Matthew 2: 13-23

includes lots of Greek exegesis

(lots of Greek exegesis)

(always good insights!)

(excellent exegesis)

How often have you thought to yourself I wish. I wish I had that job. I wish I had that house. I wish my family was as happy as that family. I wish we didn’t have this problem to face. There’s an understandable very human aspect about these things which everyone of us faces – but as is often the case with every human feeling, emotion or experience, it’s what we do with those feelings that makes a fundamental difference in whether we’re going to be joy filled, thankful people or whether we’re going to let that turn to resentment, anger, or bitterness...

The Feast of the Holy Innocents, better known to some as Childermas, marks the death of these first martyrs, becoming its own Feast Day by the fifth century. Many traditions hold the same tension we’ve explored in this text: withholding the Gloria and Alleluia from the worship service as a mark of lament, but allowing children freedom for folly and fun, sometimes even reversing leadership roles with children for the day. The massacre has been captured in numerous pieces of art, from paintings to hymns, by artists from a number of different cultures. A quick visit to the Wikipedia page will link you to their pieces. If you do look at the paintings, you’ll notice that many of the scenes are depicted in the artist’s contemporary setting, or marked by their contemporary culture in some way. The artists know that the cries and deaths of the innocent continues until Christ’s second coming. And even here, we are reminded that we will never leave the tension of Advent behind—until Christ comes again, that is.

In the Movies for Preaching part of this website, Roy Anker highlights the excellent film The Innocents. The title of the movie is clearly designed to evoke Matthew 2. The story is set in post-World War II Poland in a convent that has experienced grave evil. Invading Russian soldiers had repeatedly raped the hapless nuns in the convent, resulting nine months later in one pregnancy after the next by women who had sworn themselves to chastity. The Mother Superior of the convent tries to help but, in fact, makes matters much, much worse and inadvertently perpetuates the bad momentum of the evil done to them. Yet through a series of events and people—heroes both likely and very unlikely—the kingdom of God bursts through in the end. Like Matthew 2, so also here: God is not undone by the evil that threatens our lives. If we cannot possibly explain why such horrid things happen to innocent people and babies, we can at least rejoice that God is not evacuated from the scene due to human evil. In Christ, there will be healing. In that is all the hope of the Gospel.

Once there was a monastery with a long history of commerce and a thriving spiritual community. But as time wore on, fewer and fewer villagers visited the hallowed halls. Fewer people turned to the monastery for advice. Even the sale of their famous wines began to dwindle. The abbot began to despair for his community. “What should they do?” he wondered. They prayed daily for guidance, but the brothers only became more dispirited. The monastery itself reflected their mood, becoming shabby and untidy. At last the Abbot, hearing that a wise Jewish rabbi was visiting, swallowed his pride and went to visit the rabbi to ask his advice. The abbot and the rabbi visited for a long time...

includes link to "Cold, Dark Night" by Sam Phillips

Writer and professor Ross Gay's two most recent books are The Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude and The Book of Delights. He has developed the practice of liking for, and therefore finding, something good within every day. He has come to believe that sorrow and joy are inextricably entangled with one another. He writes: "Among the most beautiful things I ever heard anyone say came from my student, Bethany, talking about what she dreamed of for her own teaching pedagogy. She said, 'What if we joined our wildernesses together?' Sit with that a minute. That our bodies, our lives, might all carry a wilderness within, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might, somehow, meet. Might even join. "And what if the wilderness, which is almost always portrayed as dense and uncrossable, what if the wilderness is actually our sorrow? It often astonishes me how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything - lives with some profound sorrow...

Scenes of the family's travel to Egypt are often romanticized or sentimentalized. The two adults are often in the landscape with a moon shining down highlighting the people, the donkey (there's usually a donkey), and an obligatory palm tree. It is quiet and contemplative. The realities of traveling via donkey (even donkey cart) for 400+ miles with an infant are no doubt more prosaic than we imagine. And certainly they are more prosaic than Caravaggio's image here. But I think Caravaggio gets Joseph's role right...

As Frederick Buechner said in his book Telling Secrets in commenting about his father’s suicide: I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable. God did not will what happened that early November morning in Essex Fells, New Jersey, but I believe that God was present in what happened. I cannot guess how he was present with my father-I can guess much better how utterly abandoned by God my father must have felt if he thought about God at all-but my faith as well as my prayer is that he was and continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing. I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me in the sense that I was not destroyed by it but came out of it with scars that I bear to this day, to be sure, but also somehow the wiser and the stronger for it. Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way. As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it...

