John’s Notes - Clapham Village Newsletter, December 2021
As you know, the story of the birth of Jesus in Luke’s gospel begins with taxes. “In those days a decree went out from the Emperor that all the world should be registered”. This census of Caesar Augustus shook things up across the Roman Empire. It triggered the ambitious tax reforms designed to consolidate the Emperor’s already great power, diverting revenue from the provinces to the centre in Rome.
I wonder if any of the people pushed back against this decree, if there were any anti-registration campaigners (let’s call them anti-reggers) stirring things up in Bethlehem. I think we can assume that most first century Palestinians complied only reluctantly with the Emperor’s orders. An expensive and time-consuming disruption to the people’s everyday lives, the census was one of the shocks to the heart of that society which led to the Jewish rebellion of sixty years later, predicted by Jesus and brutally ended by the Romans when they destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 AD.
Now the shepherds, we’re told, stayed out in their fields while everyone else went to register; does this put them among the first anti-Roman agitators, or were they just exempt as key workers? And those wise travellers the Magi also avoided the census, being subjects of the Parthian Empire, another people ostensibly at peace with Rome but troubled by Roman interference in their affairs. In a gesture which today offends on many levels, around this time Augustus ‘gifted’ an Italian slave-girl to the Parthian monarch Phraates IV. Thea Musa later conspired with her son Phraates V to have Phraates IV poisoned, making them the co-rulers of the Parthian Empire in 4 AD.
So the story of the birth of Jesus begins with taxes and takes place in a world of sex and slavery, hostility and confrontation, conspiracy to murder and the will to power. Whilst tragically, eventually, Christendom embraced all these vices and more, the origin story of our faith is still so warmly celebrated because it offers us something refreshingly ‘other’. It offers us a picture of a gentle new world order being humbly born in the background to the mess and noise of our big broken world. Its protagonists move from the fringes - humble Nazareth, the upland pastures, a strange and distant land - to a centre which is itself a non-place, a stable in the back of an inn. This story astonishes because it opens up the possibility of a parallel world of justice and joy emerging almost invisibly from within this broken earth.
The child would in time unpack all this in terms which turn our old ways upside down: affirming the meek, renouncing wealth as a source of happiness, expressing love for enemies as the formula for a safer, kinder world. He practiced what he preached all the way to Calvary of course, and gloriously back again. Over centuries this story has inspired countless movements for social good, care of the earth, generosity towards others, reconciliation and peace. Do we only love it as a fairy story, or can we grasp how this tale is intrinsically poised to release into the world the power to transform, redeem, renew?
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