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non angelus, sed anglus!

Christmas Eve

The Christmas Eve midnight service is a tricky one to get right. The percentage of “once-a-year"ers is at its highest and so, while you want to speak clearly to them of their desperate need for Jesus, you also need to rethink how you go about it. No-one, for example, should preach Rom. 1:18ff at Christmas! (and believe me, I’ve seen it done).

Here’s my attempt last night…
Matthew 2:1After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”

3When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. 5"In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:
6” ‘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 be the shepherd of my people Israel.’ “

7Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 8He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

9After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. 12And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

13When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” 14So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Christmas is under attack. It’s under attack from places that will surprise us.

So, for example, last week I was reading through my wife’s copy of Australian Women’s Weekly. It’s their Christmas edition. Almost 400 pages telling my wife and I how to get the most out of Christmas. The perfect recipes, advice on handling family disputes, how to keep the children busy, how to select the best gifts and the best paper to wrap them in and top tips from celebrities on what makes Christmas perfect.

And as I was reading through it I had this growing sense of unease because I began to notice that something was missing. A whole magazine dedicated to getting the most out of Christmas didn’t have a single thing in it about the one after who Christmas was named! Even the colossus crossword couldn’t manage one Jesus-related clue, and they had 500 clues. Not one even vaguely about Jesus.

Now, I don’t think it was deliberate – I’m sure the editor didn’t sit down and say “we’re going to take the Christ out of Christmas” but there it is – Jesus Christ slowly edged out of the picture on the one day you would think he could get a shout.

How can Christmas be Christmas without Jesus? That’s just wrong isn’t it? But I suspect you already feel that way, which is why you’re here now.

The passage we heard read just now is about someone who actually did want to remove the Christ from Christmas – a man called King Herod. We know from the things that historians wrote in those days that Herod was a nasty piece of work. He took the throne by force and murdered members of his close family in order to stay on the throne, including a wife and three sons. They were a threat to him and so he got rid of them. He liked being charge of his own life. He liked being King.

So when the first Christmas came around Herod had a real problem. Just imagine the scene. These foreign travellers, the Magi, turn up asking for the one born King of the Jews. Born King of the Jews. Now Kings are not normally born King. When the son of a King or Queen is born he’s a prince and he only becomes King later on. Sometimes they have to wait a long time to actually become King, just ask Prince Charles – he’ll tell you. But here is someone, the Magi say, who is born King. The old King isn’t King any more. There’s a new King.

And so we get that almost comedy line in verse 3. When Herod heard this he was disturbed and all Jerusalem with him! Herod the Megalomaniac, hears that there is a new king. You bet he was disturbed. A new King in town is a threat to his comfortable life so he sets about trying to attack the first Christmas.

He calls in his religious experts and asks them, v4, where the Christ is to be born. Now the word “Christ” is the word the Bible uses for God’s special King – for the promised King of the Universe that God would send.

Of course, such a King is a bit of a threat to more than just megalomaniacs like Herod. If the God of the Universe really did send a King to rule over that universe then he would be a threat to any of us who like being King ourselves, who like being in charge of our own lives. Jesus is so much more than simply a baby in a manger.

But I suspect you already feel that way, which is why you’re here now.

So what does Herod do to get rid of this threat? Well, he asks the Magi to go and see the child and report back to him. Herod says he wants to go and worship but that’s quite clearly a lie. He’s not going to worship Jesus. He worships other things.

In fact, we all worship something – you just have to work out what it is. We worship those things that we think are most important. I don’t know what they are to you; house, career, family, standard of living. For Herod it was his status and position – he wanted to be in charge. No-one else was going to tell him how to run his own life.

Of course, the sad fact is that we’re much the same. We might not go murdering our close family (although for some of us these next few days might bring us close to it!) but we instinctively throw off the idea of other people telling us how to run our lives. The Bible has a word for that sort of thing – it calls it sin. Sin is the refusal to let God be King of our lives and the insistence that we are Kings instead. For some of us it’s a blatant open rebellion – for others its far more subtle. We don’t rebel against God per se, we just ignore Him. But it’s all the same at the end of the day. Herod’s violent opposition to Jesus is just the thin end of a far, far larger wedge. The problem with the wedge, of course, is that as – day by day – you and I tap away at it, it drives us further and further away from the God who made us. Further and further away from a real and meaningful relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. So far, in fact, Jesus tells us later in Matthew’s gospel, that when He returns to wrap everything up he will confirm that gap and banish us from His presence for all eternity. Jesus, the most loving man who ever walked the earth, speaks about our banishment as a place of fire, where there is torment. I think we need to take him seriously.

