Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive. The liberal Establishment really has little to fear from it and everything to gain. For the most part, it has become the creed of the suburban well-to-do, not the astonishing promise offered to the riffraff and undercover anticolonial militants with whom Jesus himself hung out. The suburbanite response to the anawim, a term which can be roughly translated into American English as “loser”, is for the most part to flush them off the streets.
Terry Eagleton Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Matthew 2 opens with Herod hearing about the birth of Jesus from the Wise men. “When he heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.” (Matthew 2:3) People in power spend their time worrying about losing their status. They are afraid of being stripped of privilege and wealth, so they hold on as tight as they can. They need to control the narrative, to get ahead of the story, so they create elaborate schemes. “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” (Matthew 2:8) When things don’t go as planned, they lash out in an attempt to eliminate the threat. “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under…” (Matthew 2:16)
In contrast, Mary and Joseph take Jesus on the run. They become refugees, driven from their homes by the threat of violence. They leave in the middle of the night to go to Egypt. Like the Israelites of long ago, they end up as strangers and sojourners in a foreign land until Herod’s death, at which time they do not return home, but end up in Nazareth. The messiah, the incarnate Son of God, becomes a refugee, poor and homeless, threatened by a moody tyrant hell bent on self preservation.
Somehow the message has been scrambled, the script flipped upside down. Christianity has become the religion of the status quo, the means for appropriating cultural and political power. Having been turned into an abstract self improvement project of personal salvation, we’ve lost touch with what Eagleton calls the “revolutionary message” of the gospel. We’ve forgotten that Jesus is on the side of the poor and the dispossessed, the immigrant and the refugee. This isn’t some leftist political agenda—it’s Matthew’s gospel. Just two chapters in and the baby born to a teenage mom is shaking the political order. This echoes the song that Mary sings in Luke 1: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” The birth of Jesus Christ is political—and clearly he is on the side of the lowly, the hungry, and the disenfranchised.
The greatest threat to the church today is not some woke, LGBTQ, political agenda. The greatest threat is the abstraction of Christian faith into a set of principles easily coopted by the powers of this world. It’s the use of Christianity and bible to shame the poor, the weak, and the outcast by solidifying unjust social conditions. In his letter to the Corinthians, a people obsessed with wealth, power, and status, Paul writes this: “We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless, and we grow weary from the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We heave become like the rubbish (literally the shit) of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day.” (I Corinthians 4:10-13)
The time is coming when Christians will “wake up” to the call of the gospel and pay attention to the people and places in the world where Christ is present. Just like in Matthew’s gospel, where God enters the world as a child refugee, God comes in ways that confound the rich and powerful. Jacques Ellul puts it this way: “God is a God incognito who does not manifest in great organ music or sublime ceremonies but who hides in the surprising face of the poor, in suffering (as in Jesus Christ), in the neighbor I meet, in fragility.” (Jacques Ellul Essential Spiritual Writings)