The Politics of Advent: Christmas Stories as Resistance

Do you have trouble with the Christmas stories? Wandering stars. Virgin births. Angels. Are they too unbelievable? Are they too familiar? Too simplistic? Have you been told you need to take every word literally or you’re not sufficiently Christian? And what does politics have to do with any of this?

If any of this resonates, this series of blog posts are for you. The Christmas stories are not doctrinal litmus tests. They are not eyewitness reporting. They are not even history, in the sense that we talk about history these days. Over the next few weeks, we’ll spend time thinking about what the Christmas stories are.

My plan is to spend this post and the next thinking about the big picture of the Christmas/Nativity stories and how they function and why the authors of the gospels wrote them. Then we’ll look more specifically at the stories themselves.

Sometimes people find the nativity stories hard to take seriously. If we read them “literally”¹we need to set aside what we know about how the world works, and we turn these stories into something we read while we grit our teeth, squint our eyes, and summon up all our willpower to “believe in”.

On the other hand, I do not want us to turn these stories into feel good fables that nice people read so they can have a warm and cozy holiday. There is another way to engage these stories.

To begin, we need to think about truth and facts and what that means for how we read the Bible. Often we conflate truth and facts. All facts are true, but not all truth is reducible to facts. I sometimes think of big “T” truth and little “t” truth. Facts are little “t” true things. The day you were born. Where you live. The date of the signing of the Constitution and who the signers were. There are facts about how our hearts and lungs work. These and more are facts and they are true- meaning they are as true with our current understanding. These true facts can and will be modified as we learn more science and history.

The big T truths are not as provable. For example, we can know and experience Truth in works of art, or music or literature. You have seen a movie or read a book that was clearly fiction and also was True. Those fiction works capture Truth in a way that mere fact cannot. There are some things we know as Truth that we cannot prove. I can tell you that I love my children, but neither you nor I can prove that. I can (and have) done loving things for my children. I tell them I love them. But I could be lying. I could be pretending. You can’t know for sure. That I love my children is based on something more than facts and actions.

This is important for how we engage the Bible and the nativity stories. They are True and they are concerned with so much more than facts and what “really happened”. It is more useful for us to ask, why are we told this story in this way? What does this story tell us about God, about ourselves, about how we live together, and about the relationship between God and us.

Releasing these stories from mere “facts” allows us to step into God’s alternative way. We are shifted out of our present realities and invited into the new reality of God’s kingdom. Our hearts and minds are opened up when we let go of a strict and rigid literalism.

Now a word about politics. Have you ever been told that the gospels are not political? If you have, the person who told you that was wrong. The gospels, and the entire Bible, are intensely political. Don’t let that scare you. Here is our working definition of politics. Politics is how we live together in a society. It is the way we manage competing interests and how we determine who makes the rules, who has the power and how they use it.

The Bible isn’t partisan, there are no Democrats or Republicans, or libertarians or any other modern ²political party in the Bible. But the Bible is intensely focused on how we live together, how we treat each other, and how we treat those who are suffering.

Why link politics and the Christmas stories? The nativity stories set up the major themes and ideas for the rest of their gospel. As we go along you will see that these stories are not about silent nights, meek and mild virgins, the infant who “no crying he makes.” ( I won’t ruin every single Christmas carol, I promise.) The themes of justice, of the coming of God’s kingdom, true flourishing peace begin in the nativity stories.

In the church calendar, Advent is what the rest of society calls “the holidays” the run up to Christmas. The word Advent means arrival or appearance. The season of Advent focuses on two arrivals, the incarnation- Jesus birth, and the return of Christ and the kingdom of God. The nativity stories give us clues about how we live between the Advents, how we live together as God’s people.

Many commentators describe the nativity stories as “the gospel in miniature”. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan³ use the images of prelude and parable. The nativity stories are small, self-contained previews of what the gospels will teach us in more depth and detail. You may have noticed that only two of the four gospels have nativity stories. You may have noticed that Matthew’s story and Luke’s story are very different. You may have noticed that they seem oddly disconnected from the rest of their gospels. You may have noticed that the rest of the gospels and the rest of the New Testament for that matter, seldom refer back to the nativity stories. What’s going on?

The next post will take a look at both nativity stories, what themes they lift up, how they connect the gospel to the story of Israel and how they speak to the politics of their time and ours. They are wonderful, fascinating stories. I hope you will continue on with me as we explore the politics of Advent.

1. The common modern definition of a literal reading- the text means exactly what it says- is a newer way of reading. Historically a literal reading meant trying to understand what the original audience thought about the text. The original audiences were familiar with a variety of kinds of literature. They knew in generalities how the world worked. They knew how stars acted in the sky. They knew where babies came from. We need to give the original audience and writers their due. ↩︎
2. There are ancient “political” parties in the Bible, Zealots, Sadducees, and so on. ↩︎
3. In addition to Biblical commentaries, I highly recommend two books on Advent, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth, by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, Harper One, and Light of the World, A Beginner’s Guide to Advent, by Amy-Jill Levine, Abingdon Press.
   Two commentaries, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading by Warren Carter, Orbis Books and The Gospel of Luke, by Joel B Green, Eerdmans. Also the pertinent volumes from The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Abingdon Press ↩︎