Responses to Jesus - A Sermon for an Epiphany Covenant Service

I want you to imagine a stable in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.  By firelight a mother holds a newborn baby.  Three ornately dressed men approach the stable quietly and reverently.  As they enter the woman turns round.

 “Who are you?” she screeches.

“We are three wise men.”
"What?"
"We are three wise men!"

“Well what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o clock in the morning?  That doesn’t sound very wise to me.”

This scene is, of course, from Monty Python's Life of Brian, a film that is not at all blasphemous since it very clearly points out very early on that Brian is not Jesus.  This scene from that film contains all the elements that Christians associate with Epiphany; a star over a Bethlehem stable, a mother within cradling her baby and three kings bearing gifts.  These are familiar from countless nativity plays, and yet if you really read and look into the text a rather different picture emerges.

For a start off, there is no suggestion in Matthew’s gospel that Jesus was born in a stable.  Indeed, we are told that the visitors from the East “went into the house.”

Next, whatever they were, these visitors from the East were not kings.  The Good News Bible calls them “men who studied the stars”.  Other translations call them Wise Men, Scholars, Magi or Astrologers.  In fact, I couldn’t find a single translation that calls them kings. And we don’t know how many of them there were.  Matthew’s gospel tells us there were three gifts; it doesn’t tell us how many men brought the gifts.

Some people will say that none of this matters, that what is truly important is the message of the scripture, and they are absolutely right in one sense, and wrong in another.  The author of Matthew’s gospel wrote these verses for a purpose and all the elements are included for a purpose.  He was a Jew writing to a Jewish Christian community and we need to bear that in mind as we study this text.  He was a Jew, writing to a Jewish Christian community about how several different people responded to the birth of Jesus and his message was not only relevant for them, it is relevant for us too and has much to say to us as we think about the Covenant promise we will make later in this service.

This morning we’re going to look briefly at three different responses to Jesus from our gospel narrative, and hopefully think more deeply about our own response to Jesus.

First let’s take a look a King Herod’s response.

Now it has to be said that Herod was not a very nice chap.  In fact his name is ranked with other infamous despots throughout history, evil men like Genghis Khan, Vlad The Impaler, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein.  Herod was King of the Jews but he wasn’t even a Jew, he was of Idumean extraction and had been given the throne of Judea by the Romans.  He was, in effect, a puppet king.  To try and claim some legitimacy in the eyes of his people he’d married a Jew, the sister of the High Priest; but he was hated by the Jews and for good reason.  Herod was a multiple murderer, responsible for many deaths.  He had his beloved wife Mariamme killed, along with her mother and younger brother, the High Priest.  He also put to death Mariamme’s Grandfather, the High Priest Hyrcanus.  Three of his own sons were executed at his command because he feared they might try to take the throne from him.  He also planned the murder of a crowd of Jewish dignitaries imprisoned in the hippodrome of Jericho to coincide with his own death and thus ensure widespread mourning following his own funeral.  Fortunately this order was not carried out.

Yet Herod is not remembered by history for any of these evil deeds, he is remembered because of the way he responded to Jesus.  According to Matthew, when he heard from the wise men that the King of The Jews had been born his decision was immediate; a rival claimant to his throne could not be tolerated.  It did not matter to Herod that this ruler was the longed for Messiah, the Son of God; all Herod could see was that he had a rival claimant to his throne and he knew how to deal with rivals; he killed them.  Herod could not see beyond his own personal greed and lust for power, he could not see that wonderful act of God had taken place; all he could see was a personal threat and so he had innocent babies murdered in order to eliminate a threat to his authority.

Matthew includes this account of the slaughter of the baby boys in Bethlehem to make a theological point.  One of the concerns of the author of Matthews gospel in to portray Jesus as the new Moses.  The original Jewish Christian readers of this gospel would have immediately thought of Pharaoh’s slaughter of Jewish male infants when Moses was born and drawn the conclusion that Jesus was at least as great as Moses, because of the violent opposition to his birth.

Before we leap to condemn Herod for his attitude to Jesus we should consider that there is a little bit of Herod in all of us, a part of us that wants to put our own needs and desires first, a part of us that’s wants to control our own destiny free from God’s rule.  There is part of us that will resent the Covenant promise we will be making because we don’t want to surrender everything we have and are to God, despite all that God has done for us.

Now we’ll take a look at the response to Jesus of the Chief Priests and teachers of the Law. 

It is easy to overlook them as they are barely mentioned in our passage, but they are there.  Herod asks them where the Christ is to be born and they basically reply Bethlehem.  That is it, their only appearance in the passage and yet it tells us volumes about their attitude to God and his Messiah.

