This feast suggests that things that God cares about most do not take place in the centers of power. The truly vital events are happening in refugee camps, detention centers, slums and prisons. The Christmas story is set not in a palace surrounded by dignitaries but among the poor and humble whose lives are always subject to forfeit. It’s a reminder that the church is not most truly herself when she courts power. The church finds her voice when she remembers that God “has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble,” as the Gospel of Luke puts it.

The very telling of the Christmas story is an act of resistance. This is how the biblical story functioned for my ancestors who gathered in the fields and woods of the antebellum South. They saw in the Christian narrative an account of a God who cared for the enslaved and wanted more for them than the whip and the chain. For them Christianity did not merely serve the disinherited — it was for the disinherited, the “weak things” that shamed the strong.

Christians believe that none of this suffering was in vain. The cries of the oppressed do not go forever unanswered. We believe that the children slaughtered by Herod were ushered into the presence of God and will be with him for eternity. The Christian tradition also affirms that Jesus’ suffering served a purpose, that when the state ordered his death, God was at work. Through the slaughter of the truly innocent one, God was emptying death of its power, vanquishing evil and opening the path toward forgiveness and reconciliation.

I once served as a priest at a church in St. Andrews, Scotland, that kept all the Holy Days. I gathered with a small group on Dec. 28 to receive communion and remember the innocents. Most in the group were at least 30 years my senior. One was in his last months of life after a long battle with cancer. I had very little wisdom to offer such a group, so I simply told them the stories of death, massacre and hope in the form of a child.

We weary few, gathered around the bread and the wine, reveled in our rebellion. Anyone who has visited Scotland will tell you that winters are a dreary affair, and the old church buildings with their odd angles can be gloomy. But in my memory that day was filled with light.

Esau McCaulley (@esaumccaulley) is an assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, where he serves as the director of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative.

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