Violent Night - Holy Night

If your Christmas traditions are anything like mine, you and your family will sit down and read the beginning of the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2 at some point in all of the festivities. I’ve read these verses hundreds of times, and I’ve quoted them just as many. I used to have to recite the scene with Linus from “Marry Christmas Charlie Brown,” with a blue blanket in my hands and everything. Likely because of my familiarity with this famous passage I’ve taken for granted the brilliance of Luke’s telling of the Christmas story, especially his closing passage in the appearance of the angels to shepherds in the fields:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest [heaven] and upon earth peace among those favored by God!”

Finally, it hit me—this is one of the most audacious things to read as a first-century Jew in Rome.

Around the same time Jesus was born (possibly the same year) Herod the Great died. His reign was one of terror and paranoia, even for a Roman ruler. He murdered most of his family to secure his throne and was actually in the middle of attempting to execute his son for treason in the year he died. Herod’s paranoid, mass-terrorism reign was the only thing keeping Jewish Palestine from falling apart, however.

Jewish nationalist factions had tried to rise up over the last 150 years in revolt against what seemed to them an idolatrous display of Roman accommodation by Herod. In the wake of his death, his successor Archelaus (the poor kid was 19 years old) was pressured by Jewish mobs to punish elitists who were favored by Herod during his reign and to move the highpriesthood under new leadership. Fearful of open rebellion, Archelaus stationed forces to keep eyes and ears out for sedition during the Passover, when thousands of outsiders would be visiting Jerusalem. Sure enough, some Jewish teachers of the law incited rebellious activity against some of Archelaus’s soldiers, and the result wasn’t just a quelching of rebellion… 3000 people were slaughtered, with many more fleeing to the hillside. Archelaus canceled the Passover Feast, but similar massacres followed at the Feast of Pentecost, and over several months violent factions, pilfering, and chaos broke out across Judea and beyond. Amid the havoc, three popular leaders began terrorizing the countryside and claimed the role of Popular “King.” One of these kings, a man named Judas, violently took over the city of Sepphoris, which was only 4 miles away from the little town of Nazareth.

Rome decided to call in the big guns for this upheaval and summoned Publius Quinctilius Varus, the governor of Syria. Armed to the teeth with 2 legions of skilled soldiers and numerous allies, General Varus sent men on an expedition in Galilee, reclaimed the city of Sepphoris, enslaved the remaining inhabitants, and set the city to flames. Varus continued his march through Samaria, burning cities and punishing Jewish dissent as he slowly made his way back to Jerusalem. History doesn’t tell us if he stopped in Nazareth and plundered it as well, but if he did, it’s possible a young couple named Joseph and Mary were hunkered down nearby. The violence didn’t stop. More revolts would take place, with the Zealot movement coming into existence as a result of Judas’s activism. Cries for political and religious independence would echo through one Jewish uprising after another for the next 60+ years until their temple would be destroyed.

And in the midst of all of this, an angel has the audacity to announce to shepherds in Bethlehem

Peace on earth

Peace? These shepherds are perfectly aware of what’s been happening. They’ve probably seen the pyres of smoke across the hillside. Death and abomination are taking their world by storm, and the “peace” they are supposed to take comfort in is a baby sitting in an animal troff? In the midst of what feels like the end of the world, in the backwoods middle of nowhere Rome, a single baby being born is supposed to give us comfort? God must have absolutely no empathy for what we’re going through.

Or, as always, we’re focused on this present world and its passing trials while God has something infinitely more important in mind. Seats of political power are gone in a moment. Religious influence rises and falls in a day. Power and control are never in the same place for long, and yet everybody grabs for them, thinking they can usher in salvation if they just get enough of it. Then God comes along and reminds us that power, influence, and control all belong to Him, and He’s about to entrust it to this little baby born in Bethlehem, who will save the world by refusing to grasp for any of it. Instead, he will die for us, sinners who always hunger for it. Is the problem of human sin really greater than my social and national identity, or even my personal safety?

Yes. But don’t worry. It’s in Jesus’s hands now.

It Was a Violent Night. It was a Holy Night.

