A Dumb Dutchman
My high school English teacher was Mr. Joel Boeyink. Mr. Boeyink was a little quirky. He was balding on top but still had a ring of hippie length hair around the sides. He had a big, floppy mustache. He almost always had a tootsie pop in his mouth. He liked to hand tootsie pops out as a sort of motivator. And he liked to tell dumb Dutchman jokes.
I still remember several of his jokes. For example: Did you hear about the dumb Dutchman who inherited an ice factory? He went bankrupt. He lost the recipe.
Or this one: Did you hear about the group of dumb Dutchmen who went ice fishing out of the back of a pick-up truck? It’s pretty tragic. The truck fell through the ice and they drowned. They couldn’t get the tailgate open.
And sometimes he liked to tell longer, more involved jokes where you had no idea where they were going. This is one of my favorites:
There was this dumb Dutchman who lived in a fifth floor apartment. Every Thursday his landlord would come by to collect the rent. And the Dutchman always hated Thursdays. Because his landlord would come in, go use the bathroom, and then come out and ask a question that the Dutchman had no idea how to answer. Every week it was the same scenario. The landlord would ask: “Hey, do you know the name of the first president?” or “How many hours are there in a day?” The landlord was a regular Alex Trebeck, and the poor dumb Dutchman was always stumped.
He hated how the landlord would always act all superior because he was so much smarter than the Dutchman. Just once, the Dutchman wanted the landlord to ask a question he could answer.
Then, one day after the landlord had stumped him again, the Dutchman had an idea. He went down to the local farm implement dealer and bought a tractor tire. Not just a little tractor tire—a big one—one that would go on the back of a dual axle. So he buys this big old tractor tire and brings it back to his apartment building, but he can’t get it in the door. So he hires a contractor to come and stick a pulley on the side of the building and he winches the tire up to the fifth floor. But it won’t fit through his window, so the contractor knocks a hole in the wall and they swing the tractor tire in and put it in the bathtub. Then the contractor spent the next week patching the wall up.
Finally, Thursday rolled around and the landlord showed up at his normal time and went into the bathroom just like he always did. Then he came out and said: “Hey, did you know there’s a giant tractor tire in your bathtub?”
And the dumb Dutchman said: “YES!”
Those are some pretty bad jokes. And, honestly, they don’t really have anything to do with Dutch people. I mean, you could tell the same joke and make it a dumb German, or a dumb Norwegian or a dumb Russian. There’s nothing particularly ethnic about them. The reason Mr. Boeyink liked to tell dumb Dutchmen jokes was because he is Dutch, and most of the kids in his classes were Dutch. It’s just a way to poke fun at your own heritage.
And my point in telling you about it now is to get us all to think about our heritage a little bit. For the most part, those of us in this room right now have Western European backgrounds. For most of us, our families have been in America for quite a while—I think I’m 5th or 6th generation American—and before that our ancestors lived in the Netherlands or Germany or Ireland or England or somewhere else in Europe. Few of us, if any of us, have any sort of Jewish background in our family trees. Few of us have any sort of genetic tie to the Middle East.
And yet, we are gathered here this morning in the name of an itinerant Jewish rabbi who wandered the scrubby hills of Palestine some 2000 years ago. We are here to celebrate the birthday of a man who was said to be born the king of a tiny tribe of people occupying a patch of land about 1/7th the size of Iowa.
My question is: how did that happen? How is it that a 5th generation American with a Dutch heritage living two millennia after and 6000 miles away considers this primitive era Jewish man to be Lord and Savior? What are any of us doing worshipping someone who is—if you really think about it—completely foreign to us?
God’s Plan
For an answer, we can turn to our key verse.
For this Christmas season we’ve been focusing on a single verse from 1 Timothy: 1 Timothy 3:16. It’s an ancient hymn—we’ve been calling it the first Christmas carol—and we’ve been working through it a line at a time.
16 Beyond all question, the mystery of godliness is great:
He appeared in a body,
was vindicated by the Spirit,
was seen by angels,
was preached among the nations,
was believed on in the world,
was taken up in glory.
