Sermon Archive
What kind of peace?
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 21 December 2008
We’ve just heard the story of how the angel told Mary she was to bear a son. About 50 years before this encounter there was another young woman, named Atia, who attended a ceremony in the temple of Apollo where, so the story goes, she was visited not by an angel but by a serpent. She was found to be pregnant and in due course gave birth to a son, who grew up to be acclaimed as Son of Apollo, the God of light – God from God, Light from Light, Redeemer, Liberator, Saviour of the World, Bringer of Peace.
Sound familiar? I tell you this not to debunk the story of Christ’s birth but rather to place it in context. Children born from sexual union between gods and humans were a commonplace in Greek and Roman legend. But what makes Atia’s son especially interesting to us is that he grew up to become Octavian, otherwise called Caesar Augustus, Emperor of the known world, ruler of the world into which Mary’s son is to be born.
For many Roman citizens Augustus must have seemed a little like a god. There had been 20 years of civil war in Roman territories, and Octavian’s victory at the naval battle of Actium in 31BC brought all that to an end and marked a new dawn. He was truly the saviour of their world, their liberator from disaster, the bringer of peace, the Pax Romana. Who else but a god could do all this?
If we’re really to understand the significance of the angel’s words to Mary, that her son is to be ‘great’, ‘the son of the Most High God,’ we need to know what impact they would have to those who heard the story. We need to know that he was not alone in claiming such ancestry. And therefore we need to recognize that what was at stake here was not a question about biology, whether Mary was a virgin or not, but about theology.
And I don’t mean theology as an exercise in abstract thought but theology as something deeply political. The Roman Empire had its political theology, and against this the claims of Christian theology were dangerously subversive. If Augustus has a special birth, Jesus has an even more special birth. If Augustus’ mother was ravished by a snake, Jesus’ mother conceived without sex and remained a virgin. The two stories are on a collision course. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan use the image of two massive tectonic plates grinding against each other – irreconcilable – one must give way to the other and when it does we can be sure the earth will shake.
At heart, they point out, the issue is about what kind of peace is on offer. Roman state theology offers peace through victory. The historian, Tacitus, describes this through the mouth of the Scottish General Calgacus: ‘to plunder, butcher, steal… [to] make a desert and … call it peace’. The theology of Mary, on the other hand, offers a peace through justice; peace in which the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up – in which the hungry are feasted and the rich are sent away empty. A straightforward choice, in one sense, between peace through battle and peace through feasting.
We, of course, don’t always see this choice quite so clearly. Somehow, over the centuries this political edge to the Christian gospel has been dulled; we have become content, perhaps, to concentrate instead on the personal and spiritual meaning of the story which offers us, for sure, a satisfaction of our personal yearning for liberation from bondage, return from exile, truth, light, justice, peace.
And this may be partly because, when Christianity was first adopted as the religion of empire, an accommodation was reached which somehow decided that peace through battle and feasting, through victory and justice, might coexist – battle and victory now, justice and feasting in the hereafter. How quickly human beings slip into empire mindsets! Superior power and domination can help to shape the world our way, it can persuade people to think our way – and aren’t we doing it all for God? Just as your average Roman legionary was doing his plundering, butchering and stealing for his God, the Emperor.
When Mary’s son grew up he taught us that you can’t serve two masters – and that whilst you should render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s yet the prime call on your loyalty is always to render to God the things that are God’s. Yet we know perfectly well that we’re tempted to make our own compromises by which we say, in effect, that Augustus and Jesus, ‘Well, perhaps they’re both Sons of God. Perhaps they’re compatible with each other after all; private and public, two realms in which different values apply.’
Whereas, the birth stories of Jesus face us with a much bolder demand, to face up to the subversive message of Mary and the angel now, and to try to live by it. This means changing the way we see the world; it means learning to envisage a world in which God’s dreams are realized; a world in which we are alert to the ways in which those two irreconcilable tectonic plates challenge each other in public as in private life.
You see, I think it’s vital for us to realize that we can’t really understand the birth stories of Jesus until we grasp their political nuances – their impact on how we, collectively, live our lives now. But more than this, we can’t understand them until we realize that they were written after the death of Jesus. In other words, and it’s impossible to overstate this, they weren’t written at the beginning of Jesus’ life with some vague hope that their promise would be fulfilled, and unaware of the disappointment and rejection awaiting this child. They were written in the light of all that.
So often the story of Jesus can be read as a life which began with bright hopes which were dashed by circumstance. Whereas, the message of Good Friday and Easter is that darkness doesn’t have the final word. Because of their experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus, those who told the stories 20 or 30 years later, Luke amongst them, were able to look back and say, through the mouth of Mary, ‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones…’, or Zechariah (father of JB), ‘By the tender mercy of our God the dawn from on high will break upon us.’ Luke does so in the passionate belief that these things have now happened. The true light, the light that enlightens everyone, has come into the world – and it can never be snuffed out.
So, if the light is shining, how does it enlighten our lives? It’s a question simply put but hard to answer. If the God we need is the God we glimpse in Jesus what does this tell us about where true and lasting joy is to be found? What does it tell us about peace? Heaven knows, we need some guidance on all that at the moment.
Or to put it in terms of our gospel reading, what does all this tell us about God’s invitation to us to be the place where Christ is born? Unlike St Luke, we can read back the story from the vantage point of two thousand years not just thirty; can we hear the message of the angel again today and say, like Mary, ‘let it be with me/with us according to your word’? And recognize that we are thereby saying ‘yes’ not to ‘pie in the sky when we die’ but to a changed world in which peace is a fertile valley not a desert, a banquet not a battle.