Significance of the Virginal Conception

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Christmas story is the miraculous conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, within His mother Mary. The first chapters of the gospels of Matthew and Luke reveal that Jesus was not conceived by man, but by God Himself within the womb of a betrothed young virgin (Matthew 1; Luke 1). Believers in the story today tend to focus most on how incredible God’s miracles are, with Jesus’s conception being a powerful way to start the miracle showcase on earth in Jesus’s ministry. After the Enlightenment and the emergence of Deism in the 18th century, leading thinkers and college professors required miracles to be challenged and viewed with extreme skepticism, relegating them as less important than universal truths or reason. Yet in both cases, many who view this miraculous story often miss the broader significance of the virgin birth: God is the author and sustainer of all creation. 

In the second century, a church father named Theophilus introduced the concept of creatio ex nihilo, “creation out of nothing.” This statement meant that the Hebrew God of the Bible is absolutely unique in that He is not simply a deity with powers higher than our own; He is the Creator of all that exists and brought all things into being when they did not exist. Other beings can create, but only God can create something from nothing. In the time period in which Jesus was born, just before the height of the Roman Empire, many pagan and philosophical religions considered spiritual beings to be real and have certain power. But the concept of a single, transcendent, divine creator was virtually unknown to the Greek world. The Hebrew people, however, had believed the God of their scriptures was the Creator God since the very beginning. In Genesis 1:1, when God creates the heavens and the earth, the author of Genesis uses the word bara (to create). This word is uniquely reserved for God alone when it comes to creation. Though scholars go back and forth on the precise purpose of how this word is used, they unanimously agree that in Hebrew literature God possesses a unique power to create that no other being holds. His creation power far exceeds all others. Unlike all other creators, God is above and outside of the limitations of time and space, and He alone can form something beautiful without any starting materials. God does not need a single thing from us in order to make something amazing. So in the midst of darkness, formlessness, and nothingness, God created.

Early in the bible, mankind has abandoned God yet again with their pursuit of self, so God starts over, creating a new nation out of nothing. Out of that nation, God will send a redeemer who saves all of humanity. God calls a simple man named Abram out of the wilderness and promises to multiply his family into a nation that will transform the world (Genesis 12-17). In other words, God came upon a landscape that had nothing, a wilderness, and He made something incredible from it. God calls Abram from nothing, renames him Abraham, and creates a nation where there was no nation. The author of Genesis wants you to understand a theme here: God makes things out of nothing, and from that nothing comes something eternally significant. 

Fast forward almost 2000 years, where the angel Gabriel visits Mary and tells her she will conceive and bear a son, who will be named Jesus. Her first question, of course, is how? She is a virgin after all. Gabriel’s answer, God will form the child all on His own. Gabriel explains to Mary that the Holy Spirit will form Jesus in her womb. He then reveals that Mary’s relative Elizabeth, who is barren, has already conceived a child and is 6 months into her own pregnancy. Every society in the known Roman world determined a woman’s value by her ability to bear children, so Elizabeth would seem to amount to nothing in her world. But that is perfect, because God will make something out of nothing. In Mary’s case, she will not need to conceive a child, because God is the one who will send His Son Jesus, the world’s savior, into the world in the most eternally significant event in history in a way that only He can: From seemingly nowhere and out of nothing.  

Ironically, many religious leaders did not accept Jesus as God’s chosen savior because they knew he was from Nazareth in Galilee, and the prophecies told them they would not know where the Messiah would come from (John 7:27). What they did not realize was that Jesus came from Heaven, not from ordinary places. God did not need a starting point in any town or city, He did not need the perfect environment or the right conditions to magically align. He did not need anything at all. God fulfilled His promise in the same way He always does, uniquely as the Creator, Sustainer, and Savior of all things. The Virgin Conception is a beautiful reminder that God never runs out of options and He is not limited to what we can offer Him. If the world seems too dark and hopeless for God to have His way, that is actually perfect. Those are the exact conditions God has supernaturally worked through before, and He will do it again. God will take the darkness and emptiness and nothingness and form beauty, fullness and salvation from it. God is the God of creatio ex nihilo, who will take our nothing and make exactly what He wants to out of it. I cannot think of a more wonderful promise of hope, and I will never look at the Virgin Conception the same way. If your world is too dark, your hope is gone, and your wilderness seems unending, you are actually in a great place. Give God your life, and let Him make something amazing out of nothing.