By Sheldon Greaves

Note: This started as a Facebook post, but it seemed like a good idea to expand it just a little.

While reading the ancient Greek version of Luke’s nativity last night, I was struck as I always am by the inversions that pop up throughout the story. Everything gets turned on its head; a stable instead of an inn, for instance. Shepherds, who were so low on the social totem pole that their testimony was inadmissible in legal cases, become God’s messengers.

But my favorite was pointed out to me years ago by my spouse, Denise. It’s the angels, the “heavenly chorus.” Except it’s not a chorus. This wasn’t the Godly Glee Club, it was a host or, more literally an army–στρατιᾶς/”stratias” (related to our words “strategy” and “strategic”). Whether you take the text literally or not, it makes for one hell of a mental image; an army singing about peace on earth.

Inversions upon inversions, all part of the Lucan nativity’s larger point which, I submit, is that the world was about to be turned upside down.

A New World

It is difficult to overstate just how radical the early Christian movement was, matched only by the Judaism that preceded it. The idea that deity could feel concern for humanity as a whole, let alone for the unfortunates, the “disposables” among them, was a seismic shift. It was inconceivable. The idea, for instance, that slaves could have any equal standing with masters was literally seen by non-Christians as an existential threat to the cosmic order.

But it was that very idea that empowered Christianity to displace its pagan rivals, forming stronger, healthier communities because those communities cared for each other. They also cared for those around them, even if they were not part of the community. As theologian David Bentley Hart summarized,

The ultimate meaning of the Christian movement within the ancient world cannot be measured simply by the richness of later Christian culture’s art or architecture, the relative humanity or inhumanity of its societies and laws, the creativity of its economic or scientific institutions, or the perdurability of its religious institutions through the ages. … The more vital and essential victory of Christianity lay in the strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness of the moral intuitions it succeeded in sowing in human consciences.

Those “impractical” intuitions that would liberate the slave, rescue the prisoner, give shelter to the refugee and the homeless. Heal the sick, comfort the dying, and establish justice; all these are as necessary now as ever. Perhaps even more if my intuition does not deceive me.

Welcome to the revolution.