Black Friday sales. Small Business Saturday. Cyber Monday. What we pay attention to grows, says adrienne maree brown. And the Christmas season in the United States, surrounded as it is by celebrations of cheap deals, often reveals what we pay attention to and the values many of us are growing. These are the values of capital, wealth, and consumerism.
Contemporary celebrations of Christmas can thus obscure other realities: the unending grief of war and poverty, the trans and queer refugees who are resettling in New York (where I live) during this season of hyper consumption, and the continual economic precarity of working people. Consumerism often makes us pay more attention to the commodities we want, and less attention to the struggles upon which our commodity consumption depends.
But the holidays are also a season where we are asked to think just as deeply about the values and meaning embedded in the life and story of Jesus, the Christ child, who shares more with the reality of struggle than with the Christmas obsession with hyper-consumption.
Jesus was born into Roman imperialism. The Roman empire exercised its control over 1st-century Palestine through a combination of military force, economic exploitation, and cultural domination. The imposition of heavy taxes and the confiscation of land created widespread subjugation among its local populations. The presence of Roman soldiers in urban centers and along trade routes and in Jerusalem was a constant reminder of this occupation. The client-king system, exemplified by Herod the Great and later Herod Antipas, acted as an intermediary between Roman power and local populations, further entrenching imperial control.
For many Jews, Roman occupation was not only a political crisis but a theological one. The occupation challenged the belief in a God who would liberate Israel from oppression, as told in the Exodus narrative. This tension gave rise to various responses: the Pharisees sought to preserve Jewish identity through strict adherence to the Torah, the Sadducees aligned with Roman authorities to maintain their temple privileges, the Essenes withdrew into the wilderness to await divine intervention, and the Zealots took up arms in rebellion.
Jesus was born during the census and during a time when an edict was handed down from the king, Herod, the ruler of Judea. Herod’s edict was an order to kill all children two years old and under in and around Bethlehem. After hearing that the “King of the Jews” had been born, Herod ordered the execution of all children in an attempt to kill Jesus and prevent him from challenging Herod’s authority. Having to flee from Herod’s murderous decree, Jesus was born a fugitive, marking the emergence of Christmas from the bleeding periphery of an empire seeking control.
The social context of the fragile empire, attempts to kill Jesus, and political revolt gives shape to the radical message of Jesus’s birth: God’s kingdom is breaking into this context of imperial fragility, offering an alternative vision of peace, justice, and community that undermines the empire’s claims to eternal dominance. Mary’s song, the Magnificat, is not only a declaration of faith and liberation but also a formative vision for Jesus that reflects this message. Through her words and the life she models, Mary becomes one of Jesus’ first and most profound theological teachers. Her song teaches him how to understand God, justice, and the vocation of embodying divine love in a broken world.
One way of moving beyond the shallow consumerism of Christmas is to understand Jesus as a Brown Palestinian Jew who nurtured what I, influenced by theorists such as Fred Moten and theologian Felipe Maia, call “fugitive futures.” Fugitive futures describe a mode of living and imagining shaped by resistance to domination, a refusal to be fully captured by oppressive systems, and a commitment to creating spaces of freedom and possibility. These futures are often precarious, hidden, and subversive, but they are also deeply generative—cultivating radical hope and community outside the logics of control. The concept draws heavily from the lived experiences of fugitives: enslaved persons escaping bondage, colonized peoples resisting empire, and marginalized communities carving out spaces of survival and joy. It theorizes a future that emerges not from domination or assimilation but from refusal, rupture, and radical creativity.
The story of the flight to Egypt, for instance, frames divine presence not as a guarantee of physical safety but as a solidarity with the vulnerable, the creativity of the divine presence fleeing as a fugitive in order to begin something new. God’s guidance through the angel to Joseph does not remove imperial threat but provides a way to endure it. This challenges triumphalist theology that equates faithfulness with protection and prosperity. Instead, Jesus’s God, the God sung about by Mary, is a God who traverses alongside refugees and who reveals a way of valuing the world “from below.”
Many contemporary implications follow.
First, the birth story invites us to reclaim justice as central to the message of the birth of the son of God. This insight was developed by liberation theology, which emerged among Latin American and Black theology, and provides a lens to interpret Jesus’ life and teachings as fundamentally anti-imperial and focused on the liberation of oppressed peoples. Recognizing the justice at the heart of the incarnation, many liberation theologians drew upon Marxist critiques of power and emphasized the need for solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised.
