History is littered with debris from a host of dictatorships, but we still find regimes that are eager to leave their own scars.
Any ambitious tyrant could find a role model in first-century Herod the Great.
Rome’s emperor, no stranger to cruelty, said that Herod’s pets were safer than his family, for this monster killed his wife, his mother-in-law, three sons, countless other children, and hundreds of religious and civic leaders.
Even while dying, he split his kingdom three ways to limit his heirs’ prospects.
Jesus was born at the peak of this paranoid reign. Away from home and marked for death, for whispers of a king’s birth in Bethlehem had prompted Herod’s infamous slaughter of the innocents.
Newbie parents Joseph and Mary fled to safety at the Jewish settlement in Egypt, one of many that were scattered empire-wide.
But after Herod’s death, they returned to Nazareth, a northern Galilean village, where Jesus grew to manhood and began his ministry of teaching, healing and hope.
As Jesus shuttled between Galilee and Jerusalem, a two-hour drive today, his ministry outgrew its Jewish roots, revealing a much larger plan that God had incubated over centuries, for anyone to know him personally.
And as Jesus’ ministry began including religious outcasts, the religious heavies became so fearful that they arranged his death.
However, Jesus arranged his resurrection, which effectively multiplied his ministry as growing numbers of people accepted his promise of a new start.
Many Gentiles or non-Jews had become spiritually jaded about their gods’ limited powers and their mutual distrust.
So, they were drawn to the idea that a single God – the invisible God of the Jews – could help them to deal with every aspect of life.
However, with no Jewish tribal links, they could not fully participate, so they willingly embraced Christianity’s offer of complete equality and trust for anyone – Jew, Gentile, or barbarian alike.
Then, as members of this new Christian family, they found his love renewing them and motivating them to spread the freshness of his love into their wider world.
Our pressures today may span across political to personal or even perilous.
But God has ways to undermine any of these pressures – not only protecting us, but also guiding us to greater confidence and effectiveness, especially as we make the effort to be sensitive and reassuring to folks around us who feel swamped by their pressures.
Noel Mitaxa
On behalf of a church near you, inviting you to explore God’s love