A Villain in Each of Us
I want to share some thoughts this week about the villain of the Christmas story - King Herod.
Every drama needs a villain! I think the best villains in the world of entertainment are those ones you love to hate. Scar from the Lion King, or Cruella DeVille, or Gru and his minions - we want them to lose, but we sort of like them anyway.
In our day, there is this strange move towards sympathising with the villains of our stories. There's a trend now of famous villains getting their own 'origin story' movies! Some would say that getting us to sympathise with evil characters is all part of the devil's plan to erode our faith and our holiness. Perhaps there is a degree of truth to this.
Understanding the Villain Within
But on the other hand, when you look closely at a villain, you begin to see that villains are, in many ways, just ordinary people like you and me, who made some poor decisions.
It could be that we are more like the villains than we care to admit.
Toivi Blatt was a Holocaust survivor, and in 1983 he conducted an interview with Karl Frenzel, a Nazi who had been commandant at the concentration camp Blatt had been kept in. As they spoke, Blatt was struck by how Frenzel, in spite of his horrific actions in that camp, seemed to be a normal, kind man. It unsettled Blatt to realise that he and his captor were not so different. He wrote a book about it in fact.
Herod enters the Christmas story as the villain, and we love to hate him! But maybe if we dig a little deeper, we will see that Herod wasn't simply a terrible man.
Maybe he was an ordinary man, with similar fears and struggles to most of us, who chose to deal with them in the wrong ways.
Finding Redemption Despite Our Sin
In fact you might say that sin is just us dealing with life in godless ways. Instead of going to God, we go to godless things, and this, in a sense, is what makes us villainous within. It's called the sinful nature, and the Bible is clear that each of us is born with one.
But even villains can find redemption. Perhaps you remember a few weeks back we looked at another villain, Manasseh, and how he ended up turning to God and finding redemption.
If you see yourself in the Christmas villain this week, don't despair! You may find redemption, if you do what he didn't: if you embrace the Christ-child and don't persecute Him.
May you find what Herod didn't - the wonder and glory of Christ, which changes your life this Christmas.
Herod is the great Christmas villain! But are we more like him than we’d like to admit?