Second, Jesus’s family’s journey reflects the lived experience of countless displaced families. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus fled under threat of violence, carrying little more than their lives and the uncertainty of what awaited them in a foreign land. Their story highlights the fragility of human life under regimes that prioritize power over people. I think of Jewish people living in diaspora, Black people living in diaspora, Latin American people living in diaspora, and Palestinians living in the diaspora. The whims of imperial powers often displace others into lands unknown to them. By beginning his earthly life as a displaced person, Jesus embodies a radical identification with the oppressed. This narrative subverts triumphalist notions of divine protection, emphasizing instead vulnerability and solidarity with those forced to flee.
Third, reflection on the birth of Jesus has real parallels today. For Palestinians under occupation know the fragility and power of the empire. Just as Herod’s reach extended beyond Bethlehem, modern imperial systems—marked by surveillance, militarized borders, and economic coercion—ensure that safety is conditional and fleeting. Whether in occupied Palestine, refugee camps, or militarized zones, those fleeing the violence of the state of Israel find themselves entangled in systems that perpetuate their precarity. Under occupation, the illusion of safety is a daily reality. The construction of walls, checkpoints, and militarized zones ostensibly in the name of security has created conditions where even basic survival is precarious. Like the Holy Family, Palestinians are forced to navigate spaces where safety is always contingent on the will of those in power. The birth story of Jesus suggests that there is no divine presence in this military system, but in those who are struggling to live and thrive against it.
And fourth, in an age of accelerated misogynoir, the Godbearer, Mary, emerges as a profound symbol of defiant hope and resilience. Misogynoir pervades our societies in tangible ways: the erasure of women’s contributions, their disproportionate vulnerability to state violence, and the systemic disregard for their lives and well-being. In such a context, Mary’s story must be recognized as not just an ancient narrative but as an urgent, radical call to confront these injustices in the here and now. Mary, a young, poor, colonized woman, stands at the heart of the Christmas story not as a passive vessel but as a revolutionary figure who boldly consents to bear the divine amidst an empire bent on silencing and exploiting the marginalized. Her Magnificat is a declaration of God’s justice that lifts up the lowly and brings the powerful to account. In her song, Mary names the world’s brokenness and envisions its transformation—a vision deeply aligned with the liberation of all oppressed peoples.
To recognize Mary as part of the radical politics of Christmas is to see her not only as the mother of Jesus but as a co-conspirator in God’s act of liberation. It is to see her courage in the face of structures that seek to control and diminish women, and to amplify her voice in defiance of all systems that perpetuate misogynoir. Just as Mary sings of a God who scatters the proud and brings down rulers from their thrones, we are called to join her song—to dismantle the misogynoir embedded in our own systems and to uplift the humanity and dignity of women in every sphere of life.
This Christmas, Mary challenges us to do more than celebrate; she calls us to action. Her story demands that we confront the accelerated misogynoir in our world—be it in the form of violence, erasure, or systemic neglect—and to labor alongside those who, like her, bear the divine promise of a new and just world. To ignore this call is to betray the very essence of the Christmas story: a God who chooses to be born through the oppressed to bring liberation for all.
Christmas, the beginning of the Jesus story, invites us to reconsider the incarnation as a revolutionary act of God’s becoming, a revolution which can be overlooked in the obsession with holiday consumption. Taking on flesh and entering a world composed of violence, now and then, is a radical act of becoming one with the underside of history. In a season tangled in consumerism, hyper production, and capitalism, I want to suggest that we slow down and consider the radical politics of Christmas. The truth of Christmas is embodied in the revolutionary act of God becoming flesh. This becoming of God encourages us to seek fugitive futures, like Jesus did. Empires serve themselves, and the underside of history continues to be harmed by politics and policies that undermine their flourishing. Yet, the radical politics of Christmas teaches us that hope is a discipline and hoping against all hope is to follow Jesus into his radical, even if vulnerable, future.
Roberto Che Espinoza has been a wandering nomad on the way, but is now a pastor, theologian, and cat dad nurturing visible and invisible ecologies for another possible world in Western New York.
Image Credit: Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1505/1510. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
