Two Kings

Wise men, and a troubled king (2:1–8)

"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem." Matthew has just spent a chapter proving Jesus is Israel's King; now the first people to come and worship him are not Israelites at all. The magoi were Gentile scholars — astrologers, dream-readers, the wise men of a foreign court, probably from Persia or Babylon — the last people a devout Jew expected at a Messiah's cradle. They have read a strange star and come to do homage: "Where is he who is born King of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east, and have come to worship him."

And here Matthew springs his first irony. When the news reaches the capital, "Herod was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him." The pagans travel across the world to worship; the holy city is disturbed. Herod convenes the chief priests and scribes and asks where the Messiah is to be born, and they answer instantly, chapter and verse: "In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet" — and they quote Micah, the shepherd-ruler out of Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). Then comes the most damning detail in the chapter: they know exactly where the King is, and not one of them walks the five miles to see. Calvin, the Geneva reformer, put it with no padding at all: "The scribes show them the way, and point out the place where he was born; but they allow them to depart alone: not one moves a step."^*

The men with the Scriptures stay home; the men with the star set out. It is possible to have the right address for Christ and no desire to go to him.

And the reverse is just as exact, because the magi did not get there on starlight alone. Tim Keller, who preached at Redeemer in Manhattan for nearly forty years, marked where their expertise ran out: “You see the wise men by their wisdom were able to know there was a king but not where to find the King.”^* The learning of the nations gets them across a desert and to the wrong city; six words of Micah, read aloud by men who will not travel five miles, get them the rest of the way. Keller's summary of what the magi are doing at the end of it is the other half of Matthew's irony — “here you have the wisdom of the nations bowing down and acknowledging Jesus Christ as the true wisdom of God.” Neither party has what it needs alone.

They found him, and fell down (2:9–12)

The magi go on, and "the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, until it came and stood over where the young child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy." Matthew piles up the words for gladness — the joy of people who have crossed a world and are nearly there. "And entering the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Opening their treasures, they offered to him gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh."

The church early saw a sermon folded into the three gifts. Leo the Great, the fifth-century bishop of Rome, preached on this scene and read the gifts as a confession: the magi understood, he said, that "in gold royal honour, in incense Divine adoration, in myrrh the acknowledgment of mortality" was owed to this child — a King (gold), and God (frankincense, the smoke of the temple), and a man who had come to die (myrrh, the spice of burial). Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, would not let the scene be tidied into a pageant. "And what sign at all of royalty did they behold," he asked, "when they saw a shed, and a manger, and a child in swaddling clothes, and a poor mother?" Nothing in the room argued for worship. They worshipped anyway.

Whether or not the wise men grasped all of that, Matthew surely means us to. Even the treasures at the cradle whisper the shape of the whole Gospel: the King is divine, and he has come to die. And note who is kneeling. The firstfruits of the nations are already here at the manger — a preview, on the Gospel's second page, of its last page, where this same Jesus will send his church to "make disciples of all nations" (28:19). The Gentiles who came seeking are the down payment on a promise as old as Abraham: in him all the families of the earth would be blessed.

A king who kills (2:13–18)

But there is another king in the story, and he does not kneel. Warned in a dream, Joseph takes the child and his mother and flees by night into Egypt — and Matthew hears in it the voice of Hosea: "Out of Egypt I called my son" (Hosea 11:1). The line was first spoken of Israel, God's son, brought up out of Egypt in the exodus; Matthew sees Jesus quietly living Israel's story over again — down into Egypt, and out — this time as the Son who will not fail. Where the nation was faithless, the true Israel is faithful; where they broke, he holds.

Then the horror. Herod, "when he saw that he was mocked by the wise men, was exceedingly angry, and sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region, from two years old and under." Bethlehem was a small town; the victims perhaps a dozen or two — a small number as history counts atrocities, and an entire world to each mother. Matthew reaches for Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah… Rachel weeping for her children… because they are no more" (Jeremiah 31:15). He does not tidy the grief or explain it away; he lets the mothers weep, and quotes a prophet who wept with them. The King has come into a world where kings kill children to keep their thrones, and he has come precisely into that. The escape itself is no triumph to look at — a family on a road at night, running. "This flight is a part of the foolishness of the cross," Calvin wrote, "but it surpasses all the wisdom of the world."^*

Set the two kings beside each other, for that is what Matthew is doing. Leo turned and spoke to Herod straight across the centuries: "The fear that racks you, Herod, is wasted; in vain do you try to vent your rage on the infant you suspect. Your realm cannot hold Christ; the Lord of the world is not satisfied with the narrow limits of your sway." Calvin saw the same fear from the inside: "All tyrants are cowards, and their cruelty produces stronger alarm in their own breasts than in the breasts of others." The sword is not strength. It is panic with a budget.

There is the whole tragedy of Herod, and of every Herod since: clutching a small throne so tightly that he will murder to keep it, terrified of a King who never wanted his crown — because the true King's kingdom was never the thing Herod was afraid of losing.

It is a comfortable chapter to read at a distance, and Tim Keller, who preached at Redeemer in Manhattan for nearly forty years, closed that distance: “you and I every one of us has a little Herod in our heart. We've got a part of our heart that says nobody tells me what to do.”^* What follows from that is not the exhortation you expect. Keller's counsel is not to try harder at surrender — “if you just beat your heart and submission it'll break. It will break. You'll break your own heart” — but something else entirely: “you can melt your heart. You can melt Your heart with the knowledge of what He did.” Force does to a heart what Herod did to Bethlehem. Only the other king's arrival does the thing force cannot.

Out of Egypt, home to Nazareth (2:19–23)

Herod dies; an angel calls the family home; but fearing Herod's son Archelaus in Judea, Joseph settles far north in Galilee, "in a city called Nazareth" — a town so obscure and looked-down-upon that a man could later ask, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Matthew reads even this backwater as prophecy: "he shall be called a Nazarene," catching the whole prophetic drumbeat that the Messiah would be despised and lowly. The King of the earth grows up in a nowhere town, and that too is part of the plan. There may be a finer thread here still. The prophets had promised a netzer — a green "branch," a living shoot — sprouting from the felled stump of Jesse's royal line (Isaiah 11:1); and "Nazareth" and "Nazarene" chime with that Hebrew word for branch.^* If Matthew is playing on it, the obscure town's very name preaches: out of a royal house cut down to a stump, in a place nobody esteemed, God is quietly growing the Branch who will become the tree of the nations.

Two kings, and two ways of meeting the news that a King has been born. Herod hears it and reaches for a sword; the magi hear it and reach for their treasures. One tries to kill the King to keep his little kingdom; the others give up the comforts of home to kneel. And in between stand the scribes, who know the prophecy cold and never move — the most dangerous position of all. Matthew lays the three before us and lets us find ourselves. The child who fled Herod's soldiers would grow up to be nailed to a cross under a placard that read, in bitter accuracy, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews" (27:37) — and there the two kingdoms met for the last time. But the true King does not win his throne the way Herod kept his, by killing his rivals; he wins it by dying for them. That is the King the wise men worshiped without yet knowing it, and the King the scribes missed with the map in their hands.