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Insight: by Bruce SanguinThe Church made far too much of the virgin birth,and far too much of Jesus being the Son of God, whenit came to making meaning of the story of Christ’sbirth. Mystery religions at the time of Jesus alsohad their own virgin birth stories. Every great rulerincluding Caesar, the Emperor of Rome, was believedto have been divinely conceived. As to the title Son ofGod, that too, was a title demanded by Caesar. Thevirgin birth and the affirmation that Jesus is the Son ofGod were always intended to be subversive metaphors,not propositional truths about Jesus.The gospel writers wrote these birth stories as asymbolic way of sticking it to Caesar and all thosepeople who believed that his power represented theexercise of divine power, and that his office, as thepowerful man in the world, represented the way Godexercised power in the world. The gospel writers wereoutrageously undermining Caesar’s rule. Jesus, theycontended – a Jewish peasant nobody – was God’s Son,not Caesar. His way, and not Caesar’s, was divinelyblessed. Jesus, a powerless man from the backwater ofGalilee, was divinely conceived, not Caesar. In otherwords, if you want a model of what God looks likein human form, look to Jesus, not Caesar: not therich and powerful, not the movers and shakers, notthe ones who get first dibs on tickets to the Olympics10and every other event considered to be important bysociety. Such is the outrageous claim of the Christmasstory.John’s gospel doesn’t have the story of a virgin birth.No angels. No shepherds. No magi. Rather, it kicks offwith some serious metaphysics. “In the beginning wasthe Word and the Word was with God and the Wordwas God.” Think of “the Word” as divine Wisdom,Creativity, and Love, that, says John, became flesh inJesus and dwelled among us. A more literal translationof “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us”, is‘God pitched a tent and dwelled in our midst’. It sortof brings to mind the Occupy movement, and the tentcities that sprung up around the world. These ordinarycitizens have unleashed the metaphor of ‘occupation’to cover just about everything and every institution insociety. Occupy Wall Street, the banks, and all formsof commerce. Occupy Congress, democracy, and theeducation system.Occupy your self, your life, and your valuesystems. Occupy church. Perhaps the soul of thepeople that has long been dormant and hypnotizedby the dominant power system and its assumptionsabout reality, is waking up. The time has come totake back our lives, our planet, and our institutionsand imbue them once more with soul. Have you everconsidered the possibility that the Occupy movementis one dimension of a new birth story; the story ofthe collective birth of our species as a kind of newhuman?Christianity has always claimed that Jesus wasboth fully human and fully divine. This story is reallyabout the birth of a new human in the twenty-firstcentury, one that understands that what we claimedabout Jesus, we are ready now to claim about ourselvescollectively – that all the love, healing powers, andcompassion we see in Jesus was in anticipation of acollective birth that is now underway.I’m imagining that the birth of Christ is reallyabout a divine occupation. It’s Spirit occupying ourworld, our planet, our very lives – pitching a tent rightin the middle of our comings and goings. The storyof the birth of Christ is God’s way of getting in ourface, and more importantly into our hearts, so thatwe may undergo an identity shift the likes of whichwe’ve never experienced. I’m imagining that thereis an empty cavity in the hearts of humans, waitingto be filled. Christ comes once again to occupy thecavernous emptiness of a planet that is trying to get bywithout love.May 2013 - The Canadian Friend