Will The Real Herod Be Exposed?

! recently had a very meaningful conversation with a friend of mine about theology and faith.  He wanted to know from me why we celebrate Epiphany.  What does this word mean?  Why do we use it?  What does it stand for?  What does it convey?  As I talked to my friend about the history of Epiphany and traced its Greek and Latin roots, I had a deep and profound understanding of how the Church had adopted Epiphany in the fourteenth century, how the Eastern and the Western Church had celebrated it differently, and how it meant the arrival of the wise men, and how it had an impact on our sense of God’s appearing.
 
We had this great exchange of ideas and thoughts and theology and depth, and then, he just stopped me in my tracks.  He said, “Now, Epiphany then is the day.  Epiphany is the season in the Church, am I correct?”

I said, “Yes, you are.”


He said, “Basically, for a while until we get into Lent, and then we get into Easter.”

And I said, “Well, then you’ve got it!”

Then, he says, “Well, you know, it sounds really old fashioned and outdated to me.  I think you should start changing the titles that you use to describe this experience.  I think, for example this should be the season that you call “Diet and Exercise” and have diet and exercise Sundays, and that diet and exercise comes to an end on “Chocolate Bunny Sunday”, when the tomb is empty and everyone gets to eat chocolate after a period of diet and exercise.  You know, I think people would find that quite refreshing, don’t you?”

You can imagine my response, can’t you!  I said, “You know, you are probably right.  This is the liturgical flow of the age in which we live.  You are probably very accurate that in terms of people’s everyday life it is diet and exercise time, certainly if you listen to the ads that flash up on Facebook and drive me crazy, or a time of gluttony again at Easter after the gluttony of Christmas.  I suppose “Chocolate Bunny Sunday” would be very apropos.”

I thought for a while after this rather humorous little comment, “What would we actually miss if we were to adopt such a trivial understanding of the Church here?  Would there be anything that we would give up if we actually stuck to the traditions of our culture as opposed to the traditions of the Church?”  And, the answer was “Yes!  We would lose a lot!”
This is because what we have here in Epiphany is something that resonates with human experience.  It has in it an existential reality; it has in it a spiritual reality.  The story of Epiphany and the story of the arrival of the Magi who come and worship not only about a moment in history that Matthew recorded when he wrote his Gospel between 70-90 AD, but resonates actually with real life here and now, for real life is not just about diet and exercise and chocolate bunnies.  In fact, that might be the more surreal, the more philosophical, rather than the more real and the more concrete that we actually find in the Epiphany story.  

The Epiphany story is a story that talks concretely about the lightness and the darkness of being.  It talks about those realities that every single one of us in our life experience and endure.  It speaks in many ways about the things that we experience right here in society and the world as a whole. Epiphany, rather than being something that is outdated and outmoded is profoundly contextual and reasonable.  Let me explain.  

Epiphany and the story of Herod and the wise men is a story about the lightness and darkness of being.  I have thought over the years how I enjoy playing the character of Herod in the pageant.  Maybe I get carried away, but it seems to get a little darker the moment that the pageant is over.  When I go to a grocery store and some mother looks at her child and points at me and says, “That is the man who plays Herod!” I realize that this name is going with me wherever I go and that I cannot lose it.  I will forever in this part of Toronto be associated with Herod.  Of all the dark names in history to be associated with:  Herod!  I know that I make fun of him, and I know that we make light with his music, and probably one of the least important lines of music that I ever wrote was the line that Herod sings, “I just don’t think I’ll be king no more,” which will go down on my epitaph, I think.  This was the lowlight of my musical career, but it seems to have been the highlight of my public one!  

I live Herod down, but Herod was dark.  Herod the Great, who is named in the Gospel of Matthew – there were many Herods, but Herod the Great was an amazing character. The original Herod the Great was somebody who was part Jewish and part Edomite). He was ethnically Jewish, but he was also ethnically Gentile.  He really only rose to prominence when the Romans, during the Roman war had him fight on their side.  He was willing to take Palestine for the Romans.  So, Herod the Great became under the protection of Rome.  In 70 AD, he assumed the position of King and did many good things.  
There have been magazine articles written over the last year or two trying to reclaim the history and the tradition of Herod so he didn’t look so bad.  Rightly, they pointed to some of the good things he did.  Herod the Great, for example, had a lasting period of peace when other kings had not.  When the Romans had taken over many lands with great conflict, Herod had kept the peace in Palestine.  Herod had built the great Temple in Jerusalem.  Herod was the great builder.  Herod was also kind to people.  When the people had bad economic times, he cut taxes in order that they weren’t indebted.  When there was a famine, he melted down gold from his Temple in order to be able to give it to the poor.
    
While there were moments where Herod the Great could be considered great, there was also a dark side to Herod.  Herod was a suspicious person.  He was a paranoid person.  He was so worried about his rule coming to an end that he had his wife, Mariamne, put to death, and also her mother.  Three of his sons he had arrested and executed.  Whether it was Antipater or whether it was Alexander or whether it was Aristobolus, he eliminated them, because they were a threat to his reign.  He was a cruel man.  When he eventually retired to Jericho – Jericho is a beautiful town, I have been to Jericho – he retired to his beautiful little place (“little” I use ironically) in Jericho.  He knew that when he would die people were so frightened of him that they wouldn’t shed a tear, so he arranged for others to be executed at the time of his death so tears were shed at his.
 
