Kings.  Prime ministers.  Governors.  What are they supposed to do?  Aren’t they supposed to provide for everyone?  Save people?  Make the world a better place?  A safer place? Are they doing this?  Or do you have any stories of negligence – stories of governments, kings and prime ministers not carrying out their duties?

The Bible has one.  The kings of Judah had utterly failed to carry out their divine assignment.  They were to take care of God’s people.  Provide for them.  Keep them safe.  Lead them with a godly example.  Be representatives of God for them.  Make the worship of the true God and the following of his ways be the chief priority of their nation.

They failed.  Miserably.  Not only did they not set good examples for their people, these kings didn’t follow God themselves.  They brought idol worship into their nation.  They built places for people to follow other gods.  They encouraged it.  They no longer defended the true God.  Put Him in the background.  But made every other religion acceptable.  Can we relate?

As God had warned, He now tells these kings they are going to be replaced.  He’s going to get rid of them.  They failed miserably in their roles.  God was going to replace them. The people wouldn’t need to be afraid anymore. God reminded them of his promise of hope for the future.  From the offspring of David, God had promised to give them a great and good King.  This King would care about them.  Fight for them.  Save them.  Keep them safe.

Picture in your mind’s eye an image of a great warrior, a renowned champion, returning home from far-off lands.  His fame has long preceded him, and now the reports of his feats are confirmed by the scars he bears, the remembrance of wounds more noble than any tokens of honour.  With dignity he moves up the main causeway of the city, lined with the faces of his people, the very people for whom he has fought bravely, whose freedom he has secured.  The warrior has returned after years on the field of battle, returning only when triumph was achieved and not a moment before.  This is his homecoming, and it is as a conquering hero he returns.  Before him, at the head of the street, stands the king, who is his father.  The scene is both a homecoming and a coronation.  For the father-king will now hand the kingdom over to his son.

This is the kind of King God promised his people.  One who loved them, cared about them, fought for them, sacrificed for them.  Jeremiah uses the imagery Isaiah did (11:1): “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.”  A Branch was coming!  From a stump that was dead and lifeless, the Lord would cause life to sprout up!  Since Judah’s kings had failed, the Lord Himself would step in as Saviour!

Read verse 5.  This Branch would be righteous.  Righteous in every way.  Without sin.  Perfect.  Not only would He be righteous, He would rule righteously.  He would bring about and exercise righteousness in all that He did and said.  And the outcome of his rule of righteousness would be that Judah would be saved and Israel would live in safety.

Have you ever read that genealogy in the first chapter of Matthew?  The one that just seems to be a long list of people begetting other people?  Ever wondered what’s the big deal?  Why did Matthew waste the ink on all that?  Well, there is more to it than first meets the eye.  You see, David was the greatest king Israel ever had.  And Matthew begins: “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David…”  (read various verses from Bible)

Now, if you were a Jew reading the introduction of this book, which is telling us something about Jesus’ family, where he came from, you would read king, king, king, king, king…  Matthew has an agenda here!  He wants you to see who He thinks Jesus is.

The Righteous Branch that Jeremiah promised?  The King who will reign wisely that all of Israel was waiting for?  Jesus.  Not just a king.  The King.  Was He righteous?  No one could find Him guilty of any sin.  Jesus perfectly fulfilled the law according to God’s intention!  He gave God the perfect obedience God demands of every human being!  And so, He supplied the righteousness before God which every other human being lacks.  “The Lord our righteousness!”

And what did his righteousness do for us?  Saved us.  Gave us security.  Made the world a better place.  Gave us hope for the future.  Gave us the forgiveness of sins.  Peace with God.  The Lord Himself is our righteousness!  For that to be true, the Lord Himself must have become one of us, having taken all that we are upon Himself.  What He is and what He has done, He has done for us.  He has given to us a gift, the gift of righteousness we could never have gained for ourselves.  He is the door that opens heaven and keeps it open!  The Lord our righteousness!  The Lord My Righteousness!  What He did, He did for me!  He has made me his own.  This is my certainty.  My hope.  My confidence.  The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me.

And that is what makes Him a different kind of King.  One who gives Himself for us.  The King who will do what is just and right that Jeremiah was talking about.  The King of kings!  A King who has stirred the world up ever since this Righteous Branch entered our world.

