When a Beautiful Story Turns Dark (January 5, 2025)
Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12
When King Herod heard about the magi asking for the newborn King of the Jews, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.
The Christmas story started out so beautifully – the angels singing in the heavens, the shepherds hearing the good news, finding the baby Jesus with his mother, wrapped in swaddling clothes, the promised Prince of Peace. The mystery of God entering creation as a poor, helpless child. The faith of Mary and Joseph welcoming a child born under such unusual circumstances. It is a captivating story, told now for centuries, even by people who aren’t believers.
But after the stores have put away all their Christmas displays, and Christmas songs have disappeared from the radio, the Scriptures tell us of a strange and dark turn in the Christmas story. As the stories of the Scriptures so often do – they begin with such promise, God acts and brings salvation and light, people respond with gratitude and faith, and everyone lives happily … for a little while, and then something always goes wrong.
Our psalm for today, Psalm 72, is an example of the great beginning of the story. It is a Psalm for the coronation of a new king, a sort of Inauguration Day prayer that the new ruler will live up to what God expects of a king, what we hope for in a king. “Let him defend the needy among the people, rescue the poor, and crush the oppressor. For the king delivers the poor who cry out in distress, the oppressed, and those who have no helper. The king has compassion on the lowly and poor, and preserves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their lives, and precious is their blood in his sight. In his time may the righteous flourish, and let there be an abundance of peace.” Such a king will in fact rule over all the nations – kings from exotic places will come bearing gifts, not because he has bombed them into submission, but because they recognize the goodness of his reign.
Of course, we know from the Scriptures than most of the actual kings of Israel failed miserably at living up to their coronation prayer. Perhaps, people thought, perhaps one day the Messiah will come, the rightful heir of David’s throne, and the Messiah will live up to Psalm 72’s vision of a just and wise ruler over the reign of God. Perhaps when the Messiah comes, the kings from exotic places will come bearing gifts – because all those other good things will happen when the Messiah brings the kingdom of God.
But when Jesus was born, the actual king was not the king of Psalm 72, but King Herod the Great. Herod was not from one of the traditional royal families of Israel, indeed ethnically he was more Arab than Jewish. His father had been Julius Caesar’s guy in the Middle East, and he became Mark Antony’s guy in the Middle East. Mark Antony – that’s Cleopatra’s husband, if you know the history – is the one who got the Roman Senate to appoint Herod as King of Judea. Herod was basically a thug – he had lots of people assassinated, including one of his wives and two of his children. He was paranoid and suspicious, in part because that was his personality and in part because he had a lot of enemies to be suspicious of.
So when the three wise men from the East arrive in Jerusalem asking about the newborn king of the Jews – and Herod knows they aren’t talking about one of his heirs – this throws Herod into a predictable rage. And if Herod is unhappy, the whole court is unhappy too – because they’d seen Herod in a bad and suspicious mood before and they knew what he was capable of. And in fact we know from Scripture that this story ends in tragedy and horrific suffering. Many children killed, many refugees – including Jesus and his family – flee for their lives. All because a ruler was worried about threats to his rule. It is shocking but, as we know from our own times, not exactly unusual.
The thing is, it seems like every time things are going well, there always seems to be a King Herod to mess it all up. Someone who – perhaps for understandable reasons – feels insecure, feels threatened, and when their buttons get pushed they think only of themselves and the people around them get hurt. If they have a lot of power, like King Herod, then a lot of people get hurt. But there are so many King Herods among ordinary people as well, who aren’t as famous and who don’t cause widespread mayhem, but who wind up hurting the people around them just the same.
Perhaps you have been hurt in this way yourself – someone in a moment of great stress, thinking of themselves first, and you were the one in the way. I know that I can think of more than one such person in my life. And – I know that sometimes I’ve been a King Herod to other people. Sometimes I’ve been the one who felt threatened or put upon, and I reacted out of my own insecurities and hurt people close to me because I just wasn’t thinking about them. We may not have the body count of King Herod, but we all have buttons that can be pressed and in the right circumstances any one of us can – and probably has – hurt people we just weren’t thinking about at the time.
It would be so easy to get sentimental about the beautiful story of the wise men. The wise men, who are not people of faith, can read the stars and discern what God is doing. And so they come with gifts, as the prophets and psalmists had foretold, they come to Jesus and become the first Gentiles to recognize Jesus, the first people outside Israel to have an epiphany in Jesus about who God really is for us. Yet this story cannot be told without telling of the absolute train wreck the wise men walked into at Herod’s palace, and all the suffering it provoked.
And it’s important to have this context when we tell the story of Epiphany – because this is the world where Jesus was born. As the very beginning of our gospel reading today tells us, Jesus was born “in the time of King Herod.” Which is not just a way of giving us an approximate date of birth. Jesus was born, not in the time of the Messiah King of Psalm 72, but in the time of King Herod. Jesus was born into a world full of Herods great and small, a world where people get hurt and hurt others all the time, a world filled with suffering and distress and innocent children being killed and where our dreams of a world where the lives of the needy are precious often go unfulfilled. Jesus was born in the time of King Herod, with all that that means.
So were we. And we still live in the time of King Herod. But the epiphany that has been given to us is that the time of King Herod will come to an end, indeed it is already passing away, because Jesus has already defeated the powers of fear and insecurity and death. Paul talks about this in our second reading today, which just so happens to be the last passage we talked about in our Bible study group before the Christmas break. Paul writes his letter from prison – and as far as Paul is concerned, he has the spirit of King Herod right where he wants him. The spirit of King Herod rules by dividing and conquering, but Jesus has brought people together across ethnic and even religious divides – faithful Jews and faithful pagans, like the wise men of the East. Christians now live, together as the body of Christ, like the king of Psalm 72, caring for the weak and the needy, not distressed by the rantings of the King Herods of our day great and small the way the king’s court was in Jerusalem the day the wise men showed up, because we know who the real king is.
The story of Christmas has a happy beginning. And even though it turns dark rather quickly, this is because it has an even happier ending. And even if, like the child Jesus, we are driven from home and forced to live as a refugee; even if, like Paul, we wind up in prison; even if, like the wise men, we have to take the long way home and make sure not to share with King Herod everything we have come to know and believe – even then, we know who the real king is, and we know we have nothing to fear.