A sermon on Matthew 2: 13-23 by Nathan Nettleton

The story that is set for us this morning is, to modern listeners, among the strangest in the gospels, and certainly the least familiar and probably most difficult to understand bit of the Christmas narratives. Like many of the gospel stories its meaning would have been more obvious to the people it was originally written for, as it evokes for the devout Jewish reader memories of treasured ancient stories. For us though, having had the traditional Hebrew stories replaced by stories of Winnie the Pooh and Ned Kelly and Dennis Lillee, we don’t instantly recognise the connections. In this story Matthew quotes the Hebrew scriptures several times, but perhaps even more interesting are the stories he alludes to without naming. In these eleven verses he evokes memories of the patriarch Joseph, of Pharaoh, possibly of Samson (although that one’s a bit questionable), and most importantly of Moses. Matthew does this to explain the importance of Jesus in terms that were meaningful to those who treasured those stories.

This sort of approach to telling stories has remained common right through to our day. For example, at the big protest march in the Spring street a few weeks back I saw a placard that said “When do we invade Poland Jeff?” Now that sign made no direct mention of Hitler but you and I know exactly what it meant. It evokes memories of a familiar story and that is what gives it its power. But if someone digs it up in two thousand years time they might have to do a bit of research to work it out. Or another example, a hypothetical one, suppose I wanted to make a variation on the story of Christ’s trial. If I said that after the verdict was given Jesus said, “God save the emperor, because nothing will save the high priest”, you’d all know what I was trying to say and who’s memory I was trying to evoke as I told the story. But if I told exactly the same story to a group of Vietnamese refugees who’d just arrived here, the significance would be lost on them completely. Or again if I was telling a story in which a character kept addressing the crowds as “Men and Women of Australia” you’d probably form a different picture in your mind than if I had them address the crowds as “Aaaah, My fellow Australians.” Most of you would recognise the allusions to Gough Whitlam or Bob Hawke respectively and that would affect the picture in your mind as I told the story. But if I was telling the story to Gaye’s family back in New Zealand they’d probably miss the hint and it would make no difference which way I said it.

People get really hung up about the literal truth of these stories sometimes and then miss the whole point of them because they are too busy arguing about it. It makes no difference at all to the content of Christian faith whether Jesus actually went to Egypt when he was a baby or not. It makes no more difference than whether Jesus had brown eyes or green eyes. I don’t care whether it was a historical fact or not and neither did Matthew when he wrote it. The birth stories are not told because they are historically accurate, they are told because what they mean and what they contribute to our understanding of Jesus is true. The actual historical details are largely irrelevant; Mark and John have no Christmas stories at all and we don’t consider them sub-standard accounts because of this omission. They just didn’t need those stories to make their treatise of faith so they didn’t use them. Luke didn’t need the stories of the wise men or the escape to Egypt or the killing of the infants so he didn’t use them; he used a story about shepherds and angels instead; a story that Matthew doesn’t use. If they were important just because they happened, they’d be in all the gospels.

If we only had to worry about whether they were accurate accounts of history or not, I could tell you that Jesus and his parents went to Egypt when he was a baby and that a nasty king killed a lot of babies and then we could all go home and believe it fervently and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to any of our lives. But what we are actually seeking to hear this morning is what Matthew was meaning when he told these stories in his particular way and even more importantly, how does his message translate for us now.

Joseph is the central character in most of Matthew’s account of the first Christmas, unlike Luke’s account which is much more interested in Mary. In Matthew’s account the angel announces the birth, not to Mary but in a dream to Joseph. It is Joseph who is told what to name the baby and Joseph who does name the baby, thereby legally accepting him as his own child. The angel appears to Joseph three times more, all in this morning’s eleven verses, to tell Joseph to take his wife and baby to Egypt, to tell him to bring them back again, and then to tell them not to settle back in Judea but to move north to Galilee where they settled in Nazareth. Already for the hearer who is fluent in Hebrew folklore some memories are being evoked. This is not the first man named Joseph who has taken his family to Egypt to avoid death. More than a thousand years earlier a man named Joseph had taken his aging father, Jacob, and his eleven brothers and their families to Egypt to avoid death in a terrible famine. If you want to know more about that Joseph you can read about him in Genesis or wait for the Lloyd-Webber musical version which is coming back to Melbourne in the new year. Matthew deliberately evokes a memory of a significant event in the history of God’s dealings with his people to heighten for his Jewish readers the certainty that this is another such event.

Egypt had, and still has, a central defining place in Jewish self-understanding. To the Jewish mind, Egypt evoked images of slavery, of oppression, of captivity, of displacement and dispossession. And the coming out of Egypt was, to the Jewish mind, the birth of the nation, the great liberation, the defining event of God’s decisive action for his chosen people, bringing them out of captivity and leading them to a new hope, a new future, a promised land.

And this central story had a central hero, as I’m sure you are aware. A central hero who the legends suggested was specially protected from birth. For when this central hero was only a baby, a wicked king decreed that all the male Hebrew babies under the age of two were to be killed, and it was only the covert actions of this baby’s parents that enabled him to survive the slaughter and live to lead the people out of Egypt into the promised land.