("The situation facing Syrian refugees right now hearkens back to Matthew's gospel. Right now, according to Unicef, one Syrian baby is born in refugee camps and settlements every hour. The weather is bitterly cold, and an outbreak of polio among Syrian children is spurring aid groups to raise money for vaccines, clothing, and food. More than one million Syrian children are now categorized as refugees...")

("Some early legends have come down to us about the flight from Bethlehem. One is a children's story: On their first night as refugees, they had gotten as far as they could from Bethlehem and found a cave to hide from Herod's soldiers. In the cave a spider saw the child shivering and felt sorry for him. To give some protection the spider wove a web at the cave's entrance...")

The late Herb Brokering was a master at messing with people. In his classic book of I Opener parables, he tells the following story. 'Once there was a girl who was Mary every Christmas Eve. She reminded everyone of her, and she didn't even have to volunteer. Then she met a fellow named Joe. He was older and good to her. Her skin is still soft. She cannot be Mary this Christmas, because she is pregnant...

("In November of this year, the Oxford Research Group, which specialises in matters of global peace and security, published the first comprehensive study of the effects of the Syrian civil war on the children of that conflicted nation. Its findings were horrific to say the least...")

("I was going through our household accumulation of videos and DVDs the other day and was sorting the children's movies into live action and animated and modern stories and fairy tales when suddenly I realized just how many fairy tales and children's stories have as a basic theme an evil ruler threatened by a special child; who then has to be protected and/or rescued by agents of good....")

“God abandoned him,” Liz said. Liz and I were standing beside the hospital bed of her 55-year-old husband Frederic. Frederic had woken early that morning, left his wife sleeping in bed beside the warm imprint from his body, gone to the furnace room of their basement, and put a rope over an exposed beam. When Liz woke up she went to the kitchen and heard Frederic in the basement. She called to him. Frederic came part way up the stairs, shielding from her view the white length of rope. He told her he was just going through some old boxes. Later, when he didn’t come upstairs, Liz went down and found him. She put her arms around him, trying to lift him to relieve the pressure from his neck. He was too heavy. She couldn’t lift him up or get him down. In order to call for help, Liz had to let him go. She had to let him go and then run up the stairs and rummage through her purse, pushing aside keys and wallet and Kleenex to find her phone.

In the Movies for Preaching part of this website, Roy Anker highlights the excellent film The Innocents. The title of the movie is clearly designed to evoke Matthew 2. The story is set in post-World War II Poland in a convent that has experienced grave evil. Invading Russian soldiers had repeatedly raped the hapless nuns in the convent, resulting nine months later in one pregnancy after the next by women who had sworn themselves to chastity. The Mother Superior of the convent tries to help but, in fact, makes matters much, much worse and inadvertently perpetuates the bad momentum of the evil done to them. -

(includes several quotes)

In the 1946 movie, "It's a Wonderful Life", George Bailey , the manager of the "Bailey Building and Loan" is despondent and suicidal as he faces criminal charges over $8,000 in cash that had mysteriously disappeared. We all know that his absentminded Uncle Billy Bailey had unwittingly let it fall into the lap of Henry F. Potter, the richest and meanest man in the little town of Bedford Falls, New York...

("The juxtaposition of those two images in this church, the creche and the crucifix, serves as a powerful lesson for this feast. We realize that when we speak of the , we speak of a family that struggled and suffered, like so many of us. But: this family also knew profound hope. They trusted completely in God. They call all of us to that kind of trust. And they are with us. In our own time, they stand beside all who worry, who struggle, who search, who pray...")

("I doubt that I am alone in being haunted by the holidays. They don't seem to live up to their hype for any adult. Is that why we wistfully say that Christmas is for kids? A child came forth from a family we call holy. That infant is still our best hope, because Bethlehem was followed by Nazareth, and then Capernaum and Jerusalem, until this Son climbed Calvary...")

When I was ordained, a retired pastor and parishioner gave me a print made from a woodcut depicting the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. What made this particular rendition distinct is that they were not alone. Instead, they were surrounded by a group of refugees, reminding us that in this story of forced flight, God-in-Christ identifies with all who have been driven from their homes by the threat of terror, all who are displaced by violence, and all who flee in fear with hopes for, but little assurance of, a better future.

During a British conference on comparative religions, religion scholars from various religious faith traditions around the world came together for a debate. They debated what belief, if any, was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C.S. Lewis ambled into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” After some discussion, the conferees all agreed. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist Eight-Fold Path, the Hindu doctrine of Karma, the Jewish Covenant, and the Muslim Five Pillars of Faith and law code, each of these offers a way to earn divine approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love a gift, given without regard to whether it has been sufficiently earned; given without regard to whether the recipient has measured up or not...