He was a cruel man.  He was a frightened man.  He was frightened of other powers that might come along.  He was frightened of the Romans.  If he lost power, he wondered what would happen to him and his reign.  In keeping with his life and his style and paranoia, the story of Jesus is not far-fetched at all.  Herod knew that his throne was being threatened.  When Magi came along, when Gentiles came along and said, “We heard that a King of the Jews will be born” Herod knew that everything was up for grabs.  So what did he do?  He not only went after one child, he eliminated many.
There was a precedent for this in the Book of Exodus, for this is exactly what Pharaoh did at the birth of Moses.
 
Pharaoh was so concerned about the number of Jews that were being born that he demanded that the sons of Jewish people be thrown into the Nile and that daughters be allowed to live.  Pharaoh was the cruel one.  Moses was hidden in the bulrushes, as the story goes, and saved from the grasp of Pharaoh.  See the power balance?  This is all very Jewish, all very historical.  Jesus becomes, in a sense, the new Moses.  It is all happening again!  And again, it is a person in power and again it is a monarch who has a dark side who is responsible for it.  The last thing that Herod wanted was for this supposed King of the Jews, the supposed Messiah, to come and mess with his life and ruin his reign.

Herod, rather than just being an historical figure is really an archetype of people who like to hold on to power and will do it at any cost.  Herod was an example of people who hide in the shadows and come out of the shadows to take life indiscriminately.  Herods have appeared for two thousand years.  Herods have shown their faces, and they have been of all kinds and all religions and all colours.  The Herods are those who practice the ultimate sin:  the taking of a life to preserve their own.  When people do that, for whatever reason it may be, the arrival of someone like Jesus on the scene is a threat.
 
Christ is always a revolutionary threat.  He speaks words that those who hide in the darkness cannot stand.  He says, “Forgive your enemies”, “Love those who persecute you”, “Lay down your life for the sake of others”, “Hold out for the truth”, “Let God be your Guide”, “Repent and change your ways”.  Those who hide in the darkness, those who try to hold on to ideology and beliefs that take human life wantonly cannot tolerate Jesus.  He speaks of something different.  He speaks of God.  He speaks of God with light, but they hide in the shadows.  Herods still live.  And that is why this is so real.  That is why Epiphany is so powerful!

The story of Epiphany is not about Herod; it is about the Magi and it is about Christ.  The Magi show the lightness of being.  They show the glory of following a star.  We don’t know much about the Magi.  We don’t even know how many of them there were.  We suspect there were three, because there were three gifts, but that is our only clue.  We don’t know where they came from, except that they came from the east.  We don’t know what they did professionally, except they were considered to be wise.  Maybe they were astrologers, maybe they were kings, maybe they were philosophers, but they were clearly wise.

The great irony of all this is that Herod who was supposed to represent the Jewish people persecuted Jewish children and went after Jesus.  These men are gentiles coming to worship Jesus.  Everything was being turned on its head in the story!  This is a moment in which those who came from the east came to pay homage to the Messiah of the Jews.  This is powerful and symbolic because the Magi, it says in Greek, were proskyneo, they paid homage, they worshipped, they got on their knees.  You notice they brought gifts.  They didn’t bring sacrifices; they brought gifts.  They brought gifts that were worthy of a monarch.  They brought gifts that were worthy of someone to receive praise, homage, worship, and they got on their knees.  When they got on their knees, they recognized who he was.  Being so wise, they did not return to Herod and tell him where this child was.  They were wise enough to know that they were being duped by Herod.  They knew that the thing to do was to worship this Christ child and then leave.

Worship is a powerful thing.  I think at times we sometimes lose the passion and the power of worship.  There are times in which we see it as being irrelevant from our daily lives or a distant and a remote thing.  We look at the realities of our existence and say, “Well, actually, diet and exercise would do us more good than worship.”  I say, “Diet and exercise AND worship is even better!”  Why?  Because I think in this world, in any era, there is the need to pay homage to something or someone greater than ourselves, and I think who you pay homage to and how you pay homage means everything.  You do not pay homage to God, who made life, by taking it; you pay homage to God by lifting up life.  You do not pay homage to God by demeaning people; you pay homage to God by lifting them up.  You pay homage to God by giving of yourself; you do not pay homage by protecting yourself.  That is what the wise men did with Jesus.

The great Philip Yancey tells the story about how he and his family went to Yellowstone National Park to watch the Old Faithful geyser come up.  He said that he was never so excited in his life to go and see this.  There was a clock on the wall that actually predicted when Old Faithful would blow.  There was a countdown on this clock, and Old Faithful is so good and so timely that it will generally go according to the clock. Everyone starts taking photographs, foreign tourists arrive, everyone clears the table and gets ready to look at the windows for the great emergence of Old Faithful.  Sure enough, on time, Old Faithful erupts and everybody applauds and is on their feet full of excitement.  It is a marvellous moment, but he said he looked around and he saw that the waiters and the clerks and the people who worked there had their backs turned to it all and were just shuffling papers and moving around the place doing their ordinary tasks.  It was as if they had been around it so long they had lost the wonder and the awe of it.  It no longer seemed to move and inspire them.

I think sometimes we get like that.  We do not see how powerful worship can be.  We have so much freedom, so much opportunity to do it, so many years of doing it that we might feel that it is tired and old and needs to be replaced with something new.  We might have seen this as the ordinary, whereas worshipping Christ will always be one of the most powerful, one of the most life-affirming, one of the most glorious, one of the most freedom asserting, one of the most uplifting things that we can do, because it reminds us daily that no matter what is going on in our world and no matter how many Herods stomp across this earth, it is Christ who ultimately is Lord. When we do that and know that, the power of that moment consumes us.

I wouldn’t replace Epiphany for anything!  This is because I will never reflect and we should never reflect the lightness of being with the darkness of being, for light always and forever will overcome the darkness!  I think we need to hear that.  Amen.