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29 December 2019

Echoes

I do apologise for the cough at the beginning of the podcast, and the slight delay before the sermon starts; I have just moved to a Chromebook computer and have yet to make audio editing work on it!  Next time, perhaps....




The story of the flight into Egypt, from Matthew’s Gospel, is really rather strange.
It’s certainly not found elsewhere;
in fact, Luke’s version of events is so different you sometimes wonder whether they are talking about the same thing.
Here we are, in Matthew,
finding the Holy Family living in Bethlehem,
fleeing to Egypt,
and then settling in Nazareth,
well out of reach of Herod’s descendants.
But Luke tells us that the family lived in Nazareth in the first place,
went to Bethlehem for the census,
and, far from avoiding Jerusalem,
called in there on their way back to Nazareth!
And, indeed, went there each year for the festivals –
I wonder, don’t you, whether they stayed with Mary’s cousin Elisabeth
and whether Jesus and John played together as children?

Not that it matters.
We all rationalise the two stories into one,
and add our own extraneous bits –
the ox and the ass, for instance,
are figments of people’s imaginations, not part of the Luke’s account.
And from Matthew’s telling of it, the Holy Family lived in Bethlehem anyway and didn’t need to use a stable!
And, as we shall hear next week that they were astrologers, not kings,
and Matthew doesn’t actually say how many there were!
And do you really think people kept bursting into song,
like they do in Luke’s gospel?
I rather think that Luke, like Shakespeare, was writing what he thought they ought to have said, rather than what they actually did say!

But both Gospels –
for both Mark and John choose not to start with Jesus’ birth,
but at the start of his ministry –
both Gospels agree that Jesus was born to a virgin,
was conceived in her by the Holy Spirit in some way we simply don’t understand.
And they both agree that he was born in Bethlehem,
to a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph.
Both gospels also provide a genealogy for him,
tracing him right back to Adam in St Luke’s case,
and forward from Abraham in St Matthew’s case!
And occasionally tracing by different routes.

But it doesn’t really matter, as I said.
The Bible people were not writing to modern standards of historical accuracy, but they are still telling us true stories, however they might vary in detail.
It’s what they are telling us that matters, not the historical details!

Have you ever noticed, too, that Luke’s version of events is from Mary’s point of view, but Matthew is telling us it from Joseph’s?
I hadn’t before this year, but you’re all probably going, “Well, duh!”
But if you hadn’t thought of it, it’s absolutely true.
Luke shows us Gabriel going to Mary and saying “Hail, thou that art highly favoured;
blessed art thou among women!”
But Matthew shows us Joseph’s reaction to the news that Mary was expecting a baby and it wasn’t his.
Quite why Mary chose not to discuss the angel’s proposition with Joseph before she agreed escapes me.
He could, and arguably should, have discarded her publicly and ordered her stoned to death.

But he didn’t.
He decided he’d end the betrothal quietly, with no public scandal.
And then he listened to the angel who said that he should marry her anyway, because her child was conceived by God.
As if that made it better…..

I think I rather like Joseph, don’t you?
He comes across as someone who’s willing to listen,
and to change his mind.
He comes across as someone who listens to God,
and is prepared to accept that God speaks to him in dreams.
He is forced to choose between being seen as righteous, and doing what he believes is God’s will, which may well make him a laughing-stock.
Imagine, Joseph, of all people,
can’t you hear them mutter in the market-place?
Joseph, willing to raise another man’s child!
Joseph…. Just fancy that!

In our reading today, again, Joseph listens.
He acts on what he hears –
he takes his family and flees to Egypt,
and when he is told it is safe, he brings them home again,
only to Nazareth, not Bethlehem.

But this whole story that we heard read to day has echoes in the Old Testament, doesn’t it?
And it echoes down the years.....

