Because I work in politics and humanitarianism, I have some particular views on the Christmas story. To be frank, I think the way that we celebrate Christmas, and the associated imagery, betrays the theology of the entire enterprise. The only Christmas service I’ve been to that felt hermenuetically true to the story culminated with the pastor telling us we were the Romans. It made sense – you can only celebrate Christmas in a triumphant way if you know the way the story ends. To my mind, to understand how radical Jesus was, and how miraculous the development of Christianity is, we have to understand that his birth wasn’t victory (‘victory’ is actually Easter). Christmas was a time of fear, and perhaps doing away with the soft focus glow of the birth of Christ might help us (or Christians at least) get a better grip on Jesus’s more radical politics.

Why would the Christmas story be scary? First, God decided that a human would carry Jesus. This was a huge gamble on God’s part – infant mortality rates during the Bronze Age through the end of the Roman Empire ranged up to 47%. Jesus was born in a relative backwater of the Roman Empire, so the risk that he’d die sometime between the third trimester and his first year of life was very high. Pregnancy also came with a high risk of death for women so for Joseph and Mary giving birth at all, let alone in a dirty livestock stall without what constituted medical intervention in the day, it was highly likely if Jesus survived the birth Mary would not. That Jesus and Mary both survived is already beating steep odds. If that wasn’t stressful enough, agents of the state showed up (the Magi or Wise Men) and it’s only through miraculous intervention that they don’t return to King Herod the Great to report where Jesus was.

Two relative kids with a baby in an animal stall would probably be terrified at the sudden appearance of people like the Wise Men, and for good reason. After Mary and Joseph fled with baby Jesus, Kind Herod the Great massacred every male child under two in Bethlehem and its surroundings. There are a lot of things in the story of the Immaculate Conception that might strain credulity, but I can 100% believe that the historical King Herod the Great did this. He was a psychopath in a time of big time psychopaths. Mary and Joseph would have been aware of this massacre, and during their time as refugees in Egypt they probably would have lived with the constant fear of Herod’s agents finding and killing them. The birth of Christ was a horror show of close calls, mass murder, and exile – that God put her child-made-flesh through that to understand the human condition is the core of Christian theology.

This is why the soft-focus imagery of Jesus in the manger, a halo around his (ahem…white, blond) head, Mary and Joseph looking at him doe-eyed, with awe struck shepherds and Wise Men has never sat well with me. It’s all too easy; Christians get to celebrate knowing they won instead of reflecting on how stacked everything was against them. It also washes away why Jesus was so radical in his adult life. In his early childhood he was hunted by the state, lived as a refugee, and didn’t experience something approaching a stable childhood until he was at least 4 (depending on the sources you rely on). Given his childhood, possibly the least surprising thing about his politics in adulthood is that he would flip tables and whip businessmen who were using the temple to legitimize their business ventures. Being nailed to a cross was the endpoint in a life of radical politics, a biography with attendant lessons that are usually conveniently skipped over. We like Jesus’s birth and resurrection, but the stuff in between doesn’t get the same press.

For me the Christmas story is a chance to reflect on where we’d find Jesus now. Certainly not delivered in a modern hospital, and definitely from a group persecuted by the state. He or she probably living in exile, wondering if they’ll ever go back to their homeland, or if the despot they fled recently fell, wondering if it’s safe to try to return. So when I look around at who is in church with me, when I hear ‘Christian’ politicians rush to say refugees need to be sent back, I don’t see people guided by a theology of Jesus’s radical love. I see the Romans, wrapping themselves in the gauzy lie that they’ve ‘won’ so that they don’t have to reckon with what the birth of Jesus actually meant.

Perhaps the Christmas story would resonate more if it was about the baby of two terrified kids who fled a murderous state, and how out of that darkness that baby’s radical, deeply inclusive, politics in adulthood is what we celebrate 2024 years later.