This week, our focus is on the fourth line: He was preached among the nations. The point is—what I want us to understand today is—that: God’s plan—from the beginning—has always been that all the nations would worship His Son. The reason that we know about and worship Jesus—the reason He is relevant and meaningful to 21st century Americans—is because God never intended for Him to be just a savior to the Jews.
Now, this doesn’t seem like a typical Christmas idea. “He was preached among the nations” sounds more like the kind of text we’d use for a missions weekend. But I want you to see today that it is an integral part of the Christmas story. God’s plan has always been that all the nations would worship His Son. From the beginning, Jesus was meant to be a gift to the world.
And I want us to see this by looking at a great part of the Christmas story: the story of the visit by the Magi. It’s Matthew 2:1-12:
1 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”
3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. 5 “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:
6 “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’”
7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”
9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.
I’m not going to have time to go through all the details in this story. But I would like to consider what it has to say to us about God’s intention for Jesus to be preached among all the nations. I have three observations I’d like to make from the text.
The Shepherd of Israel
First: Jesus is the Messiah, the King of the Jews, and for that He should be honored. We begin by understanding that the infant Jesus was the answer to a specific promise given to a specific people.
Verse 2 makes it clear whom this story is really about: “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?”
These Magi—and more about them in a minute—have arrived some time after Jesus’ birth and they are looking for the King of the Jews.
By itself, that’s not necessarily a big deal. If you think about it, right now in the United States there are probably 3 or 4 children under the age of 18 who are someday going to be the President of the United States. Nobody can really predict who they are, and nobody is setting out to find them or honor them. So what’s the big deal about a baby who someday is going to be king?
Verse 4 makes it clear that the magi are looking for more than just a future king to sit on Herod’s throne. It says:
When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born.
The “Christ”. That’s the Greek word for Messiah.
40 years earlier the Senate in Rome had declared that Herod was “king of the Jews.” But no one called him the Christ or the Messiah. The Messiah was the long-awaited, God-appointed ruler who would overthrow all forms of oppression and usher in the end of history and establish the kingdom of God that would last forever.
We don’t know how the wise men learned that such a king was coming: but Herod immediately gets the message. These fellows are not searching for a mere, ordinary, human successor to him. They are searching for the final King, the King to end all kings. This was not something Herod was excited about.
In fact, Herod doesn’t even know the basics of Messianic prophecy. He has to call in the experts to find out where this Christ is to be born. And they quote from Micah 5:2:
6 “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’”
Here’s what I was talking about in the introduction: Jesus is the long-expected ruler of a very specific tribe of people—the Judeans. He is the coming King of a select nation—Israel. Jesus is very much tied to a particular place and time. In many ways, He is as foreign to our context and culture as anybody can get.
That’s the first thing we have to understand: by all appearances Jesus was a Jewish Messiah.
From the East
But here’s my second observation from the story: Jesus is not just to be worshipped by Jews, but by all the nations in the world. Even though Jesus was born a Jewish Messiah, His birth was significant for everybody. And I say that, because of the Magi.
The Magi are actually very mysterious characters in the Christmas story. It’s appropriate that we are talking about them in a series called “The Mystery of Godliness” because there is a lot don’t know about them. We don’t know how many of them there were—traditionally we say there were three because they gave three gifts, but we don’t know. We don’t know their names—they are often called Melchior, Caspar, and Balthassar based on a 5th Century document, but that’s tradition and doesn’t come from the Bible. We don’t know when they got there--our nativity scenes usually picture the Magi waiting in line after the shepherds to see the newborn Jesus, but judging from the way they ask the question in verse 2 (Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews?) Jesus was probably several months old by the time they arrived (up to two years, Matt2:16). We don’t even know that they were kings—in fact, they probably were not, though they do appear to have been quite wealthy.
What we do know, is that they were foreign. Matthew 2:1:
1 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem
They came from the east. Probably from Persia, maybe from Arabia—again, we’re not sure—but they were clearly not from Israel. They were a part of what the Bible calls the nations. And they were drawn to visit Jesus.
