It wasn’t easy being
Herod. Consider: Herod the Great—aka Herod the First, the Herod of our story—was
appointed ruler of Judea by his father Antipater the Idumaean, who was from
what the Hebrew Bible calls “Edom.” After Herod helped overthrow the last of
the Jewish Kings, thus handing Palestine to the Romans, he was awarded the
title “King of Judea” by the Roman Senate, and set about alternating between
oppressing his Jewish subjects and trying—with little success—to be a good Jew
himself. He had a pretty long rule, by the standards of the day, some thirty
years or so, and perhaps it was because of his extreme paranoia, which led him
to be rather, how shall we say it, brutal
toward members of his own family, murdering for example, his second wife
Miriamne and her relatives when he thought them a threat.
Be that as it may, as
Herod approached his dotage, he began looking towards his sons as heirs. His
first choices were two of his sons by Miriamne: fine, ruddy youths who’d been
raised in Rome, at the Imperial Court no less, and who offended Herod with
their Imperial manner upon their return home to Jerusalem. Nevertheless, they
were his choices for heirs until another
of his sons—first-born Antipater II—turned the King against them, and Herod had
them strangled for treason. Which put Antipater II in the cat-bird seat as
Herod’s heir . . . for a year, anyway, until he
got convicted of trying to poison the old man and executed, at which point
Caesar Augustus was said to have remarked that “It is better to be Herod's pig than his son."
Well. Herod was on his
last legs in 4 BCE, the year Jesus was born, when three Magi—aka wise
men—showed up, looking for “the child who has been born king of the Jews.” And
when they came before the King, they emanated . . . what? An aura, I guess, a
touch of the divine, doubtless
because they had been following a star, a spark
of that Presence, and it had filled them with wonder and hope that shone out of
every pore.
But Herod hadn’t gotten
any less paranoid
since he killed his last
son, and he was completely absorbed by dynastic worries, and so missed the aura
entirely. And he was in a panic when he heard what they had to say, and all
Jerusalem with him, which seems strange, because Herod wasn’t a beloved figure
by any means. Nevertheless, he called for the chief priests and rabbis, the
Sanhedrin, and various assorted sooth-sayers, and asked them where this young
king was supposed to have been born, and by way of answer, they quoted the
prophets: “‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least
among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd
my people Israel.’”
“Holy Moly,” Herod
thought “I’m the
Shepherd of Judah!” And he called for the wise men—in secret, of course,
wouldn’t do to have people know there’s a rival, might send shock waves through
the market—and sent them to Bethlehem to look really hard for the child and let him know
where he was so he could, ah, worship
him, yes, that’s the ticket . . . worship
him. But the magi weren’t called wise for nothing—they were court astrologers
from the Far East, and where they
came from it was no different than in the here in theMiddle East. The powerful
didn’t give up that power lightly, especially when they’d had it for as long as
Herod had. And it
was in that moment that the magi—no slouches at divination—first felt that the
King’s motives were not what you would call pure.
And it’s not so
different these days, is it? It’s hard to pry the powerful away from their
power. I saw it in the federal government, the Agricultural Research Service,
where I once worked. We were organized into research units, with a Research
Leader (or RL) over a group of scientists, kind of like in a university
department. The RL was a scientist as well, promoted from within the ranks of
us run-of-the-mill types, and the minute that happened, they often began to change.
They had control of all the money, and because they still had to do research,
the temptation was strong to use it to help maintain their position. And that
went all the way up the hierarchy, from area leader to regional leader all the
way up to the top.
Administrative
hierarchies are like that . . . the one thing you can count on is that the
individuals in them will try to hold on to what power they possess, and that
gives the hierarchy a kind of unholy stability. You can see it everywhere, even
in churches. Look at the Catholic abuse scandal: it wouldn’t have become
entrenched if everybody—priest, bishop, archbishop—weren’t trying to hold onto
power, or—and this is even more dangerous—making sure the hierarchy itself, which in this case
was the Church, persists. Which, of course, preserves their own personal power,
so it’s a nasty feed-back mechanism, it goes round and round and round.
Paul called these
hierarchies “powers and principalities,” and recognized that they took on a
life of their own. He often short-handed it with the word “flesh” and ended
several of his letters with lists of bad things associated with it. Biblical
scholar Walter Wink has fleshed this notion out, and showed that if anything
can be called demonic it’s these entrenched, intertwined structures of
administrative power—whether governmental or corporate—in which we are all
embedded.
And perhaps that’s what
Matthew means when he says Herod was afraid and “all Jerusalem with him.” After
thirty-some-odd years of rule, there were so many toadies, so many
functionaries in the multi-storied hierarchy—really a web—of which he was the
head, that if you cut that head off, and relocate it somewhere else—Bethlehem? Really? —everyone
would lose.
Whatever the case, the
wise men departed in secret, and Herod’s own private guard watched their backs,
making sure they weren’t followed, and lo! before them went the star, in
defiance of all physics, and they were returned to that state of timeless
wonder that had accompanied them to Jerusalem, before their encounter with
Herod brought them . . . where? Certainly not reality, for this had more the
feel of realism than all the petty squabbles at court . . . the star went
before them, even in bright daylight, and settled over a Bethlehem house. It
wasn’t the fanciest, nor was it the meanest, it was just a house, with a small
adobe wall around a courtyard ringed by a kitchen and sleeping rooms, and
there, in the center of the courtyard was Mary and the child, and their hearts
were filled with an unaccountable joy, and once again they felt the heightened
. . . something
that surrounded the child, indeed that poured
off him, wave after wave, like a warm tide. And they fell to their knees before
the boy—they couldn’t help it, really—and they cried out their delight and
homage.
Friends, at the touch
of the star, at the sight of the child, the magi experienced another reality.
Call it the Kingdom of God, as does our scripture, or the imaginal realm, as do
Sufi mystics, or the ground of all being, but it is there. And though it is intertwined with all
matter—and in a sense, underpins
all matter—it is insensible, that is, invisible to our ordinary senses, most of
the time, at any rate. But occasionally, the kingdom slips through the veil
that normally hides it, and it did so that night. The wise men saw it, heard
it, touched it,
and even those veterans of the strange—they were magi, after all—were
overwhelmed.
And that reality—which
in the end we simply call God—that reality was incarnated that night, distilled
and instilled by some means impossible to describe into that babe in that
courtyard in that luminous night. The light of the world, pouring from that
child . . . the light of the world who somehow was that child and—somehow again—is still with
us, still underlying and supporting everything, and will be with us until, like
the wise men, we go home by another road. Amen.
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