To Egypt! To Egypt!
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Matthew 2.13-23
Elizabeth Mangham Lott
First Sunday of Christmas at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church
My son realized on Friday that we didn’t watch The Grinch Who Stole Christmas at all in the days leading up to Christmas, so we sat down as a family last night to watch before bed. When you spend time with young children, like my 4-yr-old daughter, you hear “Why?” quite a lot. As we watched the short Grinch movie: Why is he angry? Why doesn't he like them? Why is he taking their toys? Why is he stealing their food? Why did his heart grow? Why is he nice now? Why does he give the dog roast beast?
Countless hours of the past several years of my life have been spent watching children’s movies and reading beloved stories with my young ones. And every story brings with it a set of “Why?” questions.
Many of the stories we read and watch have an innocent baby turned darling princess and a terrifying villain who seeks to destroy her. Aurora is whisked away by the three fairies after Maleficent puts a curse over the baby princess. The four flee into the woods to hide until the princess’ sixteenth birthday, but Aurora is still snared by the evil witch’s magic and earns the title Sleeping Beauty as she awaits true love’s kiss. Why is the light green? Why is the princess following her? Why would Maleficent do that?
Snow White eats the poisoned apple, and the dwarves grieve her coma. Why is she in that glass box? Why would the queen hurt Snow White? Cinderella runs away at the stroke of midnight to return to her shrouded servitude. Why won't the step mother let her go to the party? Why does the step mother break the shoe? Why?
Moving into our religious canon, the complex stories continue. Adam and Eve are evicted from paradise carrying little more than their shame and sadness. Why did they eat that fruit? Why is God angry? Sweet Noah gets all of the animals on board his ark…two by two, two by two…just before God destroys the whole earth. Why is a flood coming? Why does God tell him to build an ark? Why? Why?
Our favorite stories (secular and sacred) are light and darkness intermingled, and we become accustomed to the darkness as we hear these stories across our lifespan and then begin to tell them to our wee ones. As we age, sometimes our “why” grows silent. We stop noticing the difficult lines in our story.
Matthew spins a dark tale today with the idyllic birth scene barely mentioned in chapter 1 before the Christ child is snatched away to Egypt in chapter 2. Last week we heard of Joseph's midnight waking as he joined a long line of biblical characters visited by a Divine messenger in his sleep. Without fanfare, Matthew reports, “Then Joseph woke up. He did exactly what God’s angel commanded in the dream: He married Mary. But he did not consummate the marriage until she had the baby. He named the baby Jesus.” We claimed the truth that we need not be afraid to live boldly because God is with us.
The story of Jesus, light of the world, coming into our dark world was told in beauty on Tuesday night as we heard the familiar Christmas text from Luke read in our lovely Candlelight service. We held that candlelit vigil alongside St. Charles Avenue as we sang Silent Night. We kept that sacred space for just a little while believing that in the birth of Jesus, all is calm and all is bright.
But we’re listening to Matthew on Sunday mornings, both last week and this week, and Matthew guides us away from the manger scene to the midnight visits from God’s angel messengers. These are abrupt interruptions in the rest of already exhausted and distressed people. Last week the angel spoke, “Do not be afraid. God is with you.” The angel pushed Joseph to resist his righteous impulse to treat Mary according to the Law and to trust that God moves in wildly unexpected ways. Today the angel returns, warns of certain death, and urges the holy family, “Flee! To Egypt! Now!”
As I have studied this text for a week, I have sat with the questions a young child may ask upon first hearing. Why? Why would Herod do that? Why does Matthew so casually report that all of the sons under age 2 would be slaughtered? Why? Why is fulfilling an arbitrary prophecy so important to Matthew? Why is this a Christmas text? Why? Why?
Throughout Advent I talked about the conflicting ways of preparing for Christmas—the rush and speed of a cultural Christmas season versus the contemplative preparation and introspection of Advent. As jarring as it has been for me to consider Matthew's story over and over this week, I know that we need to wrestle with the scene he lays before us. In Luke, Jesus comes to us in the humble manger, ignored by people of importance and adored by mistrusted and disrespected shepherds. He is the unlikely king, the powerless baby savior. In Matthew, Jesus comes to us in life’s horrors. Jesus did not remain in the comfort of a manger but entered the dark and dangerous world; a world so different yet not so different from ours today.
In John's gospel, he tells of the Word:
“Everything was created through him; nothing—not one thing!— came into being without him. What came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by. The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn’t put it out.”[1]
But Matthew, in doggedly pointing toward prophetic words from Hebrew scripture, reminds us that while the darkness has not overcome the light, the light has not yet extinguished the darkness, either. Jesus is born into this world and immediately becomes a refugee as his family flees the murderous wrath of Herod. Though historians question the accuracy of Matthew's reporting, the Gospel text claims countless deaths all around Bethlehem while the Christ-Child finds safety in Egypt.
