The Escape to Egypt

The Escape to Egypt

Matthew 2:13-23

I want to remind everyone this morning that of the four Gospels that we have in the New Testament, two of those Gospels don’t include any of the stories that we tell during Christmas and Epiphany.  Mark starts with Jesus fully grown and embarking on his ministry.  John starts with a deeply philosophical and theological statement about Jesus as the Word made flesh.  These Gospels tell us a lot of other important things but our whole sense of what happened when Jesus was born is just not there.

Luke’s priority is to tell us about a Gospel that is available to everyone.  Therefore, he wants to speak in a meaningful way to as broad of an audience as possible.  So, the angels visit the women and the men and the shepherds.  Then, to signal that everything is changing, the men are silent and the women speak up and the smelly shepherds turn out to be the honored guests at the most humble of birthplaces—a stable.  That’s the bulk of Christmas, the heart of our pageant, right there. Matthew’s priority was to write a Gospel that spoke to a Jewish audience that would make the case that Jesus had, in fact, been the Messiah—the Christ—for whom they had been waiting.  In Matthew’s view, what happened was exactly what was supposed to happen all along.  People just missed it.  So, he wants to make the connections between the religious tradition and what happened in Jesus’ life.  Last week, we made the case that the magi’s visit to Herod and eventually to Mary and the child in Bethlehem would have provoked memories of Moses and the liberation of the ancestors from slavery in Egypt.  In the masterly way of a great writer, Matthew  foreshadows what’s coming in Jesus’ life by pushing these buttons in his audience.  Moses strolled into Pharaoh’s court and announced the liberation of the slaves.  The magi wander into Herod’s court and announce that the people are about to be liberated again, but this time from the corrupt rule of their own king.  Jesus is the liberator.

The other part of the story that Matthew tells that would have been provocative from the start was his focus on Joseph.  Again, because we are not steeped in the traditions in the same way that an ancient Jewish audience would have been, we have to remind ourselves that there was a Joseph before Joseph, the father of Jesus.  The original Joseph was one of the sons of Jacob, sons whose descendants became the founding figures of each of the tribes of Israel.  Thanks to Andrew Lloyd Weber’s, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat,” we might actually remember this.

Joseph was despised by his brothers because he was Jacob’s favorite son.  This is a recurring theme in the Hebrew Scriptures, a long exploration of sibling rivalry that started in the story of Cain murdering his brother, Abel.  Our ancestors were honest about a lot of things.  Here, they are honestly telling us that blood brothers can despise one another, despite their ties, and that terrible things happen when they do.  What is the terrible thing that Joseph’s brothers do to him out of their jealousy? They beat him and throw him into a pit to die.  They assume he’s dead.  Even after he survives the pit, bad things keep happening to Joseph, including time as a slave and time in prison.  

All of that changes one day when Joseph starts to have dreams that seem to have prophetic powers.  Joseph’s eventual “Yahtzee” moment happens when he successfully predicts an upcoming famine, which allows Pharaoh to store up supplies to weather that challenge.  Joseph’s status and power skyrocket.  All of which leads, especially in the Andrew Lloyd Weber version of the story, to the moment when Joseph’s brothers come to plead for help and don’t have a clue that the person to whom they are pleading is, in fact, their brother, whom they thought was dead.  And then, of course, Joseph has them all dragged off to prison!  No!! That would be an awful Sunday School lesson and a bad musical!  Joseph forgives his brothers.  They are reconciled.  (And then, Donny Osmond, playing Joseph, sets off on a strangely disco retrospective of all the music in the show—really!)

Here’s the point:  one of the core founders of the nation was a guy named, Joseph, who had powerful dreams.  That fact would have been as thoroughly ingrained in anyone who is Jewish as are the stories that we learn as children in America about our founders.  If Jesus’ father turned out to be a guy named, George, who once cut down a cherry tree, we would think, “Hmmm…”  When Matthew tells his audience that Jesus’ father was a guy named Joseph who had dreams, I guarantee, his audience was going, “Hmmm…”

Matthew doesn’t focus on Mary or Elizabeth and Zechariah. He is dialed in on Joseph.  What he tells us is that Joseph knows two things: he knows that his fiancé, Mary, is pregnant and he knows that this is not his child.  Interestingly, what Matthew makes sure that we know before we know anything more than this is that Joseph had no intention of embarrassing Mary or setting her up for public ridicule.  He’s just planning to quietly dismiss her and go his separate way.  That’s kind of a switch because the original Joseph only became gracious and forgiving in the end.  This Joseph is gracious and forgiving from the moment we meet him.  He’s already not an “eye-for-an-eye” kind of guy.

