megachurch pastor Robert Schuller; now renamed Christ Cathedral under the Roman Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles. Home of one of the largest organs and concerts by leading organists.
“The Weakness of the Strong Men” - Foreign Affairs (January/February 2026), p. 8ff. Is MAGA Trump’s worst enemy? “Authoritarian adversaries are displaying audacity and resolve, but the nature of their regimes always presents an opportunity: their loyalists are the true enemy within.”
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"Politics is not an intrusion into the story. It is part of the story. One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God."
"The gospel was not about putting a better ruler on the throne, but about challenging the rule of thrones themselves—imagining a world ordered not by force and fear, but by mutual care, shared life, and dignity for those at the bottom."
Wonderful lines, William. Here is Christmas! I'm old enough to have watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" when it was first televised in 1965. It refocuses Christmas away from the materialism and back to the story of Jesus' birth. But Linus's selective reading of Luke's nativity story at the program's end, reflecting little more than what a crèche alone communicates, represents another form of religious sanitation, a bowdlerized gospel that would never have led to Jesus' crucifixion. We see the consequences of this apolitical gospel in an ironically political gospel--Christian nationalism--whose proclamation of "peace on earth" is closer to Caesar Agustus's proclaimed gospel than to Jesus'.
This essay is a suitable coping stone atop the petres of your striking Advent essays. The gates of hell will not prevail against it!
Please check out this delightful way of celebrating the Festive Season which amongst other things coincides with the northern winter solstice.
http://cms-revelation-magazine.adidam.org/books/danavira-mela/3