Preached · December 30, 2012
Series · Meet Jesus
Text · Matthew 2
Introduction
We've been in a series called Meet Jesus. We continue that today, and as we move into January, we'll continue on that same thing, talking specifically about conversations with Jesus. But today I want to invite you to turn to the book of Matthew chapter 2. If you have a Bible or an iPad or Kindle or a phone — it's going to be on the screen too, so if you feel like just sitting there, that's okay.
Matthew chapter 2. We'll be looking at what you'd consider a Christmassy passage, which is the visit of the Magi to Jesus. Let's read it. I'll read it out loud for you, and then we'll talk about it.
The Scripture: Matthew 2
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, "Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him." When Herod heard this, he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. He called together all the people's chief priests and the teachers of the law and asked them where the Messiah was to be born. "In Bethlehem in Judea," they replied, "for this is what the prophet has written: 'But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.'" Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him." After they heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was, that being Jesus. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. They opened their treasures and presented him with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.
The word of the Lord.
What we're talking about today is the fact that Jesus is King. If you read through the book of Matthew, you see this recurring theme that Jesus is king, Jesus is kingly, Jesus is the ultimate king. We see it hinted throughout the entire gospel of Matthew. We see it from chapter one — you have this genealogy of Jesus, which kind of screams out to the ancient reader, and maybe to the really attentive modern reader, "Jesus is king." And we get to Matthew chapter two, and you have this visit of the Magi, and you see once again that the Magi are asking where the King of the Jews is. Again, we're talking about Jesus.
So before we talk about what it means for Jesus to be king in your life and in mine, let's first talk about some misconceptions of the "We Three Kings."
"We Three Kings" Misconceptions
Probably a lot of you are smart, so this is really not for you — it's for those of you who are not even here, who aren't smart. So this is just review.
First of all, "We Three Kings": there weren't three of them. I mean, we don't know for sure. Most of the time when you're talking about these kinds of people, they traveled in caravans. So there might be 12, 24, 36 — I don't know, a gross of them. Probably a larger number than we've ever thought about.
Second, they weren't kings. I don't even know where this came from, except from some bad translations. They're Magi. They're astrologers. You know those people — maybe you're one of them. On your Facebook feed, you get the little app: "I'm a Pisces, and what does Pisces tell me today?" Well, this is what they were, the really old version of that. They looked at the stars and thought, "Well, if the stars are over here, if they make this constellation, this is what it means for me or for the world." They were wise guys, wise men, advisors. They were really bright people in their day, though their kind of science we'd laugh at in our day. But again, they're not kings.
Finally, let's talk about this picture — your typical nativity set. If you look to your left, you see a guy holding a sheep; he's probably a shepherd. You see Jesus in the manger. You see Mary and Joseph. And on the right-hand side, you see the "wee three kings." They've got crowns on. One is tan, one is white, and one is black. They're politically correct kings. There are so many things wrong with this picture. Like we already said, there are probably more than three. Second, they weren't kings. And third, they weren't there — they weren't at the nativity scene. We know this because in the passage we just read, Herod asks, "How long has it been since you saw the star?" And later in the passage — which we won't be talking about today — Herod sends out this message: "Kill all the babies two years and younger." Which tells us the Magi appeared later, anywhere from 18 to 24 months after Jesus was born. Another hint is that we're told the Magi come to the house where Mary and Joseph are. So they're not in the barn, not in the manger, not in the back room at the hotel. They've managed to get their own little homestead, and that's where the Magi — all 12, 24, 36 of them — show up to give Jesus their gifts.
So, misconceptions off the table. Now we can get the right picture in our minds.
When Jesus Is King, It Sets You on a Quest
So, Jesus is King. This is what this passage is about. It's a subtle, kind of political, kind of subversive way to tell the reader, "Things aren't the way you think they are." Jesus — the baby, the two-year-old living in the house — he's actually the one in charge. And when Jesus is King, it does four things, I think, that this passage brings out. The first is that it sets you on a quest.
How many of you have been Black Friday shopping? Be proud of your shameful act; I've done it too. A couple years ago, me and my buddy John — were we going for ourselves, or were we going for the church? We were going for the church, so it was a holy act. We noticed that Target had a TV on sale, and the church needed a TV, so we thought we'd go stand in line and do the whole Black Friday thing in Sioux Falls. So we bundled up as giant marshmallow men — the socks and the boots and the four pairs of pants and the jacket and the three scarves and the hats and mittens. And you go out at like midnight and stand in line and chat with people you never really wanted to chat with. There was a guy behind us; I don't even remember what he was talking about. He was pro-gun, pro-military, and managed a way to fit it into every conversation, even if we were talking about TVs. Which is fine, but I'm shivering and cold and not really in the mood to talk about that. So you stand in line for hours and hours, shivering. One of you starts the car, you go shiver in the car, and then the other person shivers in the car. And finally, it's like 15 minutes before, and there's that second group of people you absolutely hate — the ones who arrive 15 minutes before and snake their way into the line, 10, 15, 30 yards ahead of you. And the Target employees are being nice in that they're handing out coffee, but they're not stopping those guys, so all you want to do is throw your coffee at the bad people.
