How sweet, the little lord Jesus, tucked away in a manger, asleep on the hay…
Well, sleep while you can, little buddy, because this is not such a sweet story, is it? Mom and Dad are in a strange city to comply with Roman law, administered at the point of a sword. And if the Romans aren’t bad enough, their puppet, the Jewish King Herod, is about to hear of your birth – and he doesn’t behave well when threatened.
Few things are as frightening as taking power. As soon as you have it, you have to worry about who’s going to come and take it from you. Herod heard from some foreign visitors that they’d seen celestial signs of a “king of the Jews” having been born. Well, he was the king of the Jews, wasn’t he? And he hadn’t had any new offspring. How seriously was he to take these clowns from the East?
According to our story, Herod took this threat very seriously indeed, calling together all the advisors and theologians he could muster, to ask where the Messiah was to be born. All they could come up with was what the prophet said: “They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea.” Then he tried to manage the situation, getting inside information from the magi themselves and directing them toward Bethlehem. If they found something there, he’d know about it. If they didn’t, he could relax… for a little while.
Herod is only the first of many human rulers to be alarmed at reports about Jesus. At this point, the infant seemed no threat to anyone, but the Messiah could come at any time. Herod seems to have forgotten that fighting to secure his position against the One sent by God would mean fighting against God. Who can win that fight?
That’s what happens when we become attached to human power. We can forget to be leaders, forget God who entrusts us with leadership. Our world is full of Herods, from Assad to ISIS commanders to Guatemalan gang leaders. And what do Herods do when threatened? They slaughter children and wipe out communities, and they never, ever feel safe.
How are we to respond to these terrified and terrorizing figures? Few of us are in a position to confront directly. But we can pray for, and pressure our governments to stand against tyrants. And we can wield the power that so fills despots with fear – the power of Jesus, of whom Simeon said, “He is destined to cause the rising and falling of many in Israel.” Wielding the power of Jesus means refusing to seek human power ourselves. For power over others always makes human beings prey to the power of evil.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, among others, knew that. In his practice of non-violent confrontation he invited those with human power to unleash their worst - and as they did, they revealed their inhumanity. The wounds they inflicted were real, but they gave away true power with every blow. I wondered why I was writing about this today – usually Water Daily is aimed more at our spiritual lives, as though those were somehow distinct from geo-political realities. Then I remembered the murderous conflicts raging in the world, and the movie Selma (which I have not seen), bearing witness to another way of fighting injustice. This story is now.
In his earthly life, Jesus refused to be drawn into the power game. And in seeming to yield to human power, he modeled the strongest power the world has ever seen, power that overturned death and the source of evil itself. We, who bear his name, are invited to subvert human power by committing ourselves to non-violence, to reconciliation, to praying for our enemies, to making peace. That’s power without fear.
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