Power, as the world has always defined it, prefers marble halls, armed guards, and thundering declarations. It rises from capitals, crowns itself with spectacle, and speaks in the language of dominance.
Rome understood this well. So did Herod. So do modern states, corporations, and political movements that believe history bends only toward the loudest voice and the strongest hand. Yet the Christian story makes an audacious claim: when God chose to intervene decisively in human history, He bypassed Rome, ignored palaces, and settled on Bethlehem; a village so small it barely registered on the imperial map.
This choice was not accidental, nor was it merely sentimental. It was a deliberate inversion of power. In Bethlehem, God announced that strength, as humans measure it, is not the currency of redemption. The birth of Jesus in a manger was not just a religious event; it was a political and moral statement. It declared that true power does not always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it arrives quietly, wrapped in vulnerability, unsettling empires precisely because it refuses to imitate them.
Bethlehem stood in sharp contrast to Rome, the epicenter of authority, law, and military might. Rome taxed, conquered, and crucified. It projected control through legions and legal codes. Bethlehem offered none of that. It had no army, no senate, no economic leverage. What it had was obscurity. And it was in that obscurity that God chose to plant the seed of a revolution that would outlive every empire that mocked it.
This divine strategy challenges a deeply ingrained human instinct: the belief that change must come from the top. We assume salvation lies with strong leaders, fortified institutions, and decisive force. Yet the Bethlehem narrative suggests otherwise. It proposes that lasting transformation often begins at the margins, among those dismissed as weak, irrelevant, or expendable. The manger stands as a quiet rebuke to every system that equates worth with power and visibility.
History bears out the discomfort this idea creates. Herod trembled at the rumor of a child. Rome eventually crucified Him. Power always senses a threat when its definitions are questioned. Jesus did not command legions, yet His words dismantled hierarchies. He did not seize thrones, yet He altered the moral imagination of civilizations. His influence did not depend on coercion but on conscience, a far more destabilizing force.
The Apostle Paul later articulated this paradox with unsettling clarity: God chose what is weak to shame the strong. This was not poetic exaggeration; it was a theological diagnosis of human arrogance. Weakness, in the divine economy, is not a defect but a doorway. It creates space for humility, dependence, and moral clarity; qualities power often suppresses in its obsession with control.
The implications extend far beyond theology. In a world gripped by fear, insecurity, and the cult of strongmen, Bethlehem speaks with renewed urgency. We live in an age where nations boast of military budgets, leaders trade in threats, and influence is measured by reach and force. Yet these displays of strength coexist with deep fragility: fractured societies, moral exhaustion, and a persistent inability to heal injustice at its roots.
Bethlehem suggests that the problem is not a shortage of power but a misunderstanding of it. Power without moral restraint corrodes. Strength without compassion hardens. The Christmas story insists that redemption does not come from overpowering others but from bearing their burdens. It reframes greatness as service and victory as sacrifice, ideas that remain profoundly subversive.
This message resonates strongly in places where weakness is a daily reality rather than an abstract concept. In villages bypassed by development, in communities scarred by violence, in nations where citizens feel invisible to those who govern them, Bethlehem offers an unsettling hope. It says significance is not granted by proximity to power but by participation in purpose. God’s choice affirms that no place is too small, no people too marginal, to become a site of history’s turning point.
Critics may dismiss this as spiritual romanticism, unsuited to the brutal mechanics of modern geopolitics. Yet even secular history testifies that the most enduring movements often emerge from unlikely beginnings. Moral revolutions are rarely born in palaces. They germinate among the discontented, the silenced, and the overlooked, those with little to lose and much to hope for. Bethlehem fits this pattern with unnerving precision.
The danger, of course, is to sentimentalize weakness while ignoring the responsibility it carries. The Bethlehem narrative does not glorify passivity or victimhood. It elevates humility, not helplessness. Jesus grew, taught, confronted injustice, and exposed hypocrisy. His weakness was not the absence of agency but the refusal to dominate. That distinction matters. It challenges both the powerful, who confuse force with legitimacy, and the powerless, who may mistake despair for faith.
As Christmas is observed in a world anxious about security and obsessed with strength, Bethlehem remains a scandal. It asks uncomfortable questions of our politics, our leadership, and our personal ambitions. Why do we trust power so easily and virtue so reluctantly? Why do we believe salvation must look impressive to be effective? And what might change if we took seriously the idea that the world can be remade from its quietest corners?
God did not choose Rome because Rome already believed in itself. He chose Bethlehem because the world needed a different imagination. Two millennia later, that choice still unsettles us. It exposes the fragility of our strongholds and invites us to reconsider where true power resides. Not in domination, but in truth. Not in spectacle, but in sacrifice. Not in Rome, but in Bethlehem.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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