So finally they open up the doors, late. You go charging in. You don't know where the TV is — it's Target, it's like five times the size of this room, and this room's huge. You're running, sprinting, trying to keep your humanity by not throwing elbows. And then you arrive at the giant pallet of televisions. And this is what me and John see: two ladies who look like very average, typical women, probably mothers. One of them was maybe a little frumpy, a little overweight; one of them was maybe a little more in shape. Just typical, average people. And yet both of them had grabbed a single television, and were screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. "You let go!" "No, you let go! It's my television! I got here first!" Back and forth. And everybody's just kind of backing up. What is going on?
So there are these things in our lives that make us go a little crazy, that make us turn our lives upside down and do things we would never consider doing on a normal day. How many of you on a normal day stand in the cold for five hours and then sprint to a television and scream at another person? That's just not your habit. And if it is, we will not be hanging out.
Now, clearly, Black Friday television shopping is a negative example. But the fact of the matter is that we are all familiar with rearranging our lives for the sake of something we want. We've rearranged our lives to the point where we all buy convenience food, microwaves, boxed meals, and nice automobiles in order to save time. And then we use that extra time to pay for a gym membership to work off all the extra weight we got from buying our convenience food and boxed meals — well, some of us spend the time at the gym. We're willing to get our eyebrows waxed for the sake of beauty, and that just blows my mind. There's a comedian that talks about women who will shriek at the sight of a spider but then go pay money to have their eyebrows waxed. Go figure that one out.
We can also find ourselves rearranging our lives not out of convenience, but out of necessity. We never imagined our lives without our loved one, our brother, our mom, our wife, our husband. But then those people died or abandoned us, or maybe we left them, and now we have our rearranged lives. We probably never thought we could make our lives work without a certain job or income level or square footage of house. But then one of two things happens. One, we lose the job or the income we thought we deserved, or we lose that house, and our lives are rearranged. We make it work. It probably hurts, but it works. The second thing that happens is that we get an even better job, an even higher income, an even bigger house. And then we suddenly realize that we've not merely rearranged our lives, but we've actually built our lives around that new income, house, or job. We start talking about how to make sure we never lose that income. We protect that house. We start talking about housekeepers and bigger life insurance policies. We feel protective when the government wants a bigger slice of the pie that we never actually expected to have in the first place.
My point is that we know what it's like to rearrange our lives based on a need or a want, based on conveniences or brute, harsh facts. So then the question comes: when you are confronted with a star rising in the east, with the fact that Jesus is the King and the Lord of everything, are we willing then to rearrange our lives? To, as the Magi did, leave our old lives behind and get closer to the King? Because imagine what the Magi had to do. They live somewhere in the east — east of Israel, perhaps modern-day Iraq or Iran. And they left it all. They go on this ridiculously long journey. We're not talking about driving in an automobile to Sioux Falls and standing in a line; we're talking about abandoning everything they know, riding on some unfortunate animal for months to make it to Israel. So when you realize that Jesus is King, it should set you on a quest.
It Makes You Quell Wannabe Kings
Second, it makes you want to quell wannabe kings. I'm not usually the kind of teacher that uses alliteration, but I figured if I do, I might as well do it with one of the most uncommon letters, which is Q. Quell — you know what I mean by quell? One time when I was about five years old, I was trying to cook hot dogs on the stove, and there was a sponge next to the stove, and the sponge caught on fire. And I know liquid puts out fire, so I grabbed the closest aerosol can I could find and sprayed it. Bad idea. That's not how you quell a fire. Or, I like to sing, and believe it or not, when I was a teenager, I was a worse singer than I am now. I was singing a song, and my sister asked me, "Who sings that song?" And I like to be the know-it-all, so I got to say, "It's Norah Jones." To which my sister said, "Then why don't we keep it that way?" So you get that brief second of, "Yes, I know the answer... ah, I stink." The spirit of singing within me was quelled.
When we realize that Jesus is King, we get sent on this quest to find the real king, to find King Jesus. But as we begin to get to know Jesus, to know who he is as we meet him, then we begin to realize all the fake, petty, wannabe kings in our lives. And so as we get closer to Jesus, there should be this reaction within us to want to quell those wannabe kings.
