Once upon a time, there was an emperor. This guy loved flashy new clothes—like, really loved them. Along came these two con men who told him they had this amazing cloth. They said it was so special that it was invisible to anyone who wasn't smart enough or good enough at their job. The emperor thought, “Hey, this sounds like a pretty great way to see who I can count on in my kingdom,” and gave them a wheelbarrow full of cash to make his new outfit.

So, these guys set up their looms and pretended to work hard, but actually, they were just messing around—there was no cloth at all! When they told him they had finished, the emperor didn't want to seem dumb, so he said, “Oh yeah, this is fantastic!” His advisors and everyone else at court didn't want to look bad either, so they all pretended to love it too.

Come parade day, the emperor strutted out in his “new clothes,” which was basically him lacking appropriate attire. Of course, everyone in town played along, scared they would look stupid or unfit for their jobs if they said anything. But then, out of nowhere, a kid who was too young (or maybe we should say, “too honest”) to bother with all this stupid adult playacting shouted out, “He's not wearing anything!”

This got everyone to finally admit the truth. But the emperor, too embarrassed to own up to being duped, just kept on parading, pretending everything was just fine.

My mom sure loved that story Hans Christian Andersen story… or at least she loved telling it to me … usually after I’d told her about a bit from Saturday Night Live or some Steve Martin joke from his standup. She’d roll her eyes in that sad, “put-upon-mom” way and say, “It's just like the emperor's new clothes.”

I was thinking about that when I read our story for Epiphany Sunday—the coming of the magi. But before they show up, we have Herod in his study, thinking about how much time he still has left and about the idiots he’s been ruling for the past forty years.

They're suckers. He knows they're suckers. There's no question in his mind that he's smarter than the stupid sheep who look to him for answers. Smarter isn't even the word for it. Is “genius-er” a word? He's not sure, but clearly, given his outsized place in the world, it ought to be.

How else do you explain his actions?

He sees himself walking the paths of the greats, dining at the victors’ table in Valhalla, eating grapes from the hands of adoring lickspittles and toadies. He offers his manicured hand to have his ring kissed by a woman who falls all over herself to tell him that he may very well be God’s most important, indeed God’s most inspired creation.

Dinner parties generally bore him after everyone has dutifully paid homage. Just sitting around the table with a bunch of people who, after a while, start elbowing each other surreptitiously, giving the slightest roll of the eyes after the thirty-eighth instance of his use of the words “I” or “me” or “mine” … in the last four minutes.

But that's the way of the world, isn't it? Outsized personalities often have outsized egos … sometimes well-deserved, oftentimes not. In his case, he's pretty sure his is “well-deserved.”

But he's had to fight hard for a little respect in this world. He fought for so many years as an unacknowledged political prodigy. But that's what you get when your old man’s a leg-breaking Einstein himself.

As he's advanced in years, Herod should be satisfied. There has to come a time when you stop and reflect on your life—what you've done and what you've failed to do—and you realize that your time on stage is coming to a close. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but you hear the distant ripples as Charon starts to paddle the boat across the river to pick you up for your final journey. You know the whole thing's going to end, but you don't feel any peace, no satisfaction.

When you live your life by the principle that enough is never enough, when quitting time comes, it's hard to lay down your shovel and muster up any gratefulness for a life that (at least from the surface) anybody would switch places with you for.

But the other part of it is he's always had to put up with the haters and the doubters. You know, the sneering elites, the cynical smarty-pantses who are convinced they're smarter than everybody else. They've treated him his whole life like he's a Johnny-come-lately, a social climber, a wannabe, an arriviste if you travel in the tonier circles.

He'd heard all the whispers since he came to town. They said his pedigree was purchased. His breeding was, if not scandalous, at least questionable. They laughed at him when he tried to fit in with the old money—even when he wound up having more of it than most of them.

Still, he had two things going for him. He had a great deal of support from powerful patrons, convinced he’d be good for business, and also had some rabidly partisan followers who were enthusiastic skull-crackers when the situation called for it. Somehow, he'd managed to dance a delicate dance to keep his grabby little vulgarian fingers on the levers of power.

No, old Herod might be called “the Great,” but at this point in his life, “great” had long ago hopped the night train to Tupelo, leaving him a seemingly powerful man with a fairly shaky foundation—like a dusty old western town on a studio soundstage, where everything looks solid and certain if viewed from the right perspective. But just as soon as you poke your head through one of the doors and windows, you can't see anything more than dust and 2x4 framing.

That's how the world looked to Herod when the contingent from the East showed up with some distressing news—something about a baby who's being called “King of the Jews.”

Now, I say “distressing” news because, to any ancient Near Eastern ruler, the thought that a rival to the throne might be born unwittingly beneath your nose was something that gave every sovereign a case of severe indigestion. So, that was bad enough, but to find out that someone had already conferred the title of “King of the Jews” on a little kid nobody’d ever heard of before would have been panic-inducing to any self-aware dictator in Herod’s shoes.