Just five days ago, we were celebrating the birth of Jesus, the Christ, which means the anointed one. Today is a very different story than the one we read then. It is a story of jealousy, of power, and of what the world does when God comes to it. God’s is a power difficult for the powerful among us to understand. It was certainly difficult for Herod to understand. What Herod understood was that there was a different king in town, and so he attempted to solve the problem in the only way he knew how: blunt force.

But let’s ask ourselves: what is so threatening about a baby? A small, helpless being, completely dependent upon his parents seems hardly a threat to a man who was empowered by Rome to rule Judaea.

Jesus was not the only one to be called Christos, the anointed one, the Messiah. Caesar was the one who was to be called Savior. He was not the only one that claimed divine status. These were titles reserved for Caesar. Everywhere around the empire there were reminders of the peace that Caesar brought: each time they would win a battle, the army would parade through town, receiving accolades for having brought peace to Rome. Caesar would not take kindly to any indication that his rule was not divinely-ordained. Everyone knew the way one ended violence was with violence, war with war, and so there would be peace for a little while until another insurrection arose. He would not do well with the idea that a heavenly messenger – much like a war messenger – would come to give the news that a Savior had been born. The suggestion of a heavenly army fighting opposite his would have been intolerable. The suggestion that a baby could do all this was laughable, but it was one of those thoughts that slipped into your subconscious when you weren’t aware of it and woke you in a cold sweat: You aren’t who you think you are. You aren’t as powerful as you think you are. You aren’t as in control as you think you are. You aren’t God.

Herod had to do something. Any uprising, any insurrection, any disturbance in his region could lead to him being summoned to Rome and his throne stripped from him. Having someone under his jurisdiction called Christ, anointed, might suggest to Caesar that Herod’s allegiances are torn. It might suggest Herod’s own ploy for power. The heavenly messengers suggesting that the gods – or in this case God – is throwing his lot in on the battle for humanity’s allegiance would have suggested Herod was not dependable. Living a considerable distance from Rome, Caesar on the one hand needed to make sure Judaea knew who was in control, but he couldn’t spend too much time on this little nation. The human attraction to power displayed all too well, Herod determined a solution to this problem. He would send others to pay the baby king homage in order to find out more information.

He knew he was in trouble when the Magi didn’t come back and report what they had heard and seen. The imagined threat was real. Herod attempted to solve this in the only way he knew how: with brute force. He killed all of the children of Judaea under two years of age. These, who posed no threat, who would have later become part of the army, who had their whole lives ahead of them, were killed. It wasn’t the most creative solution to the problem, but Herod figured it would solve the problem. It would keep him on the throne and on Caesar’s good side.

Joseph packed up Mary and the baby and left for Egypt. Making the trek across Sinai, they traveled to the land where they had heard of their ancestors’ slavery. The land was rough and wild: “Even along the seacoast, with water visible in all directions, there isn’t a drop to drink. The surface in many places is hard, crushed stone, making for difficult walking. Nothing grows. There is no wood to burn or build with, and no water… when the dry wind blows, the sand in the air creates static electricity that often zaps the unwary [traveler] out of thin air.”[1] This was no place to trek with his young wife and their newborn son. This was not at all what Joseph had imagined. He looked at his nursing son and wondered how a baby could pose such a threat. He looked at the helpless little bundle in Mary’s arms and wondered how such a small person could save the world, fulfill the prophecies and save people from sin.

It is easy to underestimate power coming in small packages, of a God who would choose some way other than brute force to gain people’s allegiance. It is hard to imagine God working differently than us, whose attraction to power leads us to live in fear of not having enough, of someone having more, of needing to get what’s ours without regard for our neighbors. We pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, trying to take matters into our own hands. When threatened, we attack. We meet violence with violence, war with war, and corruption with corruption.

And then we look at this little baby who is supposed to save us, whose birth we celebrated five days ago, and go back to normal. We forget that God has set the world a little off kilter, that he has sent his heavenly messenger and his heavenly army to proclaim the birth of the anointed one, the one who will save us in the midst of our power-grabbing tendencies and our denial that we would do such a thing. This little baby stops us in our tracks. He threatened Herod. He threatened the way that we want the world to work, where the one with the most strength, the most weapons, the most money, wins. He challenges us to look at the powers of the world, the power that so attracts us, and teaches us that God’s power works differently from ours.

While we were busy sharpening our weapons of destruction, God sent his son into the world, born of a virgin, helpless and dependent, so that we might see what real power looks like. It threatens the regimes and the tyrants because it disarms them. It sometimes scares us because it disarms us. It reveals who we truly are. It reveals our tendencies to want to garner power from whatever source we might. It reveals that we are not in control. It reveals that we are not God.

Instead of claiming our allegiance with brute force as one of the Caesars, God comes as an infant. Instead of taking life as Herod, God gives life. Christ – the anointed one – comes as an unlikely king to an unlikely people. He reveals who God is in the face of who humans are. God destroys human destruction by walking into its path, by revealing that God loves us too much to leave us to self-destruction and too much to let the world keep working as it does. The heavenly messenger has already proclaimed victory: unto you a Savior has been born. And this one will save you. This one is the light that shines in the darkness, and the power of darkness has not, cannot, and will not overcome it.