“My grace is sufficient for you, for power
is perfected in weakness.” – Jesus of Nazareth to his imitator Paul of Tarsus
Around the world this season, humans of
every culture and language are singing:
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Joy to the world! The Lord has come
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Let earth receive her king!
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…
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He rules the world with truth and grace,
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And makes the nations prove
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The glories of His righteousness,
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And wonders of His love,
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And wonders of His love,
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And wonders, wonders, of His love.
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.
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Jesus’s birth is a cause for
celebration and joy. However, those who wish to be keepers of his flame are
often prone to err in fashioning an objectified version of Jesus, a mental
projection of the kind of power they themselves admire or aspire to; namely, a
role model who demands submission and praise. Not so, as the quote illustrates
above.
What kind of strange power is perfected in
weakness? The answer to this mystery continues to erode the very foundations of
strong structures, political-social orders, across the globe wherever the story
is told and imitated, however palely by its imitators.
Before the Christmas season, there was the
ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia. The festival celebrated the god Saturn
and the last drips of light the community could enjoy before the coming winter
solstice, the shortest day of the year. Light was associated with wisdom and
understanding. And so candles were exchanged along with other gifts and
master/slave roles were reversed while masks anonymized everyone into a flurry
of sameness.
Saturn was the god of agriculture, wealth,
and abundance. As such, his figure embodied the values of the reigning
sacrificial world order: domination systems are unquestioned and forever
cyclically refreshed with new rulers and human sacrifices. Indeed, the ruler
and sacrifice, ostensibly polar opposites on the hiearchy of Roman life shared
an odd mirror relationship in that the supreme rulers could easily become a
human sacrifice, lest the passions of the mob overrun his ability to harness
it.
Each year, a Roman soldier was chosen by a
lottery to be the “king” of the month’s festivities. An exceptional-looking
young man was garbed in royal attire in imitation of Saturn. He was paraded
around the festivities and given privileges to command others to do ridiculous
acts as well as indulge in every kind of vice imaginable. To complete the
festival and the imitation of Saturn’s persona itself, the king would cut his
own throat on the altar of Saturn. Myth recounts Saturn himself being sacrificed
for the salvation of the world.
This was the “light” or wisdom of the world
as man knew it. In fact, evidence of mock scapegoat-king rituals is found all
over the ancient world. The world and the logic it functions by is cyclical,
hiearchical, both of which are governed by sacrifice. Slaves know their place
at the lowest end of fellowship, a fact only reinforced by the sacred time’s
temporary allowance of taboo role reversals in which masters served slaves.
Saturnalia’s controlled re-creation of the
loss of difference and order reflected the primordial chaos the imperial Roman
cult saved its people from by its ordering light of gods demanding sacrifices,
be it in rituals, festivals, or war campaigns to preserve the collective body
and everyone’s place in it.
In the early 4th century a young soldier named Dasius of
Durostorum threatened that social order. He was selected to be the Saturnalia
king for the month, but as a Christian, refused to partake in the imitation of
Saturn, the accompanying pleasures, and its eventual required sacrifice of his
life. For Dasius, no animal or human’s life was required by God. According to
Jesus, the role model Dasius imitated instead of Saturn, “God desires mercy not
sacrifice.” Dasius was summarily beheaded lest he became a total buzz kill and
turned the sacrificial order of Pax deorum, or peace, of the gods into
their anger.
But the “anger of the gods” was really just
a narrative coverup for the chaos and calamity that befell pagan communities
that did not preserve difference and cycles of domination systems. Drunkeness,
loss of boundaries over whose food belonged to whom, gambling, orgies, masked
identities, all the festivities’ activities leading up to the mock-king
sacrifice to Saturn were meant to illuminate the community with the light of
understanding that monopolies of state-cult violence were necessary lest people
lose their sense of self in a sea of sameness and madness.
Saturnalia’s festival of light and Dasius’s
nonviolent defiance of its violent logic gives us context for what is so
significant about the birth narrative of Jesus. The Gospel of Luke starts the
story with a nod to the light, or logic, of empire: “Now in those days a decree
went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth.”
Caesar Augustus inherited the throne from Julius Caesar, himself a victim of
the political whims of the mob in a flash of disorder that led to his
sacrifice. Augustus was named “Son of God” by virtue of his ancestry.
