Who is Jesus? A child born to be king.
Matthew 2.1-12
A reflection for Epiphany 2021
When a baby arrives, the one thing you can’t do is carry on as if nothing has happened, nothing has changed. The arrival of a baby always causes a bit of a stir. I wonder if you can remember the arrival of a younger brother or sister, the birth of your own children or grandchildren? What changed for you?
At Christmas, we might think that Jesus is just a baby, as the carol says, “But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” But even before he was born, Jesus had shaken things up. For Mary, a young mum, who had to tell her fiancée that she was pregnant. For Joseph, who nearly broke off the engagement, but who had a dream in which an angel confirmed everything Mary had said – including the name they were to give the baby, Jesus, which means ‘God saves’.
So, Jesus was a baby born with a job description. “he will save his people from their sins”. Sin is the mess we make, which separates us from God (and from each other). How could this little child fix that problem for every one of us? I’m sure his parents didn’t know, but they knew what they had been told. Who was Jesus? He was the saviour, the rescuer, the one sent by God to close the gap between us and him.
Over the next few weeks, I want to ask the simple question, who is Jesus? When the wise men come visiting, what does that tell us? When Jesus is baptised, thirty years later, what do we see and hear? When Jesus calls people to follow him, who are they following? And what is the meaning of the signs that he performs, which we call miracles? Who is Jesus revealed to be when his parents first bring him to the temple, and what do his disciples learn about him when his appearance is changed, transfigured, on a mountaintop? These are some of the different perspectives on which we can reflect over the weeks between now and Lent, as we ask the question, who is Jesus?
Who is Jesus? When the wise men come from another country they are looking for ‘the child who has been born king of the Jews’. Like ambassadors from far away, they come ‘to pay him homage’, wanting to show appropriate respect to someone of royal descent. Herod, a puppet-king, allowed by the Roman occupying forces to exercise some kind of power, is worried, rattled by the appearance of the magi and their searching questions. Anyone born to be king of the Jews is a threat to him and his family, he thinks. Herod has the sense to realise that a baby can stir things up. He may just be a baby now, but if he’s a royal prince then he may grow up to be trouble. When Herod, like the wise men, says that he wants to pay him homage, his words sound like a threat - not respect or worship. Clearly, he is feeling threatened, and his fears turn to violence in the story to come.
Do you find Jesus to be challenging, unsettling, even a little threatening? Who is Jesus for you? For many of us, he will have been a childhood companion, a familiar name from the time when we were as small as this child in the manger. We heard the stories of Jesus, we saw his picture (with artistic licence) on the Sunday school wall, we knew adults who talked about him and even talked to him. We learnt to pray, as Jesus taught us, ‘our Father..’ He has been for us, as for many people, a comfort and a strength, an inspiration and even a guide. So, not unsettling or challenging at all.
And yet there is here, in this baby, something that unsettles power, makes Herod nervous and causes three wise men from afar to travel great distances and bring extravagant gifts. There is even in this story an echo of the division that Jesus causes, between those who cry ‘hosanna’, like the magi kneeling in worship, and those who cry ‘crucify’. The threat to his life that overshadows his birth will culminate in an untimely death, some thirty-three years later. Who is Jesus that he creates such waves?
The scandal that lies at the heart of the Christmas story gives us our first clue – and our first challenge. The scandal of an unmarried mother, a teenage pregnancy, may not shake us very much now, but what about the scandalous claim that this child was, as Matthew says in his account, “conceived…from the Holy Spirit”? What about the claim that Jesus is God’s son?
C.S.Lewis, the author of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, who imagined a world where it was forever winter but never Christmas, famously said of Jesus, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.”
For the Jews to whom Jesus came, the claim to be the Son of God was even more startling than the claim that Jesus was born king of the Jews. Herod’s political power might have been threatened by the birth of a royal prince, but Jesus’s claims about his relationship with God shook the Jewish leaders to the core and led directly to his death. So, what do we think? Who is Jesus? For many people in our society, belief in God is itself foolish – so to claim that Jesus is the son of God is either meaningless or crazy. But as C.S.Lewis suggests, if we take Jesus seriously, if we take him on his own terms, we must seriously consider his claim to be the Son of God. A star in the east, guiding non-Jews to worship him; gifts of gold for a king, frankincense for a god and myrrh for a death, point to someone extra-ordinary. So here, at the beginning of his story, at the beginning of the gospels, at the beginning of this year, we are asked to consider again, who is Jesus, and, specifically, who is Jesus for you? What difference does this child make in your life? Is he the son of God and does he therefore bring you closer to God?
These are the questions that we will return to in the coming weeks. For now, let us keep in our mind’s eye the image of the wise men kneeling before the Christ child, and let us continue with our worship, our response to Emmanuel, ‘God with us’. Amen.