Göttinger Predigten
Göttinger Predigten im Internet hg. von U. Nembach
First Sunday in Christmas, 12/29/2013
Sermon on Matthew 2:13-23, by Frank C. Senn
In our society the Christmas celebration functionally ended on December 25. We tend to celebrate the feast before the feast day. Now, except for a bit of a reprieve for New Year's Day, we're ready to settle into the seasonal affective doldrums of the long winter. The glow of Christmas is already beginning to fade. We'll be getting back to hard realities of life and work after the holidays. The reading on this first Christmas Sunday speaks to this condition.
We're dealing today (and this year) with the Gospel according to St. Matthew. Matthew doesn't actually give us a nativity story. If you read carefully in chapters 1 and 2 Joseph is alerted in a dream that Mary his betrothed is with child, that it is a holy child, and that he should name the child Jesus and take care of the mother and child. If we were only reading Matthew's Gospel we would not know about a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, a birth in a stable, and an angelic announcement to shepherds. For all we know from Matthew they were already living in Bethlehem. The birth took place in that town, the city of David, from whom Joseph was descended, and after the birth the family was visited by wise men from the East.
Next Sunday or Monday, January 6, Christians around the world will hear about that visit of the wise men, so we won't get into it today. But knowing about it sets up the follow-up story we have heard in today's Gospel. Those mysterious star-gazers from Iraq or Iran accidentally tipped off King Herod about the birth of a Messiah practically under his nose, and then they were tipped off by an angel not to return to Herod. So they went home by another way. Herod was furious and in his madness he determined to snuff out any pretender to the throne, even an infant pretender, by killing all the boy babies in Bethlehem under two-years of age. The slaughter of those whom the Christian tradition has called the holy innocents is one of the Christmas stories, but it's a story too chilling and gruesome for Christmas cards.
And yet it is this story, of all the nativity stories, that most clearly connects the birth of Jesus with some of the burning issues of our own day. What Herod did has been replicated a hundred times, even a thousand times, in the generations since then, and is still being done today. Innocent children gased in the Syrian civil war. Refugees fleeing violent repression and seeking asylum in other countries. Governments employing massive violence to achieve political ends, killing large numbers of people in an attempt to hunt down just one person, and explaining away civilian deaths as justifiable collateral damage. It all sounds eerily current doesn't it?
The holy family, like many families before and since, had to flee their homeland. And Matthew tells it all as a fulfillment of prophecy, as if this sort of thing was expected. No wonder a savior was needed! The evangelist looks back to instances of salvation in Jewish history in the telling of this story. But he also looks forward to the salvation this Christ child would accomplish in his death and resurrection. You can't read this narrative without being impressed with Matthew's ability to connect the birth of Jesus with the whole of the Bible's salvation history and the people's hope. He does so by making Joseph the central character in his nativity stories, just as Luke had focused on Mary.
Joseph is a dreamer. Modern psychoanalysis has given new credence to dreams. The ancient world knew that dreams were to be trusted. I already mentioned Joseph's dream that Mary would bear a son and that it was the fulfillment of prophecy. In today's story, Joseph has three more dreams in which he receives messages from God: the first telling him to take his wife and baby to Egypt; the second telling him to bring them back again; and the third telling them not to settle back in Judea but to move north to Galilee where they settled in Nazareth. At each stage, according to Matthew, prophecy is being fulfilled.
Already for the hearer who is fluent in Hebrew folklore some memories are being evoked. This is not the first dreamer named Joseph who has gone into Egypt to avoid death and also to help his family avoid death. More than a thousand years earlier a man named Joseph, renowned for his ability to interpret dreams, had been sold by his hostile brothers to Arab traders and taken into Egypt where they resold him. But as told in the Book of Genesis, and as spun out over four volumes by the German novelist Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers, the whole point was to put Joseph in a position to bring his aging father, Jacob, and his eleven brothers and their families to Egypt to avoid death in a terrible famine.
Egypt has always had a crucial place in Jewish self-understanding. To the Jewish mind, Egypt evoked images of death (Egyptian culture seemed fixated on it), slavery, oppression, and suffering. And the story of coming out of Egypt was, to the Jewish mind, the central story of their history: the great liberation in the Exodus, the birth of the nation in the giving of the Law on Sinai, the defining event of God's decisive action for his chosen people, leading them through the wilderness to a new a new future in the land promised to their patriarch Abraham.
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 in Egypt 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, having first grown up in Pharaoh's court where he learned the language and the routines. God's providence is amazing!
So the story of the holy family's flight to Egypt and the return from there was about a whole lot more than just a very obscure prophecy about calling a son out of Egypt. And the story of the slaughter of the infants was about a whole lot more than just Jeremiah's picture of grieving mothers. And the story of settling in the land of Ephraim and Manasseh (the sons of Joseph) was about a whole lot more than a convoluted prophecy about Jesus being called a Nazorean. These stories tap into the most treasured and identity-defining stories in the whole Hebrew Bible. Every Jewish family recited and partially enacted the stories of the escape from Egypt every year at Passover. It was as familiar to them as the Christmas stories are to us. Every Jewish 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 had been. And there is no doubt that the people were looking for another liberator. For hundreds of years Israel had been under the thumb of foreign powers; first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks and now the Romans. 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 comes out of Egypt into the promised land, is a story which is going to quickly capture the imagination of Jewish listeners longing for the promised Messiah of God who would come like a new Moses and lead the chosen people to freedom once again.
So Matthew's Gospel 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 his suffering and subjected people 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 forever. 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 an 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 the Passover sacrifice of this Messiah, and then by all those who would bear the name of this Messiah, this Christ, in every place where there is suffering, injustice, poverty, despair and oppression.
And while we see here Matthew making connections between these ancient liberation stories and the Christmas stories, the writer to the Hebrews is making connections to the events of Jesus death and resurrection, when he speaks of Jesus sharing our flesh and blood so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.
In a sense, we never come to the table of the word and the sacrament without hearing the whole story of salvation. If it's not explicit in the lectionary readings, it is made explicit in the Creed and in the Great Thanksgiving. And the testimony of these stories of God's saving acts in the history of his people prompts us to call to mind and pray for all of God's suffering people. Today especially we might remember before God those who have lost home or family or freedom to the violence the world's power mongers and warring factions. And as we weave all these stories together at the table, we encounter again the Christ who hears the cries of all who suffer, comes to give us his own broken body and shed blood, and promises to be with us always, even to the end of the age. Amen.