("For Scrooge, Christmas Eve could have been described as a nightmare. He certainly thought it was a series of pretty bizarre nightmares. Had the visitations stopped after Marley, or maybe the first of the three spirits, he might have been able to write the whole thing off as that particular piece of mouldy cheese he'd eaten earlier in the evening with his thin gruel - and nothing would have changed...")

("Matthew's Christmas story takes the whole two chapters at the beginning of his gospel, not just today's short reading. The problem is that Matthew includes women in the genealogy of Jesus! That just wasn't done! But these women are different; all four of them...")

("The Joseph of the Christmas story is clearly reminiscent of the Joseph of the Exodus story, he too has a dream, he too goes to Egypt, and he too saves the family. Likewise King Herod is clearly the counterpart of the Egyptian Pharaoh; both feel threatened and both kill the Hebrew male children only to have God protect the life of the one who is to save the people...")

("a young woman had a tumor in her cheek. In order to excise the tumor, the surgeon was forced to cut a tiny but important nerve which controls the muscles on one side of her mouth. The woman was scarred for life, her face slightly droopy on one side, her smile crooked. Dr. Seltzer writes of his visit to her hospital room after the surgery...")

("In 1977 Bishop Festo Kivengere escaped his native Uganda. In February of that year Jamini Luwum, The Archbishop of Uganda was executed by Idi Amin for opposing his brutal killings of the population. His last words to Festo were: 'They are going to kill me, but this will be for the glory of God'...")

("W. H. Auden, in his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, presents Herod in this way, worried that an infant, believed by some to be God Incarnate, threatens to destroy the reason, idealism and justice he has labored to advance: 'Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen....")

Tony Campolo tells the story about the late Mike Yaconelli, who told the story about a deacon in his church who wasn’t deaking. He just didn’t do what he was supposed to do as a deacon. One day Yaconelli said to the deacon, "I have a group of young people who go to the old folks home and put on a worship service once a month. Would you drive them to the old folks home?" The deacon agreed. The first Sunday at the old folks home, the deacon was in the back with his arms folded as the kids were doing their thing up front. All of a sudden, someone was tugging at his arm. He looked down, and here was this old man in a wheelchair. He took hold of the old man’s hand and the old man held his hand all during the service. The next month that was repeated. The man in the wheelchair came and held the hand of the deacon. The next month, the next month, and the next month. Then the old man wasn’t there. The deacon inquired and he was told, "Oh, he’s down the hall, right hand side, third door. He’s dying. He’s unconscious, but if you want to go down and pray over his body that’s all right." The deacon went and there were tubes and wires hanging out all over the place. The deacon took the man’s hand and prayed that God would receive the man, that God would bring this man from this life into the next and give him eternal blessings. As soon as he finished the prayer, the old man squeezed the deacon’s hand and the deacon knew that he had been heard. He was so moved by this that tears began to run down his cheeks. He stumbled out of the room and as he did so he bumped into a woman. She said, "He’s been waiting for you. He said that he didn’t want to die until he had the chance to hold the hand of Jesus one more time." The deacon was amazed at this. He said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, my father would say that once a month Jesus came to this place. ‘He would take my hand and he would hold my hand for a whole hour. I don’t want to die until I have the chance to hold the hand of Jesus one more time.’"...

("Once upon a time there was this young man, Peter Patrick, who could hardly wait to go off to college. Starting half way through his junior year in high school, he decided that his family was ruining his life, almost every day. His father was a tyrant who didn’t know what it was like to be a teenager....")

("Gnanaguru Aravinthan, a Sri Lankan Tamil, was just 13 years old when his father last saw him in September 1985. He had been sent home by his father to change his clothes. He was then supposed to meet his father at a friend's house. Gnanguru never arrived. Neighbours told the father they had seen his son in the custody of soldiers from a nearby army camp...")

("A little boy greets his father as he returns from work with a question: 'Daddy, how much do you make an hour?' The father is surprised and says: 'Look, son, not even your mother knows. Don't bother me now, I'm tired...")

("In Africa, a tale is told of a boy called Amazu, who was always very inquisitive. One day he asked 'What language does God speak?' But no one could answer him. He traveled all over his country questioning everyone but could not get a satisfactory answer. Eventually he set out for distant lands on his quest. For a long time he had no success. At length, he came one night to a village called Bethlehem..." and other illustrations)

("Once upon there was a little girl who never liked any of her Christmas, not her Barbie dolls, nor her crayola sets, nor her Paddington Bears, nor her doll houses, nor her nice dresses, nor her watches, nor her jewelry. She never complained about the gifts and she always thanked her family very politely...")

