From Herod to Today: Misunderstanding the Messiah

Rev. Sang Ho Bae's fifth exposition on the gospel of Matthew. This time, the focus is on Herod and his modern-day successors.

Herod’s attempt to kill Jesus arose entirely from misunderstanding. When the Magi from the East came and asked, “We have followed the star in the sky and have come all the way here; where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?” he took the birth of the “king of the Jews” as the appearance of a political rival. This misunderstanding caused him to commit a tremendous mistake—opposing the Messiah—despite living in the most blessed age in which he could have received Him personally.

Herod had risen to the throne with the support of the Roman emperor, but because he was not a descendant of David, he constantly suffered from issues of legitimacy. He was a man who, being obsessed with power, even killed his own wife and sons. To such a man, the news that “the king of the Jews” had been born appeared to be a threat to his kingship, and he ultimately committed the horrific atrocity of killing all the male infants two years old and under in Bethlehem.

Herod was not the only one who misunderstood Jesus. Even the Jews expected the Messiah merely as a “political liberator” who would drive out the Roman power. One of the reasons the Jewish religious leaders sought to kill Jesus was their fear that the whole nation might be destroyed by Rome. Seeing the crowds flocking to Jesus as a spark of rebellion, they sought to remove Him out of concern that, if the Roman government sent its army, the Jewish nation would be placed in danger (John 11:48).

The charge for which Jesus was executed on the cross was also treason. They regarded His ministry as anti-state political activity. The reason the apostle Paul was arrested in Thessalonica was likewise due to the misunderstanding that he was speaking of “another king, namely Jesus.” “They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:7). The Roman authorities persecuted Christians because they misunderstood them as a political force. They failed to understand Jesus’ kingship—the kingdom of God—in its spiritual and redemptive meaning, and instead took it as a “political kingship” competing with earthly political power.

Such misunderstandings did not end with the Roman Empire but continued throughout history. The Islamic empires of the medieval and early modern periods acknowledged Jesus as a prophet, yet regarded the Christian confession that “Jesus is King and Sovereign” as a challenge to political authority. Communist states considered the Christian belief in the kingship of Jesus a threat to their regime; during the Soviet era, they labeled this belief a “counter-revolutionary political ideology,” destroyed churches, and executed clergy. The Chinese Communist Party persecuted Christians because the confession “Jesus is Lord” was seen as recognizing an authority higher than the Party. During the Japanese colonial period, Christians were regarded as rebels against the Japanese emperor because of confessions such as ‘Jesus is our King’ and hymn lyrics like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’ North Korea likewise defines the kingship of Jesus as ‘rebellion against the Supreme Leader system.

Misunderstandings about Jesus have continued into modern times as well. In the 1970s and 1980s, some activists and labor movements in Korea and Latin America interpreted Jesus as a “liberator of the working class,” equating His kingdom movement with labor movements. During the same period in Korea’s democratization movement, some theologians and activists interpreted Jesus as a symbol of democratic struggle and understood His cross as “the death of a revolutionary who resisted dictatorship.” Liberation theology, which emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, placed the liberation of the poor and oppressed at the center of its theology. Meanwhile, prosperity theology turned Jesus into a tool of material blessing, teaching that “if you believe in Jesus, you will become rich.”

Jesus cannot be reduced to the Jesus of laborers, the Jesus of democratization, or the liberator of the oppressed. Nor did He come simply as a provider of material blessings to meet our needs.
Scripture testifies clearly: Jesus is the Son of God, the Lord of all, and the Savior who came to save His people from their sins.