So the story of the flight to Egypt and the return from there were more than a fulfilling of an very obscure prophesy about calling a son out of Egypt. And the story of the slaughter of the infants was more than a fulfilment of Jeremiah’s picture of grieving mothers. These stories tap straight into the most treasured and self-defining stories in Hebrew folklore. Every Jewish family recited and partially enacted the stories of the escape from Egypt every year at Passover. It was more familiar to them than the Christmas stories are to us. Every Hebrew kid grew up on stories of Moses floating in the bulrushes to avoid the slaughter of the infants, and of the grown Moses coming out of hiding after the death of the Pharaoh who had sought to kill him. Matthew’s readers and listeners were not going to miss his blatant cross referencing to stories of the central figure in the great liberation of God’s people.

Jesus, Matthew is saying, is God’s chosen agent of liberation, just as Moses was. And there is no doubt that the people were looking for another liberator. This time it had been more than four hundred years since Israel had been really free. First the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks and now the Romans had lorded it over Israel. There had been actual exiles under the Assyrians and the Babylonians, but the rest had ruled the Hebrew people without even taking them anywhere. Military and communications technology had advanced to a point where you could be oppressed and subjected by a foreign power in the comfort of your own home. The Jews bitterly resented this compromising of their national identity and longed for the promised Messiah of God who would come like a new Moses and lead the chosen people to freedom once again.

Any story about a baby, born of the line of David in the city of David, who somehow escapes the slaughter of every male Hebrew child under the age of two, who is hidden till the death of a vengeful king, and who symbolically come out of Egypt into the promised land, is a story which is going to quickly capture the imagination of Jewish listeners. Perhaps this is him! All the signs are there! The one like Moses! The chosen one of Yahweh! The promised Messiah of God! The one who will bring freedom to the prisoners and liberty to the captives! The one who will burst us free from the shackles of oppression and lead us to a new hope and a new future, a promised land!

And so in its context Matthew’s message was a real message of hope, loaded with signs of promise. It was a message of real good news for a real oppressed people. God is acting in human history again, just as in the time of Moses. God has heard the cries of the suffering and has seen the injustice that his people are suffering and has anointed a liberator to cast off the yoke of oppression and lead them to freedom.

And as Matthew will tell us later, unlike Moses, this liberator will be with us for ever. Matthew’s story starts with the promise of Emmanuel, God is with us, and closes 28 chapters later with the promise repeated, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” This act of liberation is not a one off event that can be completed in one place in one lifetime. This act of liberation may have begun with the baby in Bethlehem, but it is to be continued by all those who would bear the name of Christ in every place where there is suffering, distress, injustice, poverty, despair and oppression.

Matthew pulls no punches in this very story as to what it might cost to follow Jesus and continue this work of liberation in his name. Just look at what has happened to Jesus before he has even been weaned. He has been smuggled out of the city in the middle of the night to avoid the death squads. Freakish obedience to a mere dream has enabled him to narrowly escape the search ordered by a ruthless ruler who will not even stop at murdering children to protect his own grip on power. The mere suggestion of his presence has caused the dispatch of death squads who rampage through the streets kicking down doors and slaughtering innocent children before their terrified parents eyes. He has lived as a political refugee in a foreign country awaiting the chance to return safely to his homeland. On arriving home from Egypt his family finds that another violent regime has replaced the former and they again find themselves refugees, forced to resettle in another part of the country to avoid the bloodshed. Bits and pieces of that story have been repeated again and again down through the centuries by countless thousands of innocent people, many of them no older than Jesus was when it happened to him. Those who choose to follow Jesus need not expect that they will be immune from such traumas. In fact as many believers in every part of the globe can tell you, a genuine and total obedience to the example of Jesus will frequently bring violent reprisals from governments and authorities who feel that their power is threatened by radical lovers of peace and freedom and justice.

We are followers of the Christ who Matthew has carefully, deliberately and blatantly pictured in the image of Moses, whose mission of liberation put him in face to face conflict with the most powerful man in the known world of that day. His mission to bring freedom and hope to an oppressed people was accomplished at the cost of many lives and much destruction. From El Salvador to South Africa, from the Philippines to Palestine, you will find records of people who have stood up for truth, for justice, for freedom and for peace, and who have been responded to with death squads, with massacres, with refugee camps, with torture, and with even greater repression. Its been going on for thousands of years. It is there in the content of the Christmas story. It is there again in the content of the Easter stories if we want to see where following Jesus leads.

But it is only in facing up to such horrors that humanity can be liberated from them. It is only as we face up to the ugliness of the sin and brokenness in our own hearts and minds that we can finish being part of the problem and start being part of the solution. The baby who fled repression in Bethlehem and died confronting it in Jerusalem, lived and died and is with us always so that we can be liberated from the brokenness that is within us and and be healed so that we can confront the brokenness in the world outside us and bring freedom to a suffering world. That is the message of Christmas. His name is Emmanuel, God is with us, suffering with us, struggling with us, fleeing with us, hiding with us, hurting with us, confronting sin with us, overcoming hatred with us, achieving freedom with us, living with us, loving with us, celebrating with us. And Lo, he is with us always, even to the end of the age. Amen.