The original Jewish Christian readers of Matthew’s gospel would have understood exactly who they were and why Matthew mentioned them.  These chief priests and scribes knew their scriptures, they were able to tell Herod straight away that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.  But did they go to Bethlehem to see the Messiah?  Did they lift a sandal to go in the right direction?  No!  They knew a Messiah would be born in Bethlehem and that if the Wise Men were right this birth had taken place, but they did nothing at all about it.  This is a danger facing religious scholars in every age, they can get so wrapped up in their studies that the studies become all and they forget that what they are studying is real.  The chief priests and scribes had great knowledge of the scriptures, but that knowledge proved to be utterly useless so far as their own salvation was concerned.

You find this unfortunate attitude amongst religious scholars today; university theology professors and theological tutors who are so obsessed with the origins and authorship of various books of the Bible, of their date of composition and so forth that they forget to consider the message the scriptures actually contain.

It is very easy for some people to become obsessed with reading books about Jesus, with watching TV programmes about Jesus, with debating with others about Jesus and to forget the actual basics of spending time with God in prayer, of reading the scriptures devotionally, of worshipping in church and of living the Christian life.  It’s a trap it is easy to fall into.

As we prepare to make our Covenant promise we must remember that whilst it is good to find out as much as we can about Jesus it is far more important to put our efforts into our relationship with him.  Christianity is first and foremost about relationship; the relationship between ourselves and God made possible by Jesus of Nazareth.

The third response to consider this morning is that of the wise men themselves.  Their response stands in sharp contrast to that of Herod and that of the chief priests and scribes.  Their response was the correct response.  The response of the wise men was to seek Jesus out and worship him.

The Wise Men were gentiles.  They were not Jews.  The first people to visit Jesus and worship him in Matthew’s gospel were not Jews.  This is important because it reminds both Matthew’s original readers and us here today that Jesus came as Saviour of the whole world, tying the beginning of this gospel with the end of it when Jesus says “go and make disciples of all nations.”

The wise men were serious about seeking Jesus.  The Bible doesn’t tell us how long their search took; it may have been days, weeks or even months.  We do not know how far they travelled, though some scholars have suggested they came from Mesopotamia, which we know as Iraq.  We do not know how far they travelled or for how long but the wise men undertook their journey determined to find Jesus and not to stop travelling until they did.

How far are we willing to go to meet Jesus today?  We may not have to undertake a physical journey, but we do need to spend time seeking Jesus if we really want to meet him and know him.  We need to spend time reading the word of God in the Bible if we want to meet and know Jesus, we need to spend time talking with God as we pray in Jesus’ name if we want to meet and know him and we need to help others to meet Jesus by showing them his love in the way we live our lives.  The wise men were deadly serious about finding Jesus.  How serious are we about knowing him?

The three gifts of the Wise Men show how much they understood about Jesus. .  By presenting Jesus with gold they were acknowledging that he was a king.  Jesus was King of the Jews by birthright because he was of the line of David, but he was also the heavenly king of kings whose reign would never end.  By presenting him with incense they were acknowledging that Jesus was a priest.  Jesus is our great High Priest who fulfilled that role by bringing man and God together by his glorious self sacrifice.  Myrrh was used for embalming the dead.  The gift of myrrh was an acknowledgement that Jesus would die on the cross, a foretelling of his ultimate fate.

Like the wise men we have the advantage of knowing who Jesus was, what he came to do and his ultimate fate.  We know from the gospels and other books of the New Testament that Jesus was and in not only a king, but the Kings of Kings who was raised from the dead and is seated at God’s right hand in heaven, the King who will return to this earth in glory to rule forever.  We know that Jesus was our great High Priest who spent three years teaching us what God is really like and what our Heavenly Father wants from his children, to love and worship him forever.  We know that Jesus died on the cross for our sins so that we might be forgiven.  We know much more than the wise men knew, yet their response was to worship Jesus.  What is our response?

Today we are holding our covenant service.  Covenant is another word for agreement.  The agreement we make with God during the covenant service is a profound and far reaching one.  We promise to give ourselves fully and completely to God, to allow him complete control over every aspect of our lives both now and in the future.  We promise to give God everything, to hold nothing back.  That is the response we should make to Jesus.  He gave everything for us.  He came from the glory and majesty of heaven into the form of a helpless baby.  The God who had limitless power endured the limitations of a human being.  He suffered rejection, torture and one of the most horrible forms of execution ever devised by man for us; all because he loves us.  He gave everything for us.  What can we do in response but worship him and give him everything we have and everything we are?