The kings in our lives primarily come from our internal life — our desires, our feelings, our intentions, our aims — and our external life — our relationships, how we hang out with people, how we work with them, how we live with them. By "king," what I mean is that thing, that overwhelming desire, that thing that defines you, that people would use if you said, "Explain Anthony to me." They'd say, "Well, he tends to be a little cynical, and he probably is a little too sarcastic. He tends to be a little idealistic; he probably expects a little too much of people." So we have those internal things. Or our external life: "Explain this person to me." "Well, he tends to be a hard worker; he's always trying to achieve more, but sometimes he loses relationships in the process." Those are the kinds of kings I'm talking about. They're subtle. They're nebulous. They're incorporeal — they don't necessarily have a body to them. And yet they are those things that run our lives really dangerously, really quietly. You don't even notice it's happening.
For the internal life, I have some examples written down. You've got cynicism: "It's been bad before, it's going to be bad again." You've got self-imposed naivete, which is basically, "Ignorance is bliss. The less I know, the less I have to worry about." "Oh, those famines in Africa? Well, I don't know about it, I don't have to do anything about it." "That person who's sick in the cubicle next to me? I don't want to know too much about their issues, because then I'd feel bad." Or Mickey Mouse syndrome, which is all happy, all the time. Or Eeyore syndrome, which is all sad, "poor me," all the time. These things can drive us. They can push us. They can define our day. They can make our days great or bad. They can define our relationships, our external life. We can always be working to improve everybody else's opinion of me. Or we can be non-honest, non-committers. You know what I mean? You call somebody up to go to a party, and they're like, "I don't know. Maybe. I'm not sure." And then you realize you do that with your entire life — "Well, maybe, I don't know, I'm not sure." And then who are you? Maybe you're not a human being; you lost that part of you a long time ago. You're a human doing: "I must achieve more, all the time." These are all the different kinds of kings that reside within us, that when you realize Jesus is the true king, you've got to quell them. You've got to say, "I'm done with you. You don't rule my life anymore. I'm not going to be defined by you any longer."
It Has You Question Assumptions
Third, when you realize that Jesus is King, it has you question assumptions. It makes you wonder if things are really going to happen like you'd expect.
For whatever reason, I had a dentist who told me toothpaste really wasn't that necessary. And maybe — I don't know, maybe he's right. My suspicion now is that he just wanted me to have more cavities. So I went through an embarrassingly long portion of my life not using toothpaste, and had an embarrassingly high amount of historical cavities. And then I told my then-girlfriend, Emily, this, and she's like, "Are you nuts? Are you crazy? Use toothpaste." And then I started using toothpaste, and I got fewer cavities. Imagine.
Now, there are things in your life that you have assumptions about. Maybe somebody told you, with your mouth hanging open and a bib for catching your drool, "You don't need toothpaste." Maybe somebody told you some assumptions that you're still clinging to today. But when you realize that Jesus is the King of everything, when you realize that Jesus is actually the creator of the universe and probably knows quite a lot about it, when you realize that Jesus is the one who created people and came to live and to die and be resurrected to save people — then your assumptions about who he is, and what he can and can't do, and who he would and wouldn't hang out with, they change.
The reason I'm pointing this out in this particular passage is that in Matthew chapters 1 and 2 we see a lot of this upside-down kingdom. The Magi are Gentiles, they're astrologers. If you're a religious Jew that day, you're looking down on the Magi because they're basically pagans. And yet it's the Magi who take the quest to go see Jesus. But here's the irony: before they go see the King of the Jews, they go see Herod, the literal king, and they ask him, "Where's the King of the Jews?" Which is basically a big old slap in the face to Herod — "Well, I'm the king of the Jews." And so Herod calls together the priests and the teachers and asks, "Where is this Messiah figure supposed to be born?" And here's the even deeper irony: they had the answer. They knew. They knew it was supposed to be in Bethlehem. But what did they do about it? Nothing. They're not the ones who went to see the Messiah. They sent the Gentiles, the pagans, the Magi.
In Matthew chapter 1, you see this genealogy of Jesus. Most genealogies that day were made up of all males; you didn't really bother mentioning the women. And second, if you're talking about the supposed savior of the Jews, of Israel, you would hope that everybody in your genealogy was a Jew, an Israelite. But if you read carefully through Matthew chapter 1, you actually find several women. And each of those women, first of all, weren't Jewish, and second, they were actually pretty sexually promiscuous. They were not necessarily what you'd call the big honorable women of the day. And so Matthew, the writer of this gospel, is trying to tell us something: things aren't always going to be the way you'd expect.
So what if the very people you think are unworthy of getting close to Jesus are, in fact, the very people who are closer to him than we even know? What if the folks that you automatically put on a pedestal are the ones who are actually struggling with Jesus' identity? We all have expectations of what God and Jesus can and can't do. "Jesus would never vote that way. Jesus would never hang out with those people. Jesus would never hear my prayer. Certainly he would never show up as a baby in a backwater town. Certainly he would never die the death of a political insurrectionist." Certainly, certainly, certainly. But what Matthew chapter 2 shows us is that things aren't always as we thought. When we put words in Jesus' mouth about who he can or can't hang out with, we're basically just choosing our own prejudices and then making sure we feel better about them, because we think God backs us up on this one.
