[Text: Matthew 2] “Who is Jesus? He is the True King.”

The concept of “kingship” is a bit foreign to us upstarts who threw off monarchy centuries ago. But we’re all fairly familiar with control problems, although that isn’t really anything new.

[Read and Pray – Father, there are many who claim power and authority to rule, but we groan under their versions of kingship. Help us to see the beauty and the power in your Anointed King, Jesus, and believe in him and no other, not even ourselves. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.]

A news headline on Wednesday read, “Syria loads chemical weapons into bombs; military awaits Assad's order.”[1] For the past 21 months, civil war has fragmented Syria as President Bashar Assad has done everything in his power to remain in power over the country. Imagine bombs and the whine of mortars dropping over Fuquay, imagine government soldiers coming into your home because “father” is a accused of speaking against Assad – imagine that and you are beginning to imagine daily life for the people of Syria as their leader, the man who took it upon himself to be their shepherd, uses his power to maintain power at all costs. To date, the estimates regarding how many men, women and children have died in this fight of nearly two years is 20,000. That’s the whole community of Fuquay-Varina gone. In 1988 Saddam Hussein, with a single sarin gas attack, killed 5,000 people (of the Kurds) at once in his own country. Imagine how the cost of Assad’s desire to remain in power would rise if all the sarin-laced bombs of Syria were dropped on the people of Syria.

Power and control are addictive. The promise of it leads men to desperate measures to obtain it. And the experience of it once obtained leads men to desperate measures to keep it. That has always been true.

Herod the Great rose to power in the ancient world, seeking and getting from Rome the power to rule in Judea. And he even used that power for good. He rescued people from famine and, at times, used his power as king to relieve the heavy tax burden from the people. But at the same time, the Roman appointed “King of the Jews” was, in the words of one historian, “brutish and a stranger to all humanity.”[2] Once while he ruled, some young Jews, out of reverence for their God, tore down the golden eagle of Rome that had set over the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem. Herod was deeply offended. He had set up that symbol of power and believed it would have been his memorial after his death – an everlasting reminder of his power. So, when his power was unappreciated, he burned the young men alive for their offence.

There were no measures Herod would not take to retain his power and control as king of Judea. He manipulated relationships. He shifted loyalties not because of conviction but because it solidified his power. When Herod’s wife crossed his power, he had her murdered. When one by one his sons challenged his control, he had them killed. When several other relatives displeased him or threatened his rule, they each fell under the executioner’s blade by the order of Herod the king.”[3]

Herod’s life revolved around gaining power and control and keeping power and control. Every good deed done was a display of power in his pursuit for glory. Every evil deed was an effort to gain power and secure control. For Herod, everything was about keeping himself on his throne as king.

But what does my heart say when I hear the word of God and then reject His word for my own ideas of how life works best? He says, “Don’t covet.” But I say that if I just had “so-and-so’s” money, then I wouldn’t have to worry anymore. God says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” But I say, “Well, loving God with all of that doesn’t leave much for me. And about my neighbor, well, no, I don’t think I really want to love them as much as I love myself ‘cause that’s a lot and I don’t really have the time. Do you know how much time it takes to love me really well?” What does my heart say when I put my desires ahead of my wife’s? What does my heart say when the approval of men means more to me than the approval of God?

My heart says, “I want to be king. I want to sit on the throne and make the rules. I don’t want people to challenge or question me. I want my ideas to be the influential ones – to be the one with all the answers – and don’t want anyone to make me look small or unimportant. I want the power; to be in control; to be king and sit on the throne and be respected by all.”

God, help me – I’m a lot more like Herod than I like to believe.

If you ask your calendar or day-planner, “Who is king?” or look at where your money goes and ask your wallet, “Who is my king?” – what do they answer? Who is king when you get home from work after a long day and your wife needs to talk about the bills? Or your kids need a horse to ride around the living room?

Ever since the Garden, humans have wanted to be king and sit on God’s throne. Do you remember the lie of the Serpent that Adam and Eve believed in Genesis 3? The Serpent said, “God’s holding out on you ‘cause he knows that if you eat the fruit He told you not to eat, then you will be like God....” That desire to be like God, to be in control of life has twisted our hearts ever since. It’s part of being human, it’s part of our nature! We want to sit on the throne and do things our way – just ask any toddler or just ask any CEO. We go to desperate measures to obtain power and control over life and desperately try to keep it.

But Matthew began his Gospel by telling of another king being born, telling of the True King, Immanuel – Yahweh himself – coming as this baby born to Mary. Jesus, the offspring of Abraham, the Anointed of the line of David, came. And he came, as the angel said, to “save his people from their sins.” That’s a very different kind of king than this world had ever seen (or has seen since).

Then Matthew begins to prove it through this story of contrasts – the True King and Herod, the wise men and the religious leaders, the way of God’s kingdom and the ways of the kingdoms of this world. And as we hear this story, we realize that Jesus really is a different kind of king with a different kind of kingdom. While most of us would say, “Well, of course he’s different!” the beauty of this story is how he is different. Instead of using his power and control for himself, King Jesus is willing to use his power and control to have mercy on people like us who are, by nature, more like Herod than like the wise men.