In the first century, the world was ruled by the Roman Empire, which was ruled by a succession of emperors called the Caesars.  The Caesars claimed they were sent by the gods to renew creation.  Caesar Augustus believed that as the son of god, he was god incarnate on earth, the prince of peace who had come to restore all of creation.  He inaugurated a 12-day celebration called Advent to celebrate his birth.  Sound familiar?  His priests offered sacrifices & incense to rid people of their guilt.  One of his popular slogans was “there is no other name under heaven by which men can be saved than that of Caesar.”  Another phrase often used was “Caesar is Lord.”  Throughout the Roman Empire, the Caesars called on people to worship them as the divine saviors of mankind, and a city that acknowledged Caesar as Lord was called an ekklesia.

It was at this time that Jesus’ kingdom was established among an ethnic minority in a remote corner of the empire.  These people claimed their leader was a rabbi who had announced the arrival of the Kingdom of God, had been crucified, had risen from the dead and appeared to his followers.  And that He was a King.  One of their favourite slogans was “Jesus is Lord.”

Think about the political dimensions of that claim.  If Jesus is Lord, then what does that say about Caesar?  These Christians were claiming that there was a Lord, and it wasn’t Caesar!  And what did they call their gatherings?  Ekklesias.  A word that in English means “church.”  Another of their favourite slogans was “There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”(Acts 4:12) Shocking.  They took political propaganda from the empire and changed it to make it about their Lord!  To join up with these people was to risk your life!

The first Christians were confident the risen Christ was working in and through them to announce God’s love for the world. In Acts, it says they were witnessing the resurrection, “and God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there was no needy persons among them.” What was the result of the resurrection?  There were “No needy persons among them.”

Remember the Caesars claimed they were the ones who provided for everyone and saved everyone and made the world a better place?  For these first Christians, the question was, “Who is Lord?  Jesus or Caesar?  Who orders society?  Who provides for you?  Who puts food on your table?  Who brings peace to the world?  And how did they answer that?

These Christians made sure everybody in their midst had enough to eat.  They made sure everybody was able to pay their bills.  They made sure there was enough to go around. The resurrection in them was not an abstract spiritual concept!  It was a concrete social and economic reality!  This is what the Kingdom of Jesus is like!  God raised Jesus from the dead to show the world that Jesus is Lord!  The King!  And his kingdom is better than the ones He replaced!

The early Christians rarely tried to “prove” to others that Jesus rose from the dead.  They simply showed others what Jesus rising from the dead meant in their lives.  Most of the passages about the early church deal with possessions and meals and generosity.  They understood people were rarely persuaded by arguments, but more often by experiences.  Living, breathing, flesh-and-blood experiences of the resurrection community.  They saw it as their responsibility to put Jesus’ message on display.  To the outside world, it was less about proving and more about inviting people to experience this community, this kingdom, for themselves.

And so, these first Christians passed on the faith to the next generation who passed it on to the next generation who passed it on to the next generation until it got to … us.  Here.  Today.  And now it is our turn.  It is our turn to step up and take responsibility for who the church is going to be for a new generation.  It is our turn to live as our King lived, to live the kind of lives God intended us to live, to show others the kind of love that our King showed us!

Our gospel text tells us Jesus had to die to become the King.  Colossians tells us it was his blood, shed on the cross, which made peace between us and God.  And that is what makes The King a different kind of king.  And you and I, when we belong to his kingdom, when He is ruling in our hearts, show the world what our King, The King, is like.  What his heart is like.

In December 1997, a young man in West Paducah, Kentucky, took a gun to school and killed seven of his classmates. Parents came from all over the community, frantically praying a parents’ most heartfelt prayer: Not my child. Please don’t let anything happen to my child.  There is one mother whose prayer was not answered that day. Her son died in the shooting. In spite of her shock and grief, the mother didn’t hesitate when doctors asked if she would donate her son’s organs to someone else in critical need.

Many months passed, and the mother discovered that some of her son’s organs went to a Methodist pastor. She contacted him and asked to meet. The day of their meeting, the grieving mother and the grateful pastor talked and prayed and celebrated the life of the precious son who died.  And then the mother asks one last question: “Can I put my ear to your heart? Can I hear my son’s heart beating, one more time?”

When God wants to hear His Son’s heart beat, God puts His ear to our chest.  That’s where He hears the righteous heart beat of his Son.  Our King.  His righteousness is now heard in us.  Christ died that we may live. That’s how loved we are.  Is his heart beating in you?  Let The King rule in your heart.  Let Him live there.  Let God, and let others hear his Son’s heart beat in you!   Amen.