In the middle of this troubled moment, Joseph falls asleep and has a dream.  Bing!  An angel appears in the dream to explain things to him:  this child is the Holy Spirit’s child; you’re going to name him Jesus; he’s going to save the people.  Joseph awakens from the dream.  He and Mary are reconciled and married. Joseph names the child, Jesus, just like he’d been told.  The actual birth of Jesus is sort of implied but almost as an afterthought.  No barn.  No shepherds.  No real sense of who Mary was at all.  Just Joseph, the dreamer, following through on his dream.

Some time later, the magi show up in Herod’s court.  Herod becomes even more paranoid than usual.  The authorities are consulted.  Bethlehem is identified as the likely birthplace (connecting the child to King David, the all-time favorite king—bing!) The wise men go off and find the child and Mary in a house, pay homage to him, give him strange gifts, and are then warned in a dream to find another way home.

Then, we meet Joseph and Mary and Jesus again—only we still don’t really see Mary or the child at all.  Instead, right away, Joseph, the dreamer, has another dream.  In this dream, he is warned that Herod is out to kill the child.  Now, think about this.  One of the most problematic issues with Jesus, the adult, for your average person, had to be why, if he was the Messiah, did the religious authorities and the political authorities hunt him down?  Those were the people who should have recognized him.  They were the experts, right?  Matthew tells us that the authorities had it in for him from the start, that the politically powerful people and the religious leaders took action immediately to preserve their own power.  The people most opposed to God’s unfolding plan were the people who were presumably God’s representatives.

I actually think this is one of the other great truths that the Bible tells over and over again, that power does terrible things to people.  For some people, as soon as they have power, the issue becomes how they will keep and increase their power.  For other people, as soon as they have power, they begin to use that power for their own pleasure:  “If I’m this powerful then there must be a little ‘something, something’ in this for me!” These truths are as old as the Old Testament and as contemporary as the news cycle, pretty much every day.  “Why didn’t your experts and authorities recognize who Jesus was?  Simple answer:  to them, all he was, was a threat.”

And where is Joseph told to take his wife and child?  The nation is now so corrupt and dangerous for this child, for Emmanuel, for God-with-us, that the only place to flee is…Egypt, the place where God had helped the people flee from in the first place.  Things are so bad in the midst of “God’s chosen people,” that the only safe place to go is back to where the people were oppressed in the first place.  Jesus is born exactly where the Christ was supposed to be born but not long after he had to be taken to the last place on earth he would have been expected to go, just to survive.

Again, not to belabor the point, but if you’re not hearing the core human truth being told here, you may not be really listening.  Sooner or later, we’ve all kind of “been there and done that,” though maybe not in as extreme of circumstances.  We’ve had to go to the last place or the last person or we’ve done some other last thing that we ever thought we would do because…it was what we needed to do next.  “Who’d have ever thought this would happen?” we ask ourselves.  Then, we do what we need to do.  And, sometimes, we might even think to ourselves, “God must be in here somewhere, somehow.”  Maybe we should remember this image of Joseph and Mary heading off to Egypt for when we head to Egypt, ourselves.

In this incredible prologue to the story of Jesus’ ministry, Matthew hits an extreme note next:  Herod orders the extermination of all children, two-years-old or younger, in and around Bethlehem.  Here’s the thing I want you to know.  There is no evidence this actually happened.  Herod’s other atrocities were pretty well documented by historians who wanted us to know what an awful person Herod was.  People hated Herod.  They would have told us about this if it had happened.  So what’s up with this?  I think this is Matthew, exercising literary license, to whip his audience’s interest a bit further.  What was the final plague before the people were released from slavery in Egypt.  It was the death of the Egyptians first-born sons.  This plague passed over the homes of the slaves (hence, the name, “Passover” for the people’s most important holiday.)  Herod’s “plague” passes over Joseph and Mary and the child.  Of course, the child would grow into a man who would die on a Friday in the midst of the Passover feast.

Finally, Matthew explains something that would have bothered a lot of people back then:  “If Jesus was the Messiah, then why in the world did he end up growing up in Nazareth.”  Nazareth was the middle of nowhere.  Matthew tells us that in another dream, Joseph is told, while still in Egypt, that Herod is dead and it is safe to come home.  Joseph does what he is told to do.  Upon his return though, Joseph sees that Herod’s son is ruling and he has a bad feeling.  Just like he had recognized Mary’s pregnancy, he recognizes reality once again:  this new king, Archelaus, is a bad man.  That feeling is validated in a final dream when he is told to flee to Galilee.  Showing the hard-won wisdom of someone who has been through the wringer in life, Joseph not only goes to the podunk region of Galilee but finds the most obscure place around to settle down, Nazareth.  

At this point, Matthew’s audience would be gasping, bent over with their hands on their knees.  Jesus barely survived.  It took God’s guidance and the messages of angels in dreams and the guile of a good man, taking care of his family, for this to happen.  And at every turn, the audience would be thinking, “Hold it here…this is starting to make some sense.  Tell me more!”