Matthew 2:13-15
When the Magi had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “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.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
My message last week, if you will recall, dealt with the visit of the three Magi – sometimes called the Three Kings – who followed a star to Bethlehem to honor the newly born King of the Jews. I mentioned then that there was not enough space in one Sunday message to deal with the complexities of that story but that one day was all the lectionaries gave us before jumping straight to John the Baptist and the adult Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan.
Well, we’re in Cycle C and will be reading from Matthew’s gospel this year, and I’m not finished with the infancy story as Matthew tells it – there is a bit more to the story than just the three Magi. So I am ignoring the lectionary this week and continuing this last bit of the Epiphany story. It’s a small bit of a story concerning what happened after the Magi left for home. The information we have for this time in the young Jesus’ life is scanty, at best, and largely anecdotal. I’ve never taken the time to parse it all out and try to establish a coherent story line – a why and when and where. Perhaps you are as curious as I am.
If you recall from last week, Herod, the frightened and jealous Roman-appointed king, wanted to get his hands on this new “King of the Jews’ (and not, I’m afraid, to ‘honor’ him). So once the Magi left, Joseph was told in a dream to pack up Mary and Jesus and go to Egypt, out of Herod’s reach – and so they did, in the middle of the night.
Before we go any further there is some background information needed here. There’s a lot of it and it is complicated so I’m going to try to keep it as short as possible.
The first question is “why Egypt?” Wasn’t Egypt always the enemy? The bad guys of the Exodus story? Well, yes and no. In the Exodus story they were definitely the bad guys, but the Exodus took place anywhere between 1200 and 1500 years before the birth of Jesus, and much had changed over those long years.
The Egyptian dynasties had changed over the centuries, but one other important feature was that the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar had laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying the city and the Temple in the process. This took place around 600 BCE. As a result, the was a great dispersal of the Jewish population, of which a large segment ended up settling in a now open and accessible Egypt.
There was a further major shuffling of the near eastern political scene around 300 years later with the world-conquering tour of Alexander the Great who brought the Greeks into the region, followed a couple of hundred years later by the appearance of the Romans, in the Shakespeare-famous persons of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra, which led to the eventual annexation of Egypt as a part of the Roman Empire.
A lot had changed since the days of Moses. The current Romans of Egypt were not likely to be at all interested in the drama centering around a minor vassal king from Judea.
In short, the Egypt of the time of our story was not the Egypt of the Exodus, and the Jewish community there was not a group of maltreated slaves. It was, actually, a logical place for Joseph to take his family to a relative safety.
Egypt today apparently has at least two dozen sites which purport to be the place where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus stayed. Whichever might be the real site, they stayed there for something like three years until word came that Herod had died, at which time they set out to return home, but that didn’t turn out to be as simple as it should have been.
As we’re told a little farther down in Matthew:
And here Matthew ends the infancy/childhood of Jesus. This part of the story – the whole journey to Egypt -- is found only in Matthew, nowhere else. Luke, the only other gospel with any childhood mentions, tells us that at eight days old Jesus was taken into Jerusalem, to the Temple to be circumcised, and that his family went back every year for Passover. Later, Luke has the story of Jesus as a young boy, returning to the Temple to discourse with the elders.
That’s it. Everywhere else the story of Jesus begins when he wandered out of Nazareth down into the desert reaches where a wild man named John was baptizing people.
In the centuries leading up to Jesus’ time it was common practice for men who would become leaders to have semi-mythical birth stories attached to them. The mother of Alexander the Great always insisted he was the child of a god – conceived when she was serving a required time in a temple sanctuary. Even King David’s story begins when he was just a boy – the youngest and smallest of his siblings – who did the unheard of deed of killing off the giant Goliath.
So did these things actually happen to Jesus or was Matthew just seeking to make him seem more kingly material? Who knows? And does it really matter?
This story is interesting but all in all it tells us very little about Jesus the person or about his mission here among us. The most important thing it tells us is what the people of Matthew and Luke’s time thought of Jesus – not just as a teacher, but as a great king and not a simple country boy from Nazareth. As someone to be associated with the Messianic prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures.
