What might Herod, the ruthless king who appears in Matthew 2, teach us about discipleship and our relationship to power as Christians? It may seem strange, even a hangover from an earlier point in the Christian year, but considering the infanticidal Herod the Great not only during Christmastide but also in Lent may bear good fruit.
Facing political threat, King Herod clung tight-fistedly to his power. On hearing news from the Magi that a king had been born, Herod tried to trick these wise men from the east into telling him where the child was so that he could, presumably, find the newborn king and take care of him before he threatened Herod’s power. When the Magi did not return to share this information with the evil king, Herod made the dramatic and tragic decision to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were less than two years old.
In his Covenant essay for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, Wes Hill reminded us of the horror and the wails and lamentations of the mothers who lost their beloved [or young] sons in this killing. Herod thus joins Pharaoh and many others with power through the centuries who, as Hill writes, “are willing to sacrifice infant lives to preserve that power.”
Herod clung, with clenched hands, to the political authority he had, with tragic results. Think of how different this is from the way God approaches power. We read about dominion—a power word—in the opening pages of Genesis. In giving us dominion, God entrusted us with the gift of his power. Rather than hording his authority, God shares his power with us. God’s vision was that we would seek his way of justice and righteousness in the newly created world with the power that he had given to us.
To put it differently, in the story of creation we see a God who not only uses his power to give life and create beauty, but who is generous enough to share his power with humankind. Herod, when faced with the opportunity to share his power with the new King of the Jews, did not take that route. Clinging to the power he had received, he ordered the massacre of innocent infants rather than risk even an ounce of his power by waiting to see what might happen.
In a recent sermon at Christ Church, San Antonio, the Rev. Joe Dewey observed that Herod’s response on hearing the news of the birth of a king was likely to feel angry, threatened, and afraid. I can imagine with Fr. Joe that Herod experienced fear at the thought of losing power and felt anger at the threat of political change. I would guess that Herod was driven by a sense of scarcity, a zero-sum mentality, never imagining that the rule of this new king would not operate with the limited categories of what we would today call realpolitik.
This king who was born was not about to take Herod’s power, at least not in the narrow ways that Herod imagined it. This true king did not, as Herod did, sacrifice the lives of other people for the sake of preserving his power, but rather sacrificed himself for our sake. Indeed, Jesus, the King of kings, used his power to free us so that we could be loosened from the grip of power—freed from the Herodian temptation to horde and cling to power.
The freedom to live with open hands rather than tight fists is a gift that God gives to all of us in Christ Jesus, not just those with explicitly political forms of power. All humans were entrusted with the gift of dominion. This means that we all, regardless of our place in life, have been given the gift of power. That gift remains, even after the Fall.
And yet our use of that gift has become twisted. Rather than open-handedly and freely offering our power back to God to seek his vision for the flourishing of ourselves, our neighbor, and the rest of the created world, humanity began to seek what we understood to be our good at the tragic expense of others. Think, for example, of Cain and Abel and how early that story of fratricide appears in the biblical story. In the Fall we became, to use the classic theological phrase, incurvatus in se, curved in on ourselves, looking out for ourselves and our kind rather than others. We became tight-fisted, like Herod, and injustice is the inevitable result.
For Augustine, this does not invalidate the gift of power. Rather, it underscores why we need Jesus Christ—to free us from our selfish enslavement and to enable us to use such received power open-handedly to seek justice and love in the world. According to Augustine, both justice and power are God-given goods, but justice is the greater good. This means that we are called to use our power to seek God’s justice in the world. Strikingly, Augustine remarks that the devil’s mistake was to place love of power over love of justice, while Jesus Christ did just the opposite. Jesus used his power to prioritize justice, and this freed us from the devil’s power. As Augustine writes in Book XIII of his classic On the Trinity,
The essential flaw of the devil’s perversion made him a lover of power and a deserter and assailant of justice, which means that men imitate him all the more thoroughly the more they neglect or even detest justice and studiously devote themselves to power, rejoicing at the possession of it or inflamed with the desire for it. So it pleased God to deliver man from the devil’s authority by beating him at the justice game, not the power game, so that men too might imitate Christ by seeking to beat the devil at the justice game, not the power game. Not that power is to be shunned as something bad, but that the right order might be preserved which puts justice first.
The devil desired to play the power game rather than the justice game. When we focus on pursuing power or are driven by the desire for it, we are imitating the devil. But Christ, who had all authority in heaven and on earth, prioritized justice. He used his power to beat the devil at the justice game. And now in Christ we have all been freed so that we do not have to be driven by the love and pursuit of power.
To continue Augustine’s line of thought and connect it to our calling as disciples today, this means that we are called to imitate Christ by loving justice more than power. We are called to use our God-given power to play the justice game rather than the power game as we live as disciples of Jesus Christ in the world today. This is to understand Jesus not as one who rejected power, but rather used his power to seek God’s will and way in the world. So we too can receive the power we’ve been given in the different roles we have and the places we inhabit as a gift to be open-handedly offered to God as we seek his kingdom, justice, and righteousness in this world.
If Herod demonstrates a tight-fisted, destructive relationship with power, perhaps the Magi, even in Lent, can offer us a glimpse of what open-handed discipleship looks like. Willing to do whatever it took to follow the star, the wise men offered their time and energy to respond to the revelation that God had given to them through this wonder in the night sky. When the star led them to the newborn king, they joyfully knelt to worship him. And then they opened their treasure chests, open-handedly offering their gifts to God.
The Magi suggest to us what we can embody in and through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, namely, that we can joyfully worship God and open-handedly offer all of our gifts to God, including our time, our talents, and our power. In Lent specifically this calling to be open-handed can be reinforced through the classic traditions of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. As we share what we’ve been given through almsgiving, we are reminded that everything we have comes from God and is to be offered back to God for his use and his glory. As we fast, we remember that we are utterly reliant on God for our strength and our life. As we pray in repentance, we reflect on our need for Jesus Christ, who beat the devil at the power game through the justice game, so that we may be forgiven for our sins and freed from selfish tight-fistedness. From dust we have been made and to dust we shall return, and in between, let us by the grace of God open-handedly offer all our lives, including our power, as living sacrifices to him.
Kristen Deede Johnson, PhD is Principal of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. Previous appointments include Dean and Vice President of Western Theological Seminary and Professor of Educational Ministries. Her publications include Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge, 2007). Her 2017 co-authored book, The Justice Calling: Where Passion Meets Perseverance (Brazos), was awarded Book of the Year from Christianity Today in the Politics and Public Life Category.