Actually, we can say a little bit more about them. The word Magi comes from a word that refers to a magician, sorcerer or one wise in interpreting the stars. These mysterious visitors were probably highly educated scholars who were familiar with medicine, history, religion, and prophecy. Judging by their ability to drop everything and take the long trip in search of a baby, they probably came from a very wealthy class that allowed them the leisure to pursue their studies.
They were also trained in what we would call astrology—the study of the stars in an attempt to answers the great questions of life. It was what they saw in the stars that caused them to take this journey in the first place. Verse 2:
2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”
The point, again, is that the presence of these foreigners tells us something very important about Jesus: He’s not just the newborn savior of Israel, He is the newborn savior of all the world. Whatever prompted these men to get on their camels and travel to the West; they could see something that Herod and the wise men of Jerusalem could not: that Jesus was a worldwide King.
Star of Wonder
Which brings me to my third observation: God directs the universe so that His Son may be worshipped. God takes a direct hand in guiding these foreign wise men to the cradle of His Son.
The other mysterious thing about this story is the star. What could have happened in the heavens that would have been significant enough to prompt these Magi to go on a journey of tribute?
There have been several astronomical studies done to try to understand what was happening in the heavens at the time of Jesus’ birth. One study suggests that Jupiter—the planet of kings—may have been in eclipse the year Jesus was born. Another study uses ancient Chinese history to suggest a supernova may have taken place the same year as the nativity.
But the truth is, we don’t know. And even if we could pinpoint what the “star in the east” of verse 2 was, that doesn’t explain how the star went before the Magi on the little five-mile walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem as described in verse 9.
What is clear about the star is that it is doing something that it cannot do on its own: it is guiding magi to the son of God to worship him. There is only one Person in Biblical thinking that can be behind that intentionality in the stars—God Himself.
So the lesson is plain: God is guiding foreigners to Christ to worship Him. And God is doing so by exerting global—cosmological even—influence and power to get it done.
The Christmas story in Luke shows God influencing the entire Roman Empire so that a census is called at the exact time needed to get a pregnant virgin to Bethlehem so that prophecy can be fulfilled. Now Matthew shows God influencing the stars in the sky to get foreign magi to Bethlehem so that they can worship the Savior.
Towards the end of the book of Matthew Jesus is going to say:
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matt. 24:14)
And at the very end He says:
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matt. 28:19)
That’s the end of the gospel. Matthew is strongly making the point that Jesus is a universal Messiah for the nations, not just for Jews. But he is already making the same point at the beginning of the gospel, by telling the story of the Magi. From the beginning, God’s plan has always been for the nations to worship His Son.
Response
So, my point in all of this, again, is that Jesus is more than just a Jewish Savior. The reason 21st Century Americans come to worship a Jewish boy born in a stable 2000 years ago is that it was part of God’s plan all along. Jesus is a gift to the nations.
It was God’s design then. It is still His design now. This is God’s will for everybody in your office at work, in your neighborhood, and in your home. That they would come and worship Jesus Christ.
So how do we respond?
I think the application can be summed up in two phrases this morning: Come and see. And go and tell.
First, like the wise men, we should come and see this savior for ourselves. That’s the pattern at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel. We should come to see Jesus, investigate who He is, hear His claims, and then like the Magi we should bow down and worship Him.
That’s a striking word—“worship”. It’s used again and again in this story. The Magi came to worship the newborn king. Who worships a baby? If Prince William and Princess Kate had a baby, you might be inclined to come and see him. You might even want to honor him. But who worships a baby?
And yet these wise men recognized something we must all recognize about Jesus: He is no ordinary baby. He is deserving of our devotion, faith and trust. So, come and see.
Then, second, go and tell. If God’s plan is that Jesus be preached among the nations, then we have a role in that. That’s the pattern at the end of Matthew’s gospel. We should join in the task of telling others about Him. We should invite others to come and see for themselves.
Jesus was born the King of the Jews. He was Israel’s Messiah. But that birth had significance for a group of wealthy star-gazers from the East, and it has significance for 21st Century Americans as well. From the beginning, God’s plan has been for Jesus to be recognized and worshipped by all people.