We begin to learn more about this Jesus with the stories that come next and the three years he lived and walked among us as one who came from God. We will dig into these mission-beginning stories in the weeks between now and Lent. Stick with us here and journey with us as we learn.
Well, we’re in Cycle C and will be reading from Matthew’s gospel this year, and I’m not finished with the infancy story as Matthew tells it – there is a bit more to the story than just the three Magi. So I am ignoring the lectionary this week and continuing this last bit of the Epiphany story. It’s a small bit of a story concerning what happened after the Magi left for home. The information we have for this time in the young Jesus’ life is scanty, at best, and largely anecdotal. I’ve never taken the time to parse it all out and try to establish a coherent story line – a why and when and where. Perhaps you are as curious as I am.
If you recall from last week, Herod, the frightened and jealous Roman-appointed king, wanted to get his hands on this new “King of the Jews’ (and not, I’m afraid, to ‘honor’ him). So once the Magi left, Joseph was told in a dream to pack up Mary and Jesus and go to Egypt, out of Herod’s reach – and so they did, in the middle of the night.
Before we go any further there is some background information needed here. There’s a lot of it and it is complicated so I’m going to try to keep it as short as possible.
The first question is “why Egypt?” Wasn’t Egypt always the enemy? The bad guys of the Exodus story? Well, yes and no. In the Exodus story they were definitely the bad guys, but the Exodus took place anywhere between 1200 and 1500 years before the birth of Jesus, and much had changed over those long years.
The Egyptian dynasties had changed over the centuries, but one other important feature was that the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar had laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying the city and the Temple in the process. This took place around 600 BCE. As a result, the was a great dispersal of the Jewish population, of which a large segment ended up settling in a now open and accessible Egypt.
There was a further major shuffling of the near eastern political scene around 300 years later with the world-conquering tour of Alexander the Great who brought the Greeks into the region, followed a couple of hundred years later by the appearance of the Romans, in the Shakespeare-famous persons of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra, which led to the eventual annexation of Egypt as a part of the Roman Empire.
A lot had changed since the days of Moses. The current Romans of Egypt were not likely to be at all interested in the drama centering around a minor vassal king from Judea.
In short, the Egypt of the time of our story was not the Egypt of the Exodus, and the Jewish community there was not a group of maltreated slaves. It was, actually, a logical place for Joseph to take his family to a relative safety.
Egypt today apparently has at least two dozen sites which purport to be the place where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus stayed. Whichever might be the real site, they stayed there for something like three years until word came that Herod had died, at which time they set out to return home, but that didn’t turn out to be as simple as it should have been.
As we’re told a little farther down in Matthew:
- [Joseph] took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.
And here Matthew ends the infancy/childhood of Jesus. This part of the story – the whole journey to Egypt -- is found only in Matthew, nowhere else. Luke, the only other gospel with any childhood mentions, tells us that at eight days old Jesus was taken into Jerusalem, to the Temple to be circumcised, and that his family went back every year for Passover. Later, Luke has the story of Jesus as a young boy, returning to the Temple to discourse with the elders.
That’s it. Everywhere else the story of Jesus begins when he wandered out of Nazareth down into the desert reaches where a wild man named John was baptizing people.
In the centuries leading up to Jesus’ time it was common practice for men who would become leaders to have semi-mythical birth stories attached to them. The mother of Alexander the Great always insisted he was the child of a god – conceived when she was serving a required time in a temple sanctuary. Even King David’s story begins when he was just a boy – the youngest and smallest of his siblings – who did the unheard of deed of killing off the giant Goliath.
So did these things actually happen to Jesus or was Matthew just seeking to make him seem more kingly material? Who knows? And does it really matter?
This story is interesting but all in all it tells us very little about Jesus the person or about his mission here among us. The most important thing it tells us is what the people of Matthew and Luke’s time thought of Jesus – not just as a teacher, but as a great king and not a simple country boy from Nazareth. As someone to be associated with the Messianic prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures.
We begin to learn more about this Jesus with the stories that come next and the three years he lived and walked among us as one who came from God. We will dig into these mission-beginning stories in the weeks between now and Lent. Stick with us here and journey with us as we learn.
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