Our hopes and dreams for Christmas are most often different than our reality. I spoke of my stressed out wife-mama-sister friends last week who were overcome by the work of the cultural Christmas season. One of them lamented on Wednesday, “This is the happiest day of the year because I don’t have to do it again for another 365 days. Please tell me it won’t always be this way.” Our imaginations and realities often do not harmonize even if it is simply being overcome by a consumer culture that promises us happiness when it has none to offer.
Still some of us, though very few of us, know the terror and deep loss at Christmas that Matthew describes; the wailing and weeping for children who are no more. Our lives are rarely as we planned they would be, and we surely know our world is still filled with darkness. Nevertheless, we don’t like death at Christmas, but Matthew reminds us that Jesus came to conquer death and bring life to the empty places.
Last week in an online article for CNN, Rachel Held Evans wrote about her frustration with the way Christians in the United States observe Christmas as a hodge podge of culture and faith, and particularly the drumbeat of religious persecution in recent years. She wrote to remind readers that Christmas is a celebration of the belief that God is with us through Jesus. "Even as a lifelong Christian,” writes Evans, “I struggle with doubts about God. I struggle to make sense of the violence in the world, the violence in the Bible, the violence in my own heart. I don’t have all the answers. But even when there’s nothing left to my faith but a little seed of hope, that hope is in the incarnation, in the radical teaching that God loved us enough to become like us, and that when God wanted to show us what [God] was like, God showed us Jesus."[2]
We struggle to make sense of these things, too, and we struggle to make sense of the darkness that Jesus' family flees in Matthew 2. “Why?” we ask. Why? We struggle to understand the Gospel witness that God moves through the world as an outsider, and God in Jesus works against the powers and principalities from which we often benefit and which we rarely challenge. Even when we can name brokenness and darkness, there is so much we miss because, as Rachel Held Evans notes, the violence is in our hearts, too.
That is quite a lot to hold. Jesus is born into the horrors of this world, and in his birth we are forced to face not just the horrors of this world but the horrors in our own hearts.
Amidst all this, the infant Jesus is whisked away from danger in the care of his parents, and he goes to Egypt as one who is “homeless, migrant, alien. Within a few pages the baby will be all grown-up and we'll hear him say, 'Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.'[3]
Jesus moves around this first wave of death with the warning of a messenger, but he does not move through the world easily or grandly. Preacher Bill Long notes,“We have a God working through the refugee family to preserve, and then to bring forward, the Savior of the world. Jesus will not grow up in Jerusalem or in any place of prominence in that world. Rather, the refugee returns to a rinky-dink town of no importance or visibility. But that is where everything begins...”[4]
There are three distinct scenes in today’s text, and we have focused on the drama of the first two. “In the third act of the gospel’s divine drama today, once again Joseph has two more dreams and God’s messenger speaks to him, instructing him first of all that the tyrant Herod has died and now it’s safe to return back to Israel. And, in the second dream, Joseph was warned not to settle in Judea, where Herod’s son Archelaus now ruled, and was almost as cruel as Herod. Rather, Joseph was instructed to go to Nazareth in the district of Galilee and live with Mary and Jesus there.”
It is in Nazareth that Jesus emerges as the great teacher and leader we know, the truth teller whom we follow, and moving out from Nazareth, Jesus will not flee the powers who wish to overcome him. Mary and Joseph and the angel messenger, they want to guard the child Jesus and protect him. But adult Jesus, the one who shows us what God is like, heads straight into those horrors as an adult, protected no more.
Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood put it this way: “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.”[5] In the weeks to come, we will watch the child become the man, and in listening in on Jesus’ stories, we hear something fresh of who God is.
Until then, how I wish that Matthew looked to this morning’s Isaiah text and not the cries from Jeremiah. In Isaiah we hear:
Isaiah 63:7-9
7I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord, the praiseworthy acts of the Lord, because of all that the Lord has done for us, and the great favor to the house of Israel that he has shown them according to his mercy, according to the abundance of his steadfast love. 8For he said, “Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely”; and he became their savior 9in all their distress. It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.
But we may need the terrifying scene of Matthew 2 to “remind us that the Herods of this world do not prevail. Sooner or later they lose their power. Sooner or later they die.”Matthew invites us to stare the world’s darkness in the face. Whether it is inflicted on us or on others by empire or we know it from within our own hearts, the violence in this story is still known by us.
Matthew’s Gospel wants us to ask WHY? And his answer points us to a future time, a not yet time, a day for which we still wait and for which we long, when suffering children and their grieving parents, when fragile humans and their broken hearts, “One day they shall be healed and restored completely from their sufferings and their grief. One day…all tyrants; all the Herods of this world shall be no more.”[6] One day, we believe, God will keep us in perfect peace and love. And weseek that peace with each day of our lives and celebrate its coming in Jesus during this season of Christmas. Amen.
1 | To Egypt! To Egypt!
[1]John 1.3-5, The Message
[2]Rachel Held Evans,
[3]James Lamkin,
[4]William Long,
[5] From
[6]Rev. Garth Wehrfritz-Hanson,