There is Israel going down into Egypt
and being called up out of Egypt in the Exodus as God's son (hence the quotation from Hosea in verse 15),
but we also have echoes of when Pharaoh tried to kill Hebrew infants
which led to Moses being hidden the bulrushes.
Jewish legends about this event also have dream warnings
just as we have here
and I expect Matthew knew about them when he was writing the story.
At that, wasn’t there another Joseph who knew all about hearing God’s voice in dreams?

What these echoes do is to root the story in history.
The provide a setting for Jesus, if you like.
Sending Jesus wasn’t just something God decided to do totally randomly –
he was firmly rooted in the history of the Jews, who were expecting a Messiah.
Matthew, who is thought to have been Jewish, is trying to show how the Scriptures led down to this moment.

Rather like, if you will, when Jesus explained the Scriptures to Cleopas and his wife on the road to Emmaus, so they were able to see that they pointed to Jesus, and to the Resurrection.

For Matthew, all the Scripture quotations act as proof that Jesus is who He claimed to be.
It’s not the sort of thing scholars nowadays consider proof,
but that doesn’t matter.
For Matthew, as for all Jewish scholars of the time,
that was how you proved things:
was there a relevant quotation in the Scriptures?
He wants to set the Messiah in context.
And showing that history is repeating itself:
a new Pharaoh killing the babies, a new Joseph listening to dreams, a new journey into Egypt, and a new Exodus out of it.

And it echoes down to our own day, doesn’t it –
refugees, people fleeing in terror of their lives, genocide....
it never ends.

The magi –
wise men, astrologers, it’s thought –
came to Bethlehem to worship the new-born infant,
and we are invited to do the same.
But we don’t just worship him as a baby –
it’s not about going “Ah, cootchy-cootchy-coo, isn’t he sweet!”,
and having cuddles,
like we do when we admire babies.

No, worshipping the Baby at Bethlehem involves a whole lot more than that.
It’s about worshipping Jesus for Who He became, and what he did.
We kneel at the cradle in Bethlehem, yes –
but we worship the Risen Lord.
We celebrate Christmas, not just because it’s Jesus’ birthday,
although that, too,
but because we are remembering that if Jesus had not come,
he could not come again.
And he could not be “born in our hearts”, as we sing in the old carol.

We worship at the cradle in Bethlehem,
but we also worship Jesus all year round,
remembering not only his birth,
but his teachings,
his ministry,
the Passion,
the Resurrection,
the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit.
And we worship, not only as an abstract “Thing” –
what was that song:
“I will celebrate Nativity, for it has a place in history....” –
it’s not just about worshipping a distant divinity,
but about God with us:
Emmanuel.

Jesus, as a human being, can identify with us.
He knows from the inside what it is like to be vulnerable, ill, in pain, tempted.....
From the story of the flight into Egypt, we see him as a refugee, an asylum-seeker, although he was just a baby, or perhaps a small boy at the time.
From the story that Joseph chose deliberately to settle his family in the sticks, far away from civilisation, we see Jesus as living an ordinary, obscure life.

His father, Joseph, was, we are told, a carpenter, although in fact that’s not such a great translation –
the word is “Technion”, which is basically the word we get our word “technician” from.
A “technion” would not only work in wood,
but he’d build houses –
and design them, too.
He was a really skilled worker,
not your average builder with his trousers falling off.
Jesus would have been educated, as every Jewish boy was, and probably taught to follow his father’s trade.
After all, we think he was about 30 when he started his ministry,
and he must have done something in the eighteen years since we last saw him, as a boy in the Temple.

God with us:
a God who chose to live an ordinary life,
who knows what it is to be homeless, a refugee;
who knows what it is to work for his living.
Who knows what it is to be rejected, to be spat upon, to be despised.
Who knows what it’s like to live in a land that was occupied by a foreign power.

This, then, is the God we adore.
We sing “Joy to the World” at this time of year, and rightly so,
for the Gospel message is a joyful one.
But the story of the flight into Egypt reminds us that it is so much more than just a happy-clappy story of the birth of a baby.
It is the story of the God who is there.
God with us.
Emmanuel.
Amen.

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