Caesar Augustus and a Census on Christmas
Christmas Morning, 2025.
I find myself wrestling with the Gospel of Luke.
Specifically, Luke 2:1–7.
These seven verses are perhaps the most overly-familiar lines in the history of the English language. We see them on Hallmark cards, or maybe we hear them narrated by the Peanuts character dropping his blanket, Linus van Pelt. Such familiarity is a double-edged sword. It can dull the blade of a story until we no longer feel its sharpest edge.
When we strip away the "Stille Nacht" sentimentality of this birth story, Luke’s account isn’t very "Christmasy" at all. It’s a story about a bureaucratic nightmare, a housing crisis, a forced migration, and a medical emergency in a barn.
It is a story rooted in the nitty gritty of the real world—a world of taxes, sore feet, and political maneuvering.
The Paradox of the Small
“The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.” — G.K. Chesterton
Luke begins his account by zooming out. He starts with Caesar Augustus.
In 2025, we think of "Caesar" as a historical figure in a fallen empire, but in the first century, he was much more than that. Augustus was a god-king. He was the "Divi Filius"—the son of a god.
When Caesar issued a decree, the world trembled. The census mentioned in Luke 2 wasn't a friendly demographic survey. This was an act of imperial dominance. It was about counting heads to ensure the Roman war machine stayed funded and the coffers of Rome stayed full.
Augustus was "big." He was the definition of power. He was to quote Ron Burgundy…”kind of a Big Deal.”
And then, Luke performs one of the most brilliant literary pivots in history. He moves from the marble palaces of Rome to a dirt road leading to Bethlehem. He moves from the man who owned the world to a carpenter who couldn't even find a guest room.
G.K. Chesterton was obsessed with this paradox. He argued that the most revolutionary thing about Christianity wasn't that God was "big"—everyone already knew the Divine was powerful—it was that God became small.
The Weight of Vulnerability
In his classic work The Everlasting Man, Chesterton points out that in Bethlehem, the "omnipotence of God" was suddenly contained within the "impotence of a baby."
Think about the sheer risk of that. We worship a God who was once a biological dependent. He needed to be fed. He needed to be changed. He needed to be protected from the elements. If you want to understand the heart of the Christian faith, you have to start with the fact that God did not come to us as a lightning bolt or a philosophy. He came as a person who could be bruised. He came as an infant who had to be burped. He became truly human—finite, insignificant, small.
Chesterton noted that this "smallness" is what gives us our freedom. A God who stays in the clouds is a God you can only fear or ignore. But a God who becomes a baby in a feeding trough is a God you can love. God met us at our eye level. He didn't come to overwhelm our wills with a show of force. God came to win our hearts through a show of vulnerability. In Christ, God speaks baby talk to us in a language we used to understand—but without a child-like faith we too easily forget.
This morning, as we navigate our own "bigness"—our careers, our new year plans and resolutions, our pursuit of status—the manger reminds us that the most important things in the universe often happen in the smallest, most overlooked places.
The Quiet Invasion
“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” — C.S. Lewis
If Chesterton helps us see the smallness of the Nativity, C.S. Lewis helps us see its strategy.
In Luke 2:7, we read that Mary "laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn." We often treat this as a sad accident, but Lewis saw it as a tactical necessity.
Lewis called the Incarnation the "Grand Miracle." For him, the universe was like a poem and the Incarnation was the moment the Poet stepped into his own lines. But more than that, Lewis viewed the world as "occupied territory." He believed that humanity had internalised a kind of spiritual darkness, and that God had to slip past the defenses of our pride to save us.
The King in Disguise
Why a stable? Why not a palace in Rome?
If the King had arrived with his full heavenly host, we wouldn't have had a choice but to surrender. It would have been a conquest, not a relationship. Lewis argued that God arrived "in disguise" so that we could come to know him.
The "no room in the inn" (the Greek word kataluma actually refers to a guest room in a family home) tells us that Jesus was born in the lower level of a house where the animals were kept at night. It was dark, it smelled of hay and poop, and it was entirely ordinary. There was nothing glamorous about this arrival.
This is the "Quiet Invasion." God didn't break down the door—he entered through the cellar. He began his work of reclamation from the bottom up. Lewis’s point for us today is that God is still "slipping in." He rarely shows up in the "high places" of our lives—our successes, our bravado, our polished exteriors, our curated content.
Instead, he tends to show up in our "stables"—the parts of our lives that are messy, crowded, and where we feel we have "no room."
The miracle of Christmas morning is that the "rightful King" has landed. He is here, not to condemn the world, but to reclaim it in the smallest, least-known, least-spectacular ways.
The Eucatastrophe of Our Story
“The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien coined a word that every Christmas reflection should include: Eucatastrophe. A "catastrophe" is a sudden downward turn—a disaster. But a eu-catastrophe (the prefix eu- meaning "good") is a sudden, miraculous upward turn.
It’s the moment in a story where defeat seems certain, but then something happens that changes the trajectory of everything. A fool’s hope becomes reality.
In Luke’s narrative, the "catastrophe" is evident. A young, pregnant woman is forced to travel nearly 100 miles on foot and donkey because of a dictator’s whim and will. She arrives in a town where she has no privacy, no comfort, and no medical support. It is a story of displacement and hardship, toil and discomfort.
And then, we hear verse 7:
"And she gave birth to her firstborn son."
The Turning of the Tide
Tolkien believed that the human heart is wired for stories that end in "joy beyond the walls of the world." He argued that the Nativity is the ultimate "True Myth"—a story that has all the wonder of a legend but actually happened in human history.
The birth of Jesus is the "Great Turn" of the human race. Before this moment history felt like a long, slow march toward the grave—a "long winter" without a Christmas. It was Narnia ruled by the White Witch. But with the cry of a newborn in Bethlehem, the "thaw" finally began.
Tolkien’s perspective is vital for us in 2025 because we live in a world that often feels like a series of catastrophes. We look at our ordinary lives, or we hear the latest news and see a world full of darkness. But the Nativity tells us that the "Happy Turn" is built into the fabric of reality. It tells us that death and darkness do not have the last word.
The manger is the promise that no matter how bleak the "winter" of our current circumstances is, that Spring has already been sprung. The Light has entered the world, and as the Gospel of John says, "the darkness has not overcome it."
God is not too "big" to care about our small lives. If he could fit into a manger, he can fit into our homes, our struggles, and our fiercest frustrations.
God is an active participant in our world. He is the "Quiet Invader" who meets us in the messy "lower levels" of our reality. This God is working to restore what is broken.
In Christ, our story is not a tragedy. It is a "eucatastrophe"—a story that, despite the pain and the shadows, is headed toward a joyous conclusion.
Luke 2:1–7 ends with a baby wrapped in "swaddling cloths." It’s a mundane detail but it’s a profound one. Swaddling was the act of binding a child to keep them warm and secure. It is the ultimate image of an infinite God submitting to our finite limitations. He who clothes the lilies of the field allowed himself to be clothed by a teenage mother.
The picture of Jesus that Luke paints forces us to look past the commercial "bigness" of the season. We are compelled to look past the political "bigness" of our era. Instead, our eyes are to gaze upon the smallness of the manger.
The Roman Empire is gone. Caesar Augustus is a name in a textbook, or that history teachers covering the ancient world mention each year. But the Child born in the "House of Bread" remains. He is the Bread of Life, a King come in disguise, and the Joy that the world never gave and therefore can never take away.
Merry Christmas.