This passage is about so much more than just a few wise men that we (mistakenly) include in our nativity scenes at Christmas. This is part of the Good News that God has acted in our Story to rescue us and to save us from our own tyrannical reign. This is the Gospel that tells us that (no matter what we want) our reign has ended, the True King has come, and he means to rule us not as a tyrant, but like a Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep.

This story takes place roughly two years after the birth of Jesus. These wise men came to Jerusalem from the East, probably modern Iraq, asking where they could find “(him) who has been born king of the Jews.” The wise men were at least honored dignitaries from their own land and quite possibly considered to be lesser kings and rulers in their own right. So, for them, this was likely an official “state visit” to honor this new-born king.

But there was more to this visit. They said, “…we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” What star? And how on earth did they connect a star to the birth of the king of the Jews?

The job of these wise men was (you guessed it) to search for wisdom. And they did it through a lot of different ways. They watched the sky looking for signs they could connect to the events around them. They tried to figure out what dreams meant. (I have a weird one I wish I could run by them. A giant orange fell out of the sky while my brothers were throwing a football and…sorry! Back to the story.) These wise men were also readers. And it sounds like they’d been reading the books that the Jews had left behind in Babylon when they’d lived there a long time ago. In the book of Numbers, it said, “A star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.” (Num. 24:17). They saw this special star – no one knows exactly what it was like – but they saw it and they knew that the True King had been born. And they wanted to bow down to the True King and worship him and give him their honor and respect and gifts.

And that was a problem for Herod the king. He was used to getting all the worship and honor and respect and gifts from important visitors. He didn’t like someone else getting what he wanted for himself. He “was troubled” that they were talking about another king. And when Herod was troubled, everyone was troubled with him. Things didn’t usually go well when he felt like someone was trying to take away his power and control.

Now Herod had been appointed king of the Jews, but this baby…this baby had been “born king of the Jews.” That means this baby was the rightful king, the True King with a better claim on the throne than someone who’d just been appointed as king. Maybe Herod the king was a little scared. Someone was threatening his control and power. So, it seems, he made a plan in his heart to do what he always did when someone challenged him as king. He decided to kill this rival to his throne.

He did it by pretending to be like the wise men. He pretended to be religious and pretended to want to worship the new king. So he asked the religious leaders where the Christ – this Anointed King – was supposed to come from. They said, “In Bethlehem…for so it is written by the prophet (Micah):

“‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

for from you shall come a ruler

who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

Then he told the wise men to go and find the child and report back to Herod so “that I too may come and worship him.” And the wise men believed him. Now, they weren’t dummies. That’s just how clever Herod was at manipulating people to get what he wanted.

But God would protect His True King from the ways of Herod the king. Even though the wise men believed Herod, God knew Herod’s heart. God also knew the heart of the wise men and God led the wise men to the desire of their heart, to the True King in Bethlehem. And it says, “they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.” They rejoiced because by God’s mercy, by the light of this supernatural star, they had been brought to the place of their King – to the palace of the Christ, the throne of the Messiah – they had been brought to a normal little house in a backwater town of Judea.

And away from the lavish parties of Rome, far removed from the important circles of politics, miles away from the shadows of Herod’s glorious buildings, the wise men fell down and worshiped at the feet of the Child, the Christ, the True King. And to him they gave gifts fit for a King. And being warned in a dream, God led them home and away from Herod so that his power and plan would come to nothing.

But what happens when kings like us – kings who want to remain in power and control – what happens when kings like us don’t get our way? Violence replaces clever words. Rage replaces manipulation. People get hurt.

You heard Herod’s response. In his rage of not finding the one child, he decided to make an end of every child. Dozens or hundreds of toddlers were torn from their mothers’ arms and felt the bitterness of steel because Herod wanted to be in control of his world.

What is the price of remaining in control, of keeping power for ourselves, of bowing the knee to no man, woman, child or God? What bitterness will my son suffer if I try to remain as king? What hurt will pierce my wife’s heart if I try to stay on the throne of life and only serve myself? How will my friends and community suffer if the only guide for my life is my own sinful and selfish heart?

I need a better king than me. I need to live in a different kind of kingdom. Mine doesn’t work. Everyone in it dies.

But that’s why God sent the True King – to “save his people from their sins.” He sent the True King to restore the Kingdom of God on earth, to restore His good rule that we rebelled against in the Garden. And there wasn’t anything Herod could do about it. In Jesus, the True King had come and the Kingdom of God had broken into this world to redeem it back to God.

