Opinion | How Christmas Changed Everything

Perhaps the best way for us to dust off this story is to see the incarnation through the eyes of those ancients for whom it would have been a revolutionary reversal of expectations. Can we hear it through the ears of those who had heard the phrase “Son of God” applied only to Augustus Caesar, a powerful king and military ruler, not to an oppressed and poor itinerant? Could we hear it with those who could have never imagined that God would identify himself not with the victors or the strong but instead with the hungry, the thirsty and the imprisoned? Could we hear it with those whose bodies have been beaten and broken who would be amazed that God found it fit to become a human body that would be beaten and broken?

The development of the idea of universal dignity could be understood as a result of an invisible hand guiding societies toward “progress” or even as a series of random accidents. A.C. Grayling, a British philosopher, argues that seeds of this concept can be found in the thoughts of Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius. Scholars like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Israel trace the origin of human rights to the enlightenment era.

And of course, it’s obvious that Christians haven’t always lived up to this radical ethic, as enslavers and colonialists often explicitly reclaimed Aristotle’s views of “natural slaves” to justify their violence against other human beings. But Christians since at least the second century have seen the furthering of universal human dignity as the unfolding triumph of Christ and his kingdom, quietly set into motion by God being born one night in Bethlehem.

This is the season where we recall the scandalous news that the maker of heaven and earth, in the words of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men” and became obedient even to death on the cross. This story continues to offer us an invitation today.

Even now, I catch myself believing that the world belongs to the victors and the powerful. The church, like nearly everyone else, tends to want to be more like the comfortable, the successful, and the powerful — more like Augustus Caesar — than the one who became weak, helpless and despised. We often look for God more in the abundance of gifts under the tree or the happiness of our days than in the helplessness of a baby, the worry lines of the poor, or the lonely agony of a dying man on a cross. But again this year, this story asks to shock us anew and to yet again turn the world upside down.

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Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”