History records Augustus’s reign as one
marked by peace and order. He accomplished this through his effective war
campaigns that united the people around common monsters to sacrifice their
lives to defeat for the empire. This “People’s Senator” very much maintained
the careful hieararchy of authoritarian control as administered through the
safe “pharmakos” or “drug” of pagan sacrifice.
Luke’s “decree of Caesar Augustus” can be
satirically read “the Word of the Son of God.” The Gospel of John starts his
origin telling of Jesus with an interesting parallel: “In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning
with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing
came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the
Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not
comprehend it.”
The Gospel writers are intentionally
contrasting Jesus, “Son of God,” “Light,” and “Word,” with the pagan parallel
titles and words of their contemporary imperial world order. The light of
Saturn is sacrifice. The light of Jesus is “mercy, not sacrifice.”
Luke’s story points out that Caesar
Augustus’s decree is a census, a means of assessing the value of the empire’s
global subjects so as to apportion a tax on them. Augustus’s Son of God status
rests on his ability to tax human beings across the globe. The power to tax, as
Daniel Webster said, is the power to destroy. Indeed, his image is carried with
everyone of his subjects, perhaps not engraved on their hearts, but certainly
on the coins he minted with his likeness and “Son of God” title and with whom
he forced their submission and obedience.
Jesus on the otherhand, as Paul says,
insists human beings are the image of God, all human beings regardless
of slave or master status, political privilege, or control over political
violence. In contrast, imperial coins are cold, lifeless bearers of a cyclical
old imperial order, whose god-kings are always grasping to extend their turn at
the helm of harvest before the darkness of winter—and its accompanying
sacrifice—falls.
Caesar Augustus was born near the Roman
Forum, the very heart of Roman grandeur and cultural esteem. Jesus, this new
“Son of God” is born in a barn food trough, considered a bastard child to a
woman of ill-repute. For Augustus’s Saturnalia festivities, slaves were only
mockingly permitted to be served by their masters for a time. Jesus continues
his stable revolution against imperial light and logic by washing the feet of
his followers as performance art prefiguring a future new world order, one
where the first are last and the last first.
Caesar Augustus was spared the sacrificial
end of his predecessor by channeling the peoples’ tensions towards sacrificial
safety valves in the form of successful military campaigns against foreign
groups like Germania and Hispania. Jesus, by contrast later asks in Luke, “Do
you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but
division. From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two
and two against three.”
By refusing to sacrifice others and model
leadership that lords power over others, Jesus destroys the light and logic of
every empire in history. In performing the mock-king sacrificial ritual,
Jesus’s nonviolent forbearance and forgiveness of his own persecuting mob at
the Cross exposes the darkness that is the light and logic of empire. It is not
the pie-in-the-sky gods that demand sacrifice but human crowds possessed by
rage and fear. Just like the Romans covered their conscience by blaming
“Saturn” for the need to sacrifice innocent life, so too, Jesus’s community
said it was God’s will that Jesus perish so the “whole nation would not
perish.”
Jesus’s word of light that outshines the
darkness of imperial sacrificial order continues to infect humanity to this
day. Yet man, stubborn and prideful in his ignorance, is slow to renounce it
completely. And so we are ever conscience of the victims most likely to be
sacrificed by our ancestors: ethnic minorities, the disabled, the infirmed, the
weak, the disfigured, even tired kings.
Yet our sacrificial impulse always
finds a creative way to resurrect the old light and logic of expelling
(incarceration) or murdering (war) sacrifices for the preservation of
collectivism and empire.
“Every empire of our size got it wrong, but
we are the exception. We’ll use military only for just, victim-supporting
causes, not grandeur. We’ll only create laws that place nonviolent persons in
cages to protect potential future victims,” America promises. Yet the
sacrificial cat is out of the bag. We cannot go back. The world order of
cyclical sacrifice has been forever broken. It consumed the one person whose
wrongful collective persecution continues to defang and neuter our most
barbaric state-cult tendencies.
And in the wreckage of the worlds’ dying
systems of sacrifice and hiearchy, now ever falsely garbed in appeals to social
justice, the King we billions sing about declares: “Peace I leave with you; My
peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your
heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.”
The
end of empires continues under the progress of a new world order, a progressive
linear path of starts and stumbles no longer trapped in an endless cycle of the
pagan sacrificial pattern. It pulls a future of mercy and nonviolence as the
glue that holds communities together into the present. Its vehicle for change
is not violence and theft, such as monopoly coinage and taxation.
But rather
human beings, hearts alight, voluntarily becoming the change they desire in the
world.
Merry
Christmas!