If you were going to meet a king, how
would you greet him? For most of us we would realize that there are
certain rules of etiquette or customs that must be followed and we
would try to abide by those rules as a matter of respect for the
office provided they were not too archaic. I don’t think many of
us today would go as far as to kneel and kiss a king’s ring unless
it meant we otherwise would be imprisoned or impaled or something.
But I do think most would, say, bow or curtsy if such were the
custom. I think that if bringing the king a gift was the custom we
would be glad to do so. I know we would definitely shake the king’s
hand and express pleasure at meeting him. I think that most of us
would try to express the respect due to those in positions of public
authority.
But on the other hand, there always
seems to be those who will not give respect where respect is due and
this causes a bit of trouble to say the least. Sometimes this lack
of respect is justly due especially when a person of high office has
proven to be utterly despicable. For example, I would not speak kind
words to or shake the hand of someone of the stature of Hitler,
Pinochet, or Pol Pot. These were leaders who used their power to
keep themselves and their evil ideologies in power. Those are cases
when not displaying the proper etiquette of respect would be
appropriate. Yet, there are also those who are of the more
rebellious nature who will not extend respect to those who deserve it
because it interferes with their own sense of inflated
self-importance.
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 position they
are in and the authority inherit in that position and even for the
person. 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. He was the greatest builder of the Jewish
nation outside of Solomon. He was also insanely jealous about his
power and killed several of his children and many rabbi's because he
perceived them to be a threat. Well, of course there’s a whole lot
of disrespect in Herod's behaviour concerning Jesus. His jealousy
leads him to slaughter innocent children in hopes of destroying the
competition who may in fact be the Messiah. That’s some obvious
disrespect and I don’t think we need to go into too much detail on
Herod other than to say his reaction to Jesus is what we the church
can expect when we push up against the powers that be with the truth
even when its a fine, fair, just, and equitable Western democracy.
Moving on, concentrating too much on Herod here would
keep us from paying due attention to some of the folks in this story who deserve it and who, in many respects, are a lot
like us good church going people. Matthew has a message that he
wanted his original audience to get and it is one to which we must
also pay careful attention. His point is that three star-gazing
Persians can long for, search for, and recognize Jesus the Lord and
pay the respect due to the Messiah who would be the saviour of the
world 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. You would think that in Matthew’s day
the Chief priests and scribes of the people, the experts, that they
would welcome the news of 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 what to pay him the proper
respect. But these folks are rather ambivalent. They don’t care.
They are content to simply be the experts. And they in turn use
their gifts of knowing the scriptures and the rituals of the faith of
their fathers to, in the end, betray the one who had come to save them. The king
asked them a question and they answered it with their expert opinion;
no more, no less.
This was difficult news in Matthew's
day and should be for the church today as well. For we the Christian
church and particularly the evangelical church make the claim to the
world that Jesus is the world's one and only true Lord and Saviour
and that we are the experts in the way that he should be received,
worshipped, and served. We claim to have scholars with expertise on
the subject of what it says in the Bible. We Presbyterians
especially with the emphasis that we place on having educated clergy
and me one of those educated clergy, we need to perk up and listen
here. We need to be a little bit worried that our attempts to
conserve and preserve the faith of our fathers and our decent and in
order ways of doing things just might be making us out to be those
who are ambivalent towards our risen and living Lord and we may in
fact be among those who are actually betraying him to the powers that
be. Our heads are often in the right place, our bodies are at least
once a week situated in the right place. But, what about our hearts?
What about our devotedness to Jesus himself, Jesus the Christ and to living faithfully
to him according to the way of the cross. I would like to say we
have a more head-felt than a heart-felt religion. We do indeed like
to have ideas about some nebulous thing we call “God”. Yet for
the most part it is not a love of the Truth that we espouse.
Quite a
few studies show us that we do not read and study our Bibles and
theology with any regularity and when we do, because we don't find it
meaningful. We confess to not understanding the faith and what it
says in the Bible and so we consign our reading and study of things
Christian to the experts, the clergy and popularist writers, who
themselves consign their reading and study of things Christian to
experts, PhD's and popularist writers. We really have no concern
that the people in the pews have no idea what it says in the Bible
and lack the tools and the vocabulary to read and study it for
themselves. We love Nana-like Lanseer ministers who feed us pablum
mixed with drivel about how to overcome the mountains we've likely
made of our own mole hills. But, when a minister comes feeding us
the solid food of the faith, proclaiming who Jesus is and inviting us
to come and follow him in his cross-formed way of life, we say the
are too academic and out of touch with reality and complain about how
they dress and how much they cost. We should be more than a little
bit concerned about about all this for the end result does indeed
lead to the death of the church rather than its continued existence.
This is where the three wise men come
in for they show us the proper way to greet our King. They were
nothing more than three stargazers from Persia, but they knew the
right way to greet a king. And so it is that we should be more like
them in our devotion to Christ. We should make it a point to compare
ourselves to these three wise men, they did something as odd as
follow a star that would lead to this king. If I were a Nana-like
Lanseer minister I would ask you a rather meaningless and ridiculous
question like “how far would you be willing to follow a star just
to see the baby Jesus and give him a special gift?” But, a
question like that is just more of the sentimentality, nostalgia, and
superstituion that fill our churches already.
A more biblical approach would be to
note that these three men were astrologers. The studied the stars
and looked for meaning in their patterns. We would be remiss simply
to compare them to the roadside psychics and astrologers that litter
our pathways today. Rather, it would be better to compare them to
the premiere scientists of our day – people like James Clark
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 an
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?...and three astrologers not Bible experts saw it?
Following
a stellar sign of the cruciform 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? What is our mission and what will it
take for us to follow it. Are we following Jesus in his way of life,
the cruciform 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 long-suffering.
What
will it take to get us to make the leap from simply going to church
every Sunday to wanting to know Jesus and in the power of the Holy
Spirit to learn and live the Christ way of actually putting all other
things aside to follow him and the mission he has given us of being
his disciples, of being his body to everyone we meet? The call is at
work in our midst. 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. Yet, are
we ready to make the commitment to do something as crazy as follow an
exploded star, to follow Jesus Christ, to take up our own cross of
the life of faithfulness, to bow before him and lay the entirety of
our lives and not just a portions of them at his feet, and worship
him with the entirety of the gift of life he has given to us each?
500
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 the gravitous, 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
persist like apathetic experts who are ignorant in their own field
and likewise given to betrayal or 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.
