This is a story of God’s protection, but also God’s
hiddenness; a story of salvation and of evil, a hard story that
echoes back to Moses being saved from death while others weren’t saved; it’s a
reminder that while many of us are safe and happy, there are many of God’s
children today suffering. God can feel so close and powerful while at other
times he can feel so far away. This is a story of the world, a story that
reminds us that the world is not the way it’s supposed to be and still there’s
hope because Jesus is saved so he can save us, and one day fully establish his
kingdom of peace, safety, and hope where evil will no longer have any sway or
presence. In the story of Jesus’ birth, Matthew refers to how Jesus’ birth and
early years fulfill 3 different prophecies, 2, and perhaps even all 3 of them,
in painful ways.
The Magi have come and gone after finding Jesus, worshipping him, and offering him tribute. All of this
was more for Mary to treasure in her heart. We often focus on the three gifts
of tribute, the frankincense, myrrh, and gold and we can assign different
meanings to each of the gifts, in the end the important thing is that they
allowed Joseph to keep his family safe. In the wonder of angel visits, the
birth of Jesus, important and not-so-important visitors with amazing stories of
heavenly guidance, the reality that there is still evil in the world intrudes
into the lives of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus.
An angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him, “Get up, take the child and
his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going
to search for the child to kill him.” Herod is on the warpath against
this threat to his power. So, Joseph takes Jesus and Mary and they flee to
Egypt to keep them safe. While historically, Egypt may seem to us to be a
strange place to flee to, Egypt had been a place of safety and refugee for
Israel in the past, a place where in the time of Jacob and Joseph, they were able
to come during a famine and settle down while still only a large family and
over the years grow into a nation. Joseph and Mary settle in Egypt with Jesus
since there was a large Jewish population in Egypt, mostly around the area of
Alexandria.
This is the first Old Testament prophecy that’s
fulfilled in Matthew’s account. This
prophecy comes out of Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt have I
called out my son.” Hosea’s writing about when
God called out Israel out of Egypt at the Exodus. He’s referring to Israel when
the nation was a young nation and learning how to be a nation because they’d
been slaves for so long. The metaphorical language of the nation as God’s son,
comes straight out of the story of the Exodus when Moses tells Pharaoh, “This is what the LORD says, Israel is my firstborn son, and I
told you, ‘Let my son go so he may worship me.’ But you refused to let him go,
so I will kill your firstborn son.” God punishes Egypt for killing so
many of the sons of Israel.
Moses uses the history of his own birth to do a wordplay on the word son as Israel being God’s firstborn son; God’s
now going to kill Pharoah’s firstborn son. Now in the time of Herod, another
ruler is going to attempt to kill God’s firstborn son, Jesus. Moses was saved
in order to lead God’s people into freedom, Matthew sees God saving Jesus as an
echo to Moses as Jesus is saved in order to save his people from their sin. The
echoes would have struck the ears and hearts of the Jews hearing Matthew’s
account of Jesus’ birth and seeing God’s hand at work in saving his children.
The pain comes in knowing that not every child is saved.
Herod, in a fit of rage at finding out the Magi had
deceived him, sends troops to Bethlehem to
kill all the baby boys in the area. He targets Israel’s baby boys just as
Pharoah did centuries earlier. This fulfills the second prophecy that Matthew
connects to Jesus’ birth, “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be
comforted, because they are no more.” This prophecy comes from Jeremiah
after Israel’s taken into exile. Babylon conquered Israel and many Israelites
were killed in the conquest, men, but also women and children. It’s as if
Jeremiah can hear the patriarch Jacob’s wife Rachel weeping for her lost
children. I can still hear my mother weeping when my sister died in a car
accident at 18. For a long time, I thought the tears would never end, and
honestly, she went to her grave decades later still weeping. Jesus comes with great
rejoicing and celebration, but his coming also brings great sorrow due to the
presence and cruelty of evil in our world. For many still today, the lives of
the children are not precious enough to prevent evil from sacrificing them for
its own benefit and the cries of mothers mourning the loss of their children
still ring out today in places like Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, and too
many other places.
After Herod’s death, an angel again comes to Joseph to let him know it’s safe to go home. Joseph and Mary
head back to Israel with Jesus, but they don’t trust Herod’s son Archelaus who’s
as cruel as his father, so they head north to Galilee. They move away from the
seats of power of both government and temple, putting the entire province of
Samaria between them. Joseph and Mary settle in Nazareth with Jesus, close to
family, a place of safety for Jesus, hopefully a place that has moved past
Mary’s scandalous pregnancy. Matthew mentions that this fulfills a third
prophecy that he “would be called a Nazarene.”
Being called a Nazarene was not a compliment. We see this in John 1 when Philip talked to
Nathanael, “Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We
have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets
also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” “Nazareth!
Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked. “Come and see,” said
Philip. When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here truly is an
Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” When Matthew tells us that Jesus
being called a Nazarene fulfills what was said through the prophets, we get a
glimpse at how the Jewish people used their Scriptures and do theology because
there is no prophet who actually mentions in those exact words that the Messiah
will come from Nazareth. This is where the Jewish culture and how they do
theology comes into play, especially with the Hebrew scriptures.
In Isaiah 11, the prophet talks about a shoot coming out of a stump, “A
shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear
fruit.” The word for shoot in the Hebrew is netzer, which is the
same 3-letter root that the name Nazareth comes from. Netzer means “a small
twig, a sprout, or sucker.” The tree of Jesse has been chopped down and now
all that’s left is a sucker coming up out of that old dried-up stump; this is a
picture of weakness; the proud strong tree is reduced to a fragile twig.
Nazareth is never mentioned in the Old Testament; the great Jewish historian
Josephus also never mentions this small insignificant town either. It’s a small
village in the province of Galilee. Galileans were looked down on as being
simple farmers rather than the leaders, rulers, or scholars of Israel you’d
find in Judah and Jerusalem.
Matthew starts off by describing the Messiah Israel was expecting, a king that even foreigners bow
down to and worship, and then Matthew shows us the Messiah that the Old
Testament points to, the servant in Isaiah, the refugee raised outside of
Israel in Hosea, the persecuted child in Jeremiah, the scorned and rejected
Messiah of Isaiah who dies for his people in spite of how they receive him. Jesus is
identified with helpless, the vulnerable of this world rather than the powerful.
Archelaus
would never have thought to look for the Messiah in Nazareth. That’s the whole
point here; Jesus is not the kind of Messiah that they or anyone else was
expecting. Nelson Trout, the first African-American bishop in the American
Lutheran Church used to say that “in Jesus Christ, God
stoops down very low,” echoing the early church hymn in Philippians 2, “Who, being in very nature God, did not
consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather,
he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in
human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by
becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” But the story doesn’t end with a dead Messiah on a cross, the hymn
goes on, “Therefore God exalted him to the highest
place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every
tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father,”
bringing us back again to how Matthew first introduces us to Jesus as a king
whom other kings will bow down to.
As
one writer put it, “The Christmas story begins with the birth of
a child. But it doesn’t end until this child has grown up, preached God’s
mercy, been crucified and died and then raised again. Actually, it doesn’t end
until Jesus draws all of us into that same story, raising us up to new life
even amid the very real challenges that face each of us here and now.” Jesus, the
Messiah who relates to everyone, invites you to trust in him as he leads you to
the Father, as he draws you into his family to tell his good news story.
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