But look how the True King and his Kingdom came – not in power but in the weakness of a baby; not in security but in danger of death; not in the splendor of Rome but in the smallness of a little child sitting on his mother’s lap. He came not from Jerusalem, the home of the religious elite, but from Nazareth – the place of which people asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

In this story we see the beginnings of what the Kingdom of God would be like and how its King would live and serve his people. Matthew goes to great lengths – lengths to which I’m not able to begin to do justice – he goes to great lengths to present Jesus here as the True King, the True Israel, the True Son of God, the True Offspring of Abraham who the nation of Israel was always supposed to be but never was because they wanted to do things their way. And Matthew will go on to prove in his Gospel how this True King and Son and Offspring was going to rule over the whole world –

Make no mistake; the Kingship of Jesus is a threat to your power and control over life.

– and yet as his rule makes an end to every other rule, we discover that where our rule led only to death, the rule of our Shepherd King leads to life for his people.

Consider the phrase from v. 19. It says, “…Herod died…” The historian Josephus wrote about the death of Herod and the legacy he meant to leave.[4] Josephus writes that in great agony, Herod’s body was falling apart:

“…a fire glowed in him slowly, which did not so much appear to the touch outwardly, as it augmented his pains inwardly; for it brought upon him a vehement appetite to eating, which he could not avoid to supply with one sort of food or other. His entrails were also ex-ulcerated, and the chief violence of his pain lay on his colon; an aqueous and transparent liquor also had settled itself about his feet, and a like matter afflicted him at the bottom of his belly. Nay, further, his privy-member was putrefied, and produced worms; and when he sat upright, he had a difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath…”

And yet his sickness did nothing to humble Herod. Herod knew that his death would not be mourned by anyone. He himself said,

“I shall die in a little time, so great are my pains…but what principally troubles me is this, that I shall die without being lamented, and without such mourning as men usually expect at a king's death.”

So Herod once again exercised his power as king and sent for a great number of the leaders of the Jewish people and had them locked away under guard. He gave orders that at the moment of his death, soldiers were to go in without a word and slaughter all of those men before his death be announced to the people so that his death would be the occasion of a “memorable mourning.” Herod was willing in death to use his power and authority once more to get what he wanted.

Herod’s kingship led only to death, his own as well as his people’s. The kingship of Jesus, however, leads to life because he used his power and authority as God not to serve himself, but to serve sinners like us and to bring his unstoppable plan into reality – a plan to join earth and heaven again, a plan to turn rebels into sons and sinners into saints. He fulfilled the promise of God to “save his people from their sins” and he did it through the shameful cross, through the loss of power, through his submission to his Father and through a setting aside of his rights as Almighty God. The True King means for you to live and was willing to die so that you will.

At the end of the quote on the front of your bulletin, Tim Keller says,

“Jesus’ kingship is not like human kingships, for it wins influence through suffering service, not coercive power. We enter it not through strength but through the weakness of repentance and the new birth (John 3) and becoming like a child (Matt 18:3-4).”

As Jesus comes to you now through his Word, hear the call to lay down your power, your authority, your control over life and work and family. But as you die that death, rejecting your claim to any throne or power and looking to Jesus as your King, you find that your weakness is covered over with his strength, your nakedness is covered over with the righteousness of Christ and your life is held securely both now and in the age to come.

By nature and apart from Christ, we are all little Herods. But through the grace of Christ as he helps us to repent of our desire to rule and helps us to submit to his good rule, we become something new. Our lives begin to take a shape more like the wise men as our response to the news of a new-born King is not like the one of troubled Herod but one of worship and joy. We worship and rejoice because Jesus is our Ruler and Shepherd, who has laid down his own life and served us to bring us into His Kingdom.

I don’t often let another have the last say in these sermons, but there is more from Keller’s quote that gives me more hope in the Kingship of Jesus and makes me want more and more to submit to Him. I pray it does the same for you. He said Jesus is King and yet,

“Christ’s liberating rule is not fully here. All his disciples are to pray for it to come, according to Matthew 6:10, and at the end of time we will receive it in completion (Matt 25:34). But finally the day comes when the city of God will descend. It contains the throne of God – the seat of the kingdom (Rev 22:3) – from which the renewal of all things proceeds (Rev 21:3-6). This is the ecstatic enthronement depicted in Psalms 96-98. When God returns to rule, even the rivers will clap their hands and the mountains will sing for joy that their liberator has finally come (Ps 98:8; Rom 8:21-22). The freedom and joy of the kingdom of heaven will come to earth.”

Amen. Come King Jesus.

[Pray – Father, we praise you that you have set Jesus on the throne. Grant to us that we less and less desire his throne for ourselves and joyfully submit to the King who washes our feet and serves us from below. Help us to learn from his meekness and humility and gentleness, that we might wash each others’ feet in acts of love and service. And then give Jesus all the glory, for we would only be following in his steps, modestly echoing the vast love Jesus has lavished on us. Amen.]

[1] http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/05/15706380-syria-loads-chemical-weapons-into-bombs-military-awaits-assads-order?lite

[2] From Eaton’s Bible Dictionary

[3] ESV Study Bible notes on Matthew 2:1

[4] What follows comes from Ant. 17.6.5