If you think back to your days in high school English class, you may remember learning about the deus ex machina. When the author of a story or play becomes twisted up in an irresolvable plot of her or his own making, this literary plot device could be summoned to save the day.
The origins of the deus ex machina lie in ancient Greek plays in which an actor, representing one of the many deities, was lowered from on high using a crane or a lift. As the gods entered to perform the great rescue operation, they descended from a remote place, entered history, from the outside in, and left again, having untied the complicated knots of a gnarly plot.
Euripides is usually considered the first to consistently use the deus ex machina device. It later came to be associated with non-machine oriented literary ploys used by writers to enact a twist in a plot, to create facile resolution, or to conclude a drama with a splash. Shakespeare used this device. You’ll also find it in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.[1] Even Faux the Phoenix in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has been seen as an example of deus ex machina.[2]
Unsurprisingly, this eleventh-hour literary technique has been criticized as displaying a lack of imagination. At its worst, it could be used to salvage the most poorly written plot lines imaginable. Anyone, it seems, could pen the most fantastic plot and tie everything up by simple employment of the deus ex machina.
But there’s another aspect of this plot device that places it outside the confines of reality. Often, the hero who swoops in to save the day through the deus ex machina is a remote figure. In the case of ancient Greek tragedies, a member of the pantheon of gods and goddesses, normally distant from happenings on earth, deigns to descend from on high, rescue a situation, and then return to the comfort of Olympus. In other examples, the use of the device itself seems like an intrusion on the normal course of reality and is scarcely believable.
In some ways, it seems that, over the centuries, Christians have come to view the Incarnation as a great deus ex machina event. Perhaps you’ve heard God’s work in Christ described as the wonderful rescue operation through which the world is saved. God, enthroned loftily on high, somewhere up in the clouds, deigns to enter into mortal existence sometime around 4 B.C. God swoops down in the great arc of salvation, enters human history to save it, and then ascends far into the heavens when all is accomplished.
But there is something unsatisfactory about the way God is portrayed in this visual scheme. Somehow the Incarnation is cheapened when we see it as little more than a gargantuan rescue operation when all the world had gone down the tubes.
A more nuanced view of what we celebrate this night is offered by St. Luke. We hear, once again, as we do every year, Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. We have perhaps heard it so many times that it seems to offer little that is new. But hear with fresh ears, if you can, Luke’s account of the nativity. Luke, as he is wont to do, roots Jesus’ birth in the folds of history. During the reign of Caesar Augustus, when Quirinius was governor of Syria, God entered the most impoverished depths of human history as a little child.
Some scholars have spent a lot of ink trying to debunk the reality of a census at the time that Luke offers us. I think this misses the point. What Luke is telling us is that the Incarnation was, in fact, no deus ex machina plot-saving device in the narrative of salvation. Whether there was a census in 4 B.C. or not, Luke is telling something utterly true about God’s work in Christ through his own use of literary details. In the Incarnation, God enters the human story in an unparalleled manner, with such intimacy, that we must pause in order to appreciate its extraordinary magnificence, lest we take it for granted. God, as Luke tells us, was literally enrolled in a census along with the entire known world.
Into a world of countless subjects of a brutal empire, God came. Born amid the meager conditions of a peasant family on the move, God entered the records of a census. The Word became flesh, as Luke describes it, in a feeding trough because, presumably, there were so many others in town for the census registration that there was no more room for the Holy Family in the inn.
When the Name of God was enrolled as Jesus Christ in the annals of the ancient Roman Empire, God entered the records of human history. Into a world where many were kept anonymous by the cruel imposition of power and the incessant machine of efficiency, God entered human existence in a way that might be seen as inefficient and not necessarily convenient.
God came, not swooping down from on high to temporarily rescue a fallen race, but, instead, the Word became flesh in the womb of a human mother. He was himself given a Name in order to bestow a name to all the nameless, both of Jesus’ day and of ours. God became a statistic in the human project of statistics in order to ensure that no person would be just a statistic. God took on a human face so that no person would be faceless in the midst of the dehumanizing system of domination and efficiency.
This was no mere deus ex machina operation, as if God could only save the world by an aloof, momentary descension from on high. The salvation Luke describes is God taking on flesh, a name in a census, a life lived for over thirty years, and a death suffered under the cruel systems of human punishment. Salvation was brought to the poorest village, to the loneliest criminal on death row, to the poorest of the poor, to the forgotten homeless, to the forsaken.
In some ways, our world is no different from the day when God was enrolled in a census. On a globe of some 7.5 billion people, we are all just numbers. Even this year, many of us have been recorded in this decade’s census in the attempt to quantify a motley group of people who are essentially unquantifiable.
Every day brings new statistics of the number of COVID-19 cases across the world, of the number of hospital beds occupied, and of the number of people vaccinated. Without fail, we are constantly confronted with souls whose names are known only to God because they have no homes and because they will never be documented in any census.
Right now, those of you watching via live-stream are being recorded as a view, a simple, anonymous statistic that will be enrolled in the parish’s record of services. In a time in which we are all so seemingly connected by technology, we have become more and more anonymous to one another. In some sense, we might just feel like a number among many millions.
And this is precisely why our salvation is more meaningful than an unimaginative deus ex machina operation. This is why God was enrolled in the records of humanity: to save every aspect of our frail humanity, every detail, down to every face, name, condition, including all who never make it to the official books of history. Salvation became rooted at ground level, in the numbers of a census, in the production system of Galilean carpentry, in the cruel punishment of a Roman execution system.
There was no stalemate in the plot of human existence that required God to lower himself from the heavens, work some magic, and disappear, leaving us to work out our future with a new exit strategy. There was instead a human existence in need of salvation from the inside out. And into this existence, God became a name and number in a census.
In a year that many of us might want to see disappear quickly, this is the intimacy of salvation for which we might long. As we mourn those victims of this cruel virus, we know they were more than just numbers in a newspaper or massed percentages. We know that those lying in hospital beds right now are not mere numbers either. As we wrestle with feelings of God’s aloofness in the midst of unspeakable tragedy, we don’t need to long for another deus ex machina operation to unfold. We have already been given the mystery of God’s presence that continues to save us from the inside out.
Amid our unconscionable divisions in this country, and in the face of anger, enmity, and violence, we rejoice in our salvation by a God who entered all those conditions of human existence and redeemed them from the inside out. There is no corner of human existence that was left outside the reach of God’s saving embrace.
As the great hymn tells us, Christ was born for this.[3] Christ was born, this night, so that no feeding trough was outside the realm of salvation. No device of capital punishment was immune to his saving grace. No child of God roaming the streets this night without a home or a warm bed is beyond the scope of salvation, which works from the inside out.
This night, rejoice. Rejoice, that you and I are not mere statistics in a census every ten years. Rejoice that our salvation could not be performed by some anonymous, remote rescue operation. Rejoice, that our God was enrolled in the annals of human history, in a census over two thousand years ago so that all of us could be saved, not from the outside in, but from the inside out.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
The First Mass of Christmas
December 24, 2020
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
[2] https://screenrant.com/biggest-deus-ex-machina-moments-in-film-history/
[3] “Good Christian, men, rejoice” by John Mason Neale