I HAD THREE JOBS (one at a time!) before I got married. The first two were only temporary, working first for the city I grew up in, and then the federal government. The federal job was working for the U. S. Census Bureau, which was piloting new procedures in various cities (including mine) in advance of an upcoming regular census in 1980. I wasn’t one of the people who went door to door asking the questions; I had a low-level supervisory job in the office. But even then, I got to see some of the messy inner workings of the process.

The Constitution requires that a population census be taken every 10 years; the information helps the federal government know how to allocate resources. It is not tied to taxation, which is a completely separate process. But even with the purpose of the census being benign, we quickly discovered how many people were leery of answering the questions.

That’s in the United States. Now, try to imagine your way back to the first century and the Roman Empire. You are a member of a people conquered by the empire and have just received the decree from Rome: there’s to be a census. You suspect that it’s for the purpose of taxation, which you already resent. And no one is conveniently coming to your home; you have to travel, perhaps a long distance, to the place of your ancestry.

Perhaps some people simply took it all in stride, thinking, “Hey, it’s a chance to see the relatives. Let’s make a vacation out of it.” But I imagine that most would have found the decree inconvenient at best, threatening at worst.

And this is the context in which Luke narrates the birth of Jesus.

. . .

PREVIOUSLY, LUKE DESCRIBED the birth of John the Baptist as well as Zechariah’s response, a prophetic song known as the Benedictus. Luke will come back in chapter 3 to say more about John’s ministry as an adult, but first he has to move him out of the spotlight to focus on the birth of Jesus in chapter 2. Luke therefore ends the first chapter with these words:

And the child grew and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the wilderness until he appeared publicly to Israel. (Luke 1:80, NIV)

It’s in the wilderness that we’ll meet John again, as he prepares to go out preaching a message of repentance as Gabriel prophesied years earlier. For now, however, Luke turns his attention to Jesus. In chapter 1, he introduced the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth by giving his reader the historical context: “In the time of Herod king of Judea” (vs. 5). Herod, you’ll remember, was a brutal tyrant, a paranoid and tortured individual who used his power in any way he thought necessary to protect his rule.

As he begins the story of Jesus, Luke gives us more historical reference points:

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. (2:1-3)

Here, “Augustus” is not a name in the way we would think of it (his friends didn’t call him “Gus”). Rather, it’s more like a title, meaning “greatly revered.” His name was Gaius Octavius, or simply “Octavian.” He was the grand-nephew of Julius Caesar. Caesar was so fond of him that he named him his son and heir.

Technically speaking, Julius Caesar was not officially the “emperor” of Rome. He had been part of a powerful trio of men who at first worked together to secretly consolidate their power and influence. Not surprisingly, their alliance eventually deteriorated—into war. Caesar defeated his former ally Pompey in 48 BC and became a solo dictator.

But his victory was short-lived. A group of Roman senators who resented the way he undermined the traditions of the Roman Republic conspired to assassinate him, stabbing him to death in 44 BC. Instead of restoring the Republic, however, the murder triggered more civil war.

In the wake of the assassination, another powerful coalition of three men was formed, this time officially. Octavian was one of the three, as was Mark Antony. This coalition, too, broke down. Antony’s dalliances with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, made him unpopular with Romans. Long story short, Octavian defeated Antony in the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and was given the title “Augustus” by the Roman senate in 27 BC, marking the dawn of the Roman Empire and making Octavian its first official emperor.

In contrast to Herod the Great, Augustus was a relatively successful ruler. The beginning of the famous “Pax Romana” or “Roman peace” coincided with his rise to power. That’s not to say that the empire had no internal or external strife during his 41-year reign. But Augustus seems to have been a wise and relatively benevolent ruler.

Augustus initiated a census, probably to help with the collection of appropriate taxes. Luke gives us yet another time reference; the census began “while Quirinius was governor of Syria”; the smaller territory of Judea would have been under his jurisdiction. The census required that everyone return to their ancestral home. As we’ll see shortly, that meant that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem, because as Luke has already told us, Joseph was a descendant of David, and Bethlehem was the city of David’s birth.

In a way that Theophilus would probably have appreciated, Luke’s way of telling the story of Jesus locates it against its broader sociopolitical background. The story begins “in the time of Herod,” a ruthless dictator; it continues in the days of Augustus, a more respectable figure than Herod, but still the embodiment of absolute authority as Theophilus would have known it.

We still live in a world that, on the surface of things, is ruled by humans, some tyrannical, some benevolent. But what Luke seems to want Theophilus to know is that below the surface, the story belongs to God. That should be our perspective, too.