Advent 2024: Caesar or Christ?

Advent Day 17, December 17, 2024

This Advent series began as an invitation to unity in a world that is fractured by war, political division, insatiable greed, power-seeking, and biases of every sort, from skin color to sexual orientation. It is, in fact, a world very like the one that the Light/Love/Christ entered some two-thousand years ago in a rural village in a land occupied and oppressed by the Roman Empire and Caesar Augustus. While Christ offered a way to peace through servant-leadership, mercy, justice, sacrifice, inclusion, and love, Caesar Augustus demanded peace (Pax Romana) through war, violence and submission.

Ukraine. Russia. Syria. Israel. Palestine. Sudan. Martyrs and presidents. It doesn’t seem like much has changed in two-thousand years.

Could part of the current situation be because those of us who say we follow the Light/Love/Christ really don’t? That we look the other way when our own self-interests are involved? That we’ve become so apathetic, so tired, so disgusted that we’ve let our candles dim? That it’s just easier to allow the Caesars of this world their own way?

In the book The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Say about Jesus’ Birth, the authors Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan make the following analysis, a tough read but one worth contemplating these last days of Advent:

Can peace ever be attained “by the victory of a Great Final Battle or must it be done—if ever it is done—by the justice of a Great Final Feast?

“The terrible truth is that our world has never established peace through victory. Victory establishes not peace, but lull. Thereafter, the vigilance returns once again, and always worse than before. And it is that escalator violence that then endangers our world.

“The four-week period of Advent before Christmas is a time of penance and life change for Christians. . . . Each Advent is a time of repentance for the past and change for the future. Do we think that peace on earth comes from Caesar or Christ? Do we think it comes through violent victory or nonviolent justice? Advent is about a choice of how to live personally and individually, nationally and internationally.

“Christmas is not about tinsel and mistletoe or even ornaments and presents, but about what means will we use toward the end of a peace from heaven upon our earth. Or is ‘peace on earth’ but a Christmas ornament taken each year from an attic or basement and returned there as soon as possible?”

Hard questions for a hard time. Will we choose to lift Love in unity, or miss the star altogether? To whom will we really bow down this Christmas?

Blessings ~ Rosemary

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