Please Click Here For Sermon Video
I think it’s probably a “cost-me-a-quarter” question to ask you Canadians “How does one greet His Majesty King Charles III?”. Being raised in the US, that wasn’t something I was schooled on. Anyway, to greet King Charles, you know the drill, women slightly curtsy, men slightly bow the head, shake hands only if the King extends his hand first, speak if spoken to, and address him as “Your Majesty” at first and “Sir” works after that. That’s pretty simple.
Even so, there are plenty of YouTube videos of American Presidents and First Ladies breaking protocol when greeting the royals and they wind up looking like school children who know they’ve done something wrong but not quite sure what it was – even Michele Obama who accidently by instinct put her arm around Queen Elizabeth as if she were simply a dear old lady. Oops! The funniest gaffs were during Trump’s first visit to the queen. He’s tall and she was short. It seemed like he took every opportunity to step in front or walk in front of her. Duh! Even in common peoples’ etiquette it’s ladies first. I guess he just wanted centerstage in every photo.
Well, the point here is that there are proper ways to greet people such as kings, queens, presidents, people of professional position, neighbours, parents, siblings, friends, and so one. Proper ways which demonstrate respect for the person but more so for the position they are in and the authority inherit in it. And I think this is part of the reason which Matthew goes about showing us how the three wise men and Herod and the chief priests and scribes all react to Jesus, the king of the Jews, how they greet him or refuse to do so.
Looking at the sitting king of the Jews, Herod the Great. Herod wasn’t actually a Jew. He was an Idumaean appointed by Rome to be King of Judea. He was the greatest builder among the Jewish kings besides King Solomon. Herod built ornate palaces for himself inclusive of ballrooms. He greatly enlarged and embellished the Mediterranean port, Caesarea Maritima, just to impress Caesar Augustus who made it the Roman capital for the area. He decorated the Jerusalem Temple with fancy stones and lots of gold, lots of gold. Herod was also insanely jealous about his power so much so that he killed several of his children and many rabbis because he perceived them as threats.
Well, as you would expect from a megalomaniac, there was a whole lot of disrespect in how Herod attempted to greet Jesus. His jealousy led him to slaughter innocent children around the town of Bethlehem two and younger in hopes of destroying the Messiah sent by God to save his people. Herod loved power so much he would even stand in God’s way to keep it to the extent of killing innocent children. (Sounds like what happened with USAID.) Attempted assassination, that’s some greeting.
Concentrating too much on Herod would keep us from paying due attention to some folks in this story who are a lot like us good church going people. Matthew has a message concerning the spiritual blindness of the religious authorities of Jesus’ day. He makes his point by showing that three star-gazing Persian kings can long for, search for, and recognize Jesus as the Messiah and pay the respect due to the One who would be the saviour of the world. All the while, the people to whom this King Jesus was sent, the ones who knew what the Scriptures said, the ones who should have been expectantly awaiting this king – these people, the religious authorities appear to be willing to conspire and betray their saviour into the hands of those who would just as soon see him dead.
This story does not come as welcome news to those who claim to be experts at the rituals of religion and at knowing the Scriptures. We would think that in Matthew’s day the chief priests and scribes, the experts in things pertaining to God, that they would welcome the birth of the Messiah as good news and be excited and awed about it and want to go and see him themselves and worship him. You’d think that they would want to greet him properly. No. These authorities who held the power of religion, they were remarkably ambivalent. THEY DIDN’T CARE! They were content to simply be the experts who enjoyed the “blessing” of growing wealthy from the big business of Temple religion.
The chief priests and scribes greeted their king from afar by using their gift of knowing the scriptures to betray the one God sent to save them. Herod asked them a question and they answered it with their expert opinion; no more, no less, even quoted Scripture and all the little boys aged two and under born in Bethlehem got massacred. Political power and religious power make for a terribly evil duo especially when wealth is involved. The way North American Evangelicalism courts Authoritarianism should concern us.
As I mentioned earlier Matthew is making a point by these three wise men being the ones to properly greet this baby Jesus, born king of the Jews yet Lord and Saviour of the world. They were non-Jews, but they knew the God of the Jews was up to something huge. They didn’t know the Jewish scriptures. They knew the stars. They were three stargazers from Persia otherwise known as Assyria, a historical enemy of the Jewish people. Yes, they are a foreshadowing of the salvation of Gentiles through Jesus. They are powerful men in their land. Tradition says they were kings.
These three men were astrologers. They studied the stars and looked for meaning in their patterns. We would be remiss simply to compare them to the roadside psychics and astrologers today. Rather, it would be better to compare them to the premiere scientists of our day – people like James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble. Maxwell gave us Field Theory and Electromagnetism; radio and wireless technology would not be available to us without him. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe in that everything is related and relative to the speed of light. Hubble discovered that there are more galaxies in the universe than the Milky Way and was more or less the inventor of extragalactic astronomy as we call it. He also discovered that all galaxies in the universe are accelerating away from each other rather than decreasing in speed and collapsing in on itself. Without this counter-intuitive acceleration which apparently did not begin until 5 billion years ago our universe would no longer exist.
Similarly, our three wise men in Matthew saw something in the heavens which indicated a revolutionary upheaval in the way we understand our existence. It is likely, they saw a supernova, a star dying a massively explosive death that feeds the surrounding area of its galaxy with the material to form new stars and the heavier elements that form planets and indeed carbon-based life forms such as ourselves. They saw a star dying that would bring forth new life elsewhere. This reminds me of Jesus saying about himself, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24). Could the heavens indeed have been telling of the glory of the Lord? Yes, they were...and three astrologer/scientists not Bible experts saw it and followed it.
Following a stellar sign of the cross-formed way of life of the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus the Messiah, these three wise men had a vision to follow, a vision that would lead them into the presence of the Lord of the universe where they would simply just bow down and worship him and give to him of themselves. We must ask ourselves. What star are we following, if at all? Where is the star that will lead us to a deeper commitment of worshipping our Lord and Savior with our whole lives? Are we following Jesus in his way of life, the cross-formed way of life? The way of laying down our lives for him and loving each other as he has loved us each, loving the world as God has loved it, sacrificially and unconditionally. Are we daily bringing the lives God has given us each to Jesus worshipfully, prayerfully? Are we taking time to sit in his presence in wonder and awe?
Jesus says, “Come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. My yolk is easy and my burden is light.” Most of us I’m sure know what it is to have our burdens lifted by the Lord. We know the Peace that he has to give. We wouldn’t continue to come here if we didn’t. The proper way to come here and greet King Jesus is with burdens in hand, ready to give to him that he may give us his peace.
5 billion years ago something beyond our comprehension happened that kept the force of gravity from causing the universe to collapse back in on itself...the love and will and plan of the Trinity for his creation maybe? Roughly 2,000 years ago by the Incarnation of God the Son as the man Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit according to the love of God the Father the Trinity acted to free his creation from spiritual dark gravity, self-destructive force of sin and death. The question for us today is will we follow our Lord who died a supernova-like death to bring about the New Creation? Will we pick up our crosses and walk the way of the cross following Jesus which is the only proper way to greet this particular king? Amen.
