The Sunday night message given in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on December 10, 2023. The Bible verses used are Matthew 2:1-23.
You know, when
you come to tell the Christmas story, you have a lot of characters to deal
with. You have Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the
Baptist. You obviously have Mary and Joseph. You have the angel
Gabriel. Later you have the shepherds and the wise men. The thing
about a good story, though, is that it always has to have a villain, and that’s
true of the Christmas story, too. Tonight, we’re going to talk about the
villain, King Herod.
Herod
is not someone we want to talk about in the Christmas story. In the
traditional Sunday school Christmas pageants, he’s often left out
entirely. He’s certainly not part of anybody’s nativity scene. None
of the advent or Christmas lectionary readings talk about Herod. The only
time he gets in at all is on Epiphany Sunday, and then the focus is usually on
the wise men, not on Herod. At Christmas, we want to talk about the good
stuff, about the angels and shepherds and the baby in the manger. That’s
understandable, but as we’ve said before, everything in the Bible is there for
some reason. So let’s look at Herod and think about why this is part of
the Christmas story.
Now,
Herod was a king in some ways, and in other ways he was not. This area,
Judea, was still under the control of the Roman Empire, and so Herod could only
be king as long as the emperor said so. Still, as long as the empire
could collect taxes from Judea and as long as Judea was not causing problems
for the emperor, the emperor really did not care very much what Herod
did. So, in a lot of ways, Herod was pretty much in control there.
In that sense, he really was pretty much the king.
At the time Jesus was born, Herod was about
seventy years old. Given how long people lived at that time, he was
considered a pretty old man. He’d been in power for over thirty
years. A lot of people in Judea could not remember a time when Herod had
not been the king. Herod himself probably had a hard time thinking of
himself as anything but the king. He was used to being king, he liked
being king, and he was going to stay king any way he could. Plus, Herod
had three sons whom he hoped would take over after he died.
Another
fact we need to remember when we look at this story is that the political
history of Judea was not all that stable at the time. The Romans had only
ruled Judea for about sixty years. The people of Israel did not like the
fact that they were ruled by Rome. They wanted independence, and every
once in a while there’d be a rebellion against the empire. These were all
things that Herod knew very well.
Then,
too, the position of king was not always the safest one to hold. There
were always people out to take over, and the way they’d usually try to do that
was by killing the king. When you were king, you always had to watch your
back. You had to be careful who you trusted, and you had to always be on
the lookout for people plotting against you.
When
we think about all that, Herod’s actions in the Christmas story become more
understandable. Not okay, not excusable, but understandable. You’ve
got a king who has been king so long that he cannot envision himself not being
king. You’ve got a king who knows there are very few people he can
trust. You’ve got a king who knows there are always people trying to get
him out of the way and take away his throne and his power.
So, imagine you’re King Herod. You’re sitting
there, minding your own business one day, and these “wise men”, these
astrologers, come by. They tell you they’ve seen a sign, a star in the
sky. They tell you that sign means there’s someone who’s been born to be
king, and he’s some place nearby, and they want to come and worship
him.
Now, people
back then tended to buy into signs and stars and such, so this would not have
seemed like a particularly strange story. If you were King Herod, you’d
tend to believe it. So, how would you react? What would you do?
Our
scripture says that Herod was frightened. I’m thinking he was near
panic. Everything he’d worked for all his life was being
threatened. He does what to him seemed like the logical thing. He
calls together his advisers and finds out where, in prophecy, this king is to
be born. Then, he sends the wise men to that town, Bethlehem, tells them
to go look for the new king there, and to let him know exactly where this king
is when they find him.
As
you know, the wise men found Jesus, but did not report back to Herod.
Herod eventually found out about that and got even more panicky. So he
had all the male children in Bethlehem two years old or under killed.
What an awful thing. Think about that. Every
boy two years old and younger was killed. For no reason whatsoever, other
than Herod’s fear that he might no longer be king.
With
all this, we come back to the question: why is this part of the Christmas
story? Why did God bring about the Christmas story in this
way?
You know,
Herod died not too long after the events described in the Bible took
place. If the wise men had not gone to see him when they did, he might
never have known about Jesus at all. The children in Bethlehem would not
have been killed and Joseph would not have had to take Mary and Jesus and run
to Egypt. Things would have been a lot easier for everybody.
The Bible tells us this was to fulfill Old
Testament prophecies, but that’s really not an answer. Could God not have
fulfilled these prophecies some other way? In fact, God could have not
had these prophecies be made at all. If these prophecies came from God,
then all these things have to have been part of God’s plan from the
beginning. We assume that God never does things without a reason. I
said at the beginning that every good story needs a villain, and that’s true,
but God surely had more of a reason than just giving us a good story.
What would the reason be for this?
Well,
any time we start to think about God’s reasons for doing things, we’re
speculating. None of us can ever fully understand the mind of God.
As I thought about it, though, I think I may know at least part of the answer.
All
the other main characters in the Christmas story are examples of people with
great faith. Mary, Joseph, Zechariah, Elizabeth, the shepherds, the wise
men, all of them. They all were told by God what to do, and they did it,
even though they did not fully understand why. They are wonderful
examples for us. They appeal to the good in all of us. They give us
role models. We should all aspire to have as much faith as those people
did.
We aspire to that faith, but that does not mean we have
it, or even that we can relate to it. Herod, though, is something
else. Herod appeals to the dark side of our nature, and believe me, we
all have that dark side. We all want what we want and we all want to keep
it once we get it. We all want to keep control of our lives and keep
control of the things around us. When someone comes along and threatens
all that, when someone comes along and upsets the apple cart, threatens what we
have and our control of it, we don’t like that very much. We tend to
resist it. And our response often is to do everything we can to keep
things the way they are, to keep things the way we like them, and to fight
against anyone or anything that changes that.
I think part
of the reason Herod is in this story is to be a warning for each of us. I
ask you sometimes, when we read passages in the Bible, to try to put yourself
into the story. In the Christmas story, that means to think about what it
would be like to be Mary or Joseph. That’s a good thing to try to do, but
it’s not really possible. None of us can really imagine what it would be
like to be involved in the virgin birth of the Son of God. That’s
something that’s so beyond our experience that we really cannot understand it.
I think it’s
a lot easier to imagine ourselves as Herod. I think it’s a lot easier for
us to imagine having a fairly comfortable way of life, and then have that way
of life be threatened. I think it’s a lot easier for us to imagine having
worked all our lives for something, and then hearing about someone who was
going to take it all away. I think it’s a lot easier for us to imagine
how we’d react if we were Herod than it is for us to imagine how we’d react if
we were Mary or Joseph.
I think
Herod is there as a warning for us. Herod is there to remind us that
what’s important in life is not to accumulate power for ourselves. What’s
important in life is not to accumulate wealth. What’s important in life
is not to get our way. What’s important in life is not to have things go
the way we want them to go. When we get that wrong, we can find ourselves
fighting against things that are good. We can find ourselves fighting against
what’s right. We can even find ourselves fighting against God.
In about two
weeks, it will be Christmas. We’ll celebrate the birth of Jesus.
We’ll talk about Mary and Joseph, and the shepherds, and the wise men.
That’s fine. But we need to talk about Herod, too. Herod may be the
villain, but there’s a little bit of Herod in each one of us, including
me. Let’s pray that God forgive us for that, and help us overcome
it. Let’s pray for God to help each one of us be someone who worships the
Savior, rather than someone who fights him.
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