Anne Lamott puts it this way: "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." That's a rough truth right there. What assumptions do I have about my God, about what he likes and doesn't like, what he thinks is great and not so great? It really just turns out to be my preferences.
It Quenches Your Thirst
Finally, when you realize that Jesus is King, it sets you on a quest to know him. And in that quest, you begin to quell all those fake wannabe kings. And as you do that, as those kings begin to disappear from your life, then you begin to question — maybe God's a little bit better than I thought, maybe his love's a little bit bigger than I thought, maybe his beauty is a little bit grander than I thought. And then you can't help but be quenched. Because all of us have this thirst within us — a thirst to love and to be loved, and a thirst to worship. Because all of us worship something. All of us bow down to something. Sometimes it's ourselves. Sometimes it's someone else. Sometimes it's something else. But inside all of us, we have this need, this deep-seated desire to glorify God. When we fully live lives that recognize Jesus as King, it's only then that we can be fulfilled. Worshiping God quenches a need within us that we probably never even knew we had.
Some examples. Do you remember the first time you successfully wakeboarded? Or climbed a mountain? Or saw the ocean? Or maybe it was when you held your newborn child, or the first time you saw them ride a bike, or walk down the aisle. Or maybe for you it was the first time you could afford to try filet mignon, or lobster tail, or Nutella. Or maybe it was when you gazed upon your unclothed spouse for the first time, or the first time you met that special someone and something just clicked. Whatever it was, you probably know the feeling of a yearning being met, a satisfaction coming to you, but you didn't even know you had that yearning in the first place.
And maybe some of you today feel this vague gnawing at your insides, something incorporeal, whispering in the synapses of your brain and the strings of your heart, that your life is not complete, that your purpose is not fulfilled, and whatever quest you are on currently is probably the wrong one. But when we see that Jesus is King and we respond, and we enter into a beautiful quest that leads us to quell the fake kings that demand our attention, and when we quell those kings so that we can question our misinformed assumptions, and we finally come to Jesus to fall down and worship him like the Magi giving their gifts, giving him all we are — then that thirst, that crawling-in-the-desert, mirage-inducing thirst, that vague and yet powerful thirst, that neck-deep, sky-high, painful yet easily ignored thirst, is finally, finally quenched. Because Jesus is King, and that's what he does.
Application Questions
There are no application groups today. That doesn't mean I'm not going to give you some application questions. You can't escape.
First, because of Jesus' kingship, has your life been rearranged — fully, completely, utterly? Have you left your proverbial country, the place you're most comfortable with, like the Magi, and gone on a quest? If not, what do you think is keeping you back? What scares you about moving forward, about setting forth on your quest to King Jesus?
Second, what old wannabe kings in your life need quelled? How do you suppose you'll go about doing that? I'll give you some hints. Quelling kings in your life is not just something that you decide to do. It's a process, and it tends to be long and treacherous. And that's why we talk about spiritual disciplines and accountability and study and prayer. Our goal here at Good News, as staff and elders and deacons and leaders, is that we want each and every one of you to be in a long-term discipleship process — a commitment that you enter into more than just an hour on a Sunday, but for the rest of your life — that says, "I've got these kings. They're trying to rule me. Let's quell them."
Third, there are some assumptions about what Jesus can't or won't or couldn't possibly do that you need to let go of, unlearn, begin to question. In other words, I'm asking you: is there a prejudice that you need to let go of, as well as stop thinking that Jesus supports you in it?
Fourth and finally, is there a general sense in your life that there is some thirst, some longing that needs quenched? Could it possibly be that King Jesus is asking for your worship, your life, your all? Could it be that he is asking everything of you so that he can be everything to you? How will you respond?
Closing Prayer
Let's stand and pray together.
King Jesus, I want to pray for myself, for my friends in front of me. We are needy people. And we have assumptions about you, assumptions about ourselves, assumptions about the way life is, that I'm pretty sure are probably wrong. And so my prayer for myself, for my friends, is that God, you would teach us, that you would show us what those thirsts are in our life that need quenched, that you would reveal to us on a day-by-day basis that you are King, and that we need to quest after you, leaving it all behind and pressing on toward you. And Father, I ask that all of us would be in a lifelong, long-term discipleship process. And God, whatever fears, whatever distractions, whatever things get in the way of that in our lives, God, may we push them aside and press on toward you. We thank you for your love. It never ceases, it never fails, it never stops, it never lets go. Thank you for pursuing us. We love you, God. Amen.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
