We don’t find Elizabeth or John the Baptist on Christmas cards or manger scenes. Thankfully, we also don’t see much of King Herod – although he does slip into a pageant or two. Who’s been more vilified than King Herod the Great? It’s as if a good story needs a nasty villain.

The Bible replays – to be sure you don’t miss the point – its favorite plotline: it’s not the high and mighty God uses, but the lowly, the unlikely. I have this hunch that it’s no accident that Jesus arrived under the reign of Herod, Judea’s longest-ruling, wealthiest and most powerful ruler, and during the season when Augustus was reigning as the greatest of all the Roman emperors – just as God delivered the Israelites from Egypt while Rameses the Great, the longest ruling and most powerful of all the Pharaohs, was on the throne. Sort of God’s joke, not sneaking redemption in under a weakling, but squarely in the face of those least likely to allow anything revolutionary.

I recently finished Zora Neale Hurston’s latest novel – an odd thing to say, since she died in 1960! But just this year, among her belongings nearly destroyed by a housefire, a deputy sheriff found a box of papers which turned out to be her novel about King Herod! She portrays him as brilliant, charming, handsome, romantic, an exemplary leader, a genius at building – which must have been true! Villains are never just creeps. They attract, they achieve; people get drawn in to be near a winner.

Perhaps in Herod’s case, after decades of governing a prospering nation and constructing wonders of the world, he went a bit mad. He had two of his own sons strangled to death, along with the boys of Bethlehem days after Jesus’ birth. On his deathbed, he ordered the elite of the city to come to the hippodrome, had the gates locked behind them, and ordered that they be executed to guarantee an outpouring of grief when he himself died. The magi were lucky to get away after riskily saying to his face “Where is the king of the Jews? We have come to worship him” (Matthew 2:2).

Even his grandest achievements raise questions. Herod was the darling of the Roman world, and the most prolific, impressive builder in all of antiquity. His structures and cities dazzled. But it was poor Jews, like Mary and Joseph, and Jesus’ disciples, who bore the burden of excessive taxes to fund this building extravagance. Herod’s tax collectors knew how to squeeze you for your last shekel. Pay! – or we’ll break your knees, burn your crops, seize your wives.

You have to love the bawdy, theologically kooky humor in Matthew 2’s story of the Magi – astrologers! – hunting for the savior of the world. A Libra, a Pisces and a Taurus, gazing at their star charts, found Jesus, while Herod’s Bible scholars missed the Messiah entirely! How sobering: how many times I too have flipped through the Bible, holding truth in my hands, yet still missing the living Lord. How determined is God to be found? There are no means God won’t try.

Sometimes Bible readers get mixed up about which Herod was which. Herod the Great ruled when Jesus was born. But it was Herod Antipas, his son, who reigned when Jesus was crucified. There also was Herod Archaelaus, Herod Philip, and not one but two Herod Agrippas in the Bible! But really, Herod, Herod, Herod and Herod are the same guy. All were big successes while being egotistical, insecure petty potentates, in bed with the Romans, and clueless about God.

There is a kind of monotony about the Herods and their ilk through history. It was during Advent that Saddam Hussein was found in a hole in the ground. It was during Advent that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Josef Stalin was born during Advent. Pan Am flight 103 crashed near Lockerbie during Advent, downed by a terrorist bomb. The faces vary, but rulers repeatedly corral too much power and abuse their position. Violence ripples outward, fear explodes, we are terrified, and God is grieved.

Advent is the season we glory in the humble and small. Herod felt threatened by a small baby. Once that baby was a grown man, his friends fanned out into the world and provoked riots. Paranoid authorities complained, “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also… They are acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus” (Acts 17:6-7). But not just another King. The King. The King of Kings. Emmanuel, before whom rulers silent fall.