The bottom line is that there is something very wrong with each one of us. Day by day we have tapped away at that wedge and we are now poles apart from Jesus. Nevertheless, in many of us something stirs and we recognise that we need to do something about this immeasurable gulf.

I suspect you feel that way, which is why you’re here now.

Well, that’s the bad news. But this is Christmas, a time of good news. The best news. Matthew tells us clearly what that good news is in the section that comes straight before the one that we read together. He tells us how an angel appeared Mary, announced that she would carry the baby Jesus and then tells her “you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

And the name Jesus itself simply means “God saves”. So here, in the baby Jesus who will grow into the man, is the one who will break the wedge,

shatter it.

Here is the one who can deal with the massive gulf that you and I have made between us and God because we worship other things.

And that’s why Herod is making a massive mistake here. Because he is passing up the chance of a lifetime. The very one who can save him from a life of self-obsession, the very one who can close the gap between him and God is the very one that he is determined to get rid of. This is the irony right at the heart of Christmas. The one who can save us from our sins is the one that we so quickly reject in our sinfulness.

So the wise men go off to find the baby and when they find him they do the right thing, the thing that Herod will never do – they worship him. They say “here is the one around whom we need to run our whole lives”. That’s what worship is, remember. It’s the centering of one’s life around something.

Of course the point being made here in the Bible is that there are 2 sorts of people. There are self-styled Kings like Herod who want to be in charge. And then there are wise men who worship Jesus and want him to be in charge.

The first, the Herods, who seek to minimize the impact of Jesus in their lives. They may acknowledge Him but they don’t want him to be king because that would mean too much change.

But wise men and women seek to maximize the impact of Jesus in their lives. They make Jesus the centre of their lives where previously they had been the centre. They’re beginning to realize that their biggest problem is not the size of their mortgage or where to send the kids to school or career progress or even their crumbling marriage or whatever it might be. They’re beginning to realize that the big problem in life is that massive wedge they’ve made between them and God and they see that Jesus can remove it.

That’s why v10 tells us the Magi were filled with joy when they got here. Because they understood who this baby was, they knew who he would grow into!!! They understood that this was the Jesus who would save them from their sins. No wonder they worshipped for they understood that this whole Christmas thing was something more than simply a baby, more than a cute nativity scene for children.

And I suspect that many of you feel that way – which is why you’re here now.

Christmas is under attack. It’s under attack from places that will take surprise us.

It’s under attack from us. For we are far too much like Herod and far too little like the wise men. We want a Jesus that is convenient, not the Jesus who demands our whole lives. We want a Jesus we can see on a Christmas card, not the Jesus we should worship.

We, like Herod, in our own ways have slowly and most often unwittingly pushed Jesus to the side and the wedge we have driven deep into that relationship is one that, despite all our efforts, we can never pull out again. We are, in the words of that same Jesus himself, sinners.

And the wonderful news of Christmas is that Jesus came to save his people from their sins. He comes to blast that wedge to smithereens. He does it, of course, by taking the punishment that you and I deserve as, in the most amazing act of love the world has ever seen, he hangs on a cross 33 years later. We’ll have an opportunity shortly to think about that a bit more as we take Communion together.

But for now, let’s return to that moment when Herod and the Wise Men part company for the last time. The Wise Men leave to make the most of the first Christmas, they leave to worship Jesus. Herod wants to manage the first Christmas so that Jesus cannot make any demands upon him in the days, weeks, months and years to come.

The Christmas message, the message of Jesus who came to save people from their sins, is the warning to not make Herod’s mistake in pushing Jesus aside but, instead, to be wise and worship him.

I can’t even begin to guess how many of you will feel about that. But you’re here now and that excites us.

Let’s pray

Posted by on 12/25 at 06:23 PM

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