("In rereading this chapter, I recalled a lecture I once heard by the Australian musical artist Nick Cave. It was a lecture on the subject of love songs, and it offers stunning insight into the truth of our Gospels. In his lecture, Cave portrayed love songs as pain songs. At one point, he declares, 'The love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain...")

("In many quarters of the modern church there is a distinct prejudice against all things supernatural. Morton Kelsey, in a book called Dreams, A Way to Listen to God, asks the question, 'Why has the modern church, for the most part, ceased to become a channel for humankind to experience the power of Christ?'..." and other illustrations)

("The morning of my father's funeral, my sister and I went on a mission. We drove two miles south of town to the farm where we grew up. Our parents had retired from farming several years before, but we still thought of it as 'our farm' ~ even though we never owned the land...")

During World War II, the Nazis were rounding up the Jews. In a small French town the local pastor decided to protect the Jewish people. In order to make this work, he used the teenagers and young adults of the town. They were divided into cells. No cell knew about the existence of another. The Jewish people were hidden in empty buildings throughout the town. The youth brought them food and necessities. Word got out that the town was a haven and other Jews running from the Nazis came to hide. They turned no one away. They hid them all. Near the end of the war the Nazis suspected the town of hiding Jewish people. The pastor, his brother and a few of the young adults lost their lives by standing up to this wicked regime. They did not find the Jewish people in hiding. When the war ended hundreds of lives had been saved...

("Some years ago a couple were on the verge of breakup. The love had gone out of the marriage. When one spoke the other reacted angrily. Every day was tense, a series of battles. They stuck together only because of the children. Today this same couple say that they have found one another again...")

("I was standing in a very long line and there were two men in the line beside me. I was just listening to what they were saying and I heard one of them say to the other, 'You know, I go in for surgery tomorrow.'...")

("Eli Wiesel was a noble prize winning author and a survivor of the concentration camp Auschwitz. In the book Night, he tells of his experiences in the concentration camps. In one chapter, he tells of witnessing the hanging of three men...")

In one of his books Marcus Bach tells about a sixteen-year-old boy from Bishop, Texas, named Mark Whitaker. With a homemade telescope that cost him only seven dollars and fifty cents to build, Mark discovered a new comet. That's something that few astronomers with their thousands of times more expensive telescopes ever accomplish. It was about 2:00 a.m. on his third night of sky watching that Mark spotted something he had never seen before in the heavens. The next night he traced the object again, and on the third night he phoned the Harvard Observatory. Confirmation soon followed. And they named the comet Whitaker-Thomas, adding to Mark's name the name of the professional astronomer who helped in the confirmation. Commenting on this extraordinary accomplishment Marcus Bach says, "There is a law. It says that if you engage in a sky watch you may see something. It does not say that you will see something, but that you might. . . ."

("A few years ago a book called I Heard the Owl Call my Name by Margaret Craven was popular. It was about a young priest going out into a northern mission in British Columbia. When he first went out there, the people watched him with suspicion, like people often watch their clergyman. At first there was an uneasy relationship..." and other quotes)

("Tomorrow you are born again, Who died so many times. Do you like the candlelight? Do you like the chimes? Do you stop to wonder Why men never see How very closely Bethlehem Approaches Calvary...")

("It is like an 80 year old lady who lived in St. Louis and at the age of 65 Miss Jenie had to retire from teaching. But Miss Jennie didn't stop teaching. She got a room in the inner city and found a job in a day nursery doing what she loved best, loving little children. One night after the school had closed, she was walking down the street in the darkness when a young boy knocked her from her feet and grabbed her purse..." and other illustrations)

("God will not forsake you. He will protect you from danger and harm. A poem says it well: 'I once was an outcast, stranger on earth, A sinner by choice, and an alien by birth, But I've been adopted; my name's written down, An heir to a mansion, a robe, and a crown. I'm a child of the King, a child of the King, With Jesus my Saviour, I'm a child of the King'!!'..." and several more)

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Two of the loveliest New Testament legends are connected with the flight into Egypt. The first is about the penitent thief. Legend calls the penitent thief Dismas and tells that he did not meet Jesus for the first time when they both hung on their crosses on Calvary. The story runs like this. When Joseph and Mary were on their way to Egypt, they were waylaid by robbers. One of the robber chiefs wished to murder them at once and to steal their little store of goods. But something about the baby Jesus went straight to Dismas’ heart, for Dismas was one of these robbers. He refused to allow any harm to come to Jesus or his parents. He looked at Jesus and said: ‘O most blessed of children, if ever there comes a time for having mercy on me, then remember me, and forget not this hour.’ So, the legend says, Jesus and Dismas met again at Calvary, and Dismas on the cross found forgiveness and mercy for his soul.