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Sermon Text: Matthew 2:13-23
Life After Christmas
is marked by:
Opposition from God’s Enemies
Preservation by God’s Grace
Fulfillment of God’s Promises
(Matthew 2:13-23)
13 When they 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.”
14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 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.”
16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
19 After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20 and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”
21 So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, 23 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.
Christmas is such a special time of year, isn’t it? Tell me, what made your Christmas special? Maybe you put up some of your favorite decorations. Maybe you got to spend some time with people you love. Maybe you had the chance to give or receive some special gifts. Maybe for you, what made Christmas special was the chance to gather here at church with your fellow believers to hear again the account of Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger, to join your voices to sing Silent Night by candlelight or Joy to the World with the trumpets sounding. Certainly, Christmas is a special time of year. But what happens when Christmas is over? What is it that kind of marks the end of the celebration? Is it when the last present has been opened? Or when the guests have all gone back home? Or the decorations have all been put away?
Or maybe it’s something more sobering than that. Maybe it feels like Christmas is over when you have to head back to work, or when the credit card bills start coming in the mail, or when you step on the scale and realize where all those Christmas cookies ended up. Or maybe for you, that transition from the peace and joy of Christmas to the harsh reality of life was even more abrupt. Maybe it came in the form of a medical diagnosis that you didn’t expect, or those family tensions firing up again. Maybe your post-Christmas plans suddenly include a funeral of someone you love. Man, what happened to that wonderful Christmas celebration? It’s like it ran right into the reality of life in a broken world.
But you realize, you and I are not the only ones to experience that kind of post-Christmas reality. Jesus’ family experienced it to an even great extent. It didn’t take long to go from “all is calm and all is bright,” to “you have to run for your lives!” Today we want to draw some parallels between what Jesus’ family experienced after the presents were all opened, and what you and I might still experience to this day. This morning/evening we turn our attention to what we might call:
Life After Christmas
We’ll see that in Jesus’ life and ours, Life after Christmas is marked by:
Opposition from God’s Enemies
Preservation by God’s Grace
Fulfillment of God’s Promises
Now, one might think that being the parents of a sinless son of God would be the most comfortable, the most relaxing job ever. I mean, think about it. Your child never sinned, no temper tantrums, no back talking, just a perfectly obedient child. And think of the perks you’d enjoy. Shortly after your child was born you have these foreign dignitaries delivering some super valuable gifts of gold and incense and myrrh. It’s like an instant retirement plan for the whole family. You can just about imagine Mary and Joseph waving goodbye to the Magi and saying to themselves, “We’ve got it made, raising Jesus as our child. This is going to be so easy!” Not so fast! Matthew tells us, When they (namely, 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.”
Whoa! You want to talk about 180° turn of events. To go from thinking you’ve got smooth sailing ahead, to finding out from this messenger of God, that the most powerful man in the country wants your little baby dead. And understand, that was no idle threat on the part of Herod. Within days, Herod orders that every boy under the age of two, living in the vicinity of Bethlehem was to be put to death, all in an attempt to catch baby Jesus in a lethal dragnet. Can you imagine the horror that would have created among those families in Bethlehem? The tears that would have been shed over the loss of those innocent children?
Maybe you can, for something similar happened earlier in the history of Israel when children were carried off into captivity in Babylon. The prophet Jeremiah describes that event with these words: A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. Here in our text, Matthew tells us that that tragic event in Ramah, was simply a foreshadowing of this tragic event in Bethlehem hundreds of years later.
And why would King Herod perpetuate such a massacre? On the one hand, he saw Jesus as a threat. The Magi had referred to Jesus as “the one who was born King of the Jews”. Herod thought that he was already the one who was King over the Jews. He had already killed his wife and children to maintain his position of power. He wasn’t about to let some Jewish baby knock him off the throne. But Herod wasn’t just opposed to potential political rivals; he was opposed to God. Herod saw himself has the most important person in the universe. And he was going to protect that status no matter who else got hurt.
You realize, some things haven’t changed in 2000 years. Human beings are still innately opposed to God. All around us, people are living like they think they are the most important people in the world. And they are going to do everything in their power to protect that status, protect the right to do what they want to do, even if that means the killing of innocent children, whether they are born or yet unborn, even if it means massacring Christians in places like Nigeria and the Sudan, even if it means arresting hundreds of Christians gathering for Christmas services in China last week.
In this post Christmas world, there are plenty of people who are opposed to God. But that opposition isn’t just out there somewhere. It’s also in here. Scripture says it well. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. (Romans 8:7) You realize that each of us has a sinful nature that lives in rebellion against God. By nature, I want to do what I want, rather than what God wants—even if it means that other people get hurt. It’s all part of the ugly truth that the devil, the world, and yes our own sinful nature, are all opposed to God.
And yet, in spite of that ongoing hostility toward God, what does God show us? He shows us grace. We see that in Jesus’ life, and we see it in our lives as well. Here in our text, we see that life after Christmas is marked not only by I. Opposition from God’s enemies, it’s also marked by II. Preservation by God’s grace.
I don’t know about you, but I find it interesting that when the life of God’s son is threatened, God doesn’t come in with guns blazing. He doesn’t wipe Herod off the face of the earth. He doesn’t send an army of angels to protect the life of the Christ child. Instead, he sends one angel to Jesus’ stepfather to tell Joseph in a dream, “It’s time to go.” “Get up, (the angel) said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you.“
In other words, God used rather ordinary means to protect the life of his son: a well-timed message, a faithful parent, a trip through the darkness, down some dusty road. But through it all, God was still in charge, guiding their steps to where he wanted them to be, in this case, the land of Egypt.
If you remember, down through the centuries, God’s people had used Egypt as a place of refuge. During times of famine, Abraham traveled to Egypt. Later Jacob and his 12 sons took refuge in Egypt, and under the leadership of Joseph and later Moses, they became a great nation. In fact, when God ultimately brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, he described that event with these words recorded by the prophet Hosea: Out of Egypt I have called my son. (Hosea 11:1) Here in our text, the holy writer makes it clear that that passage from the Old Testament was ultimately fulfilled in this event in Jesus’ life. Matthew tells us, After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.” Once again, God was quietly guiding the lives of Jesus’ family to not only preserve the life of the Christ child, but also to fulfill the Scriptures.
If you think about it, it doesn’t God still do the same thing for you and me today? No, maybe God doesn’t send an angel to talk to us in the middle of the night, but he does make us the promise that he will do what? Psalm 91:11: God will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. You wonder how many times God preserves our lives, without us even knowing it. Maybe he had that drunk driver stay on his side of the road as you passed by him or kept that little cut in your finger from turning into an infection running through your whole body. Maybe we looked at that detour as a major inconvenience, when in reality it was God steering us away from an even greater disaster.
And why would God do this? Because we deserve it? Because we’ve earned God’s favor? No, he does it out of pure undeserved love. God’s preserves us by his grace. Isn’t that a comfort to you? As you and I head into a new year with some major unknowns still ahead or maybe when we feel threatened by some of the things going on in our lives, some of things going on in our world, isn’t it a comfort to know that God is still in control? He is still guarding our steps. He’s still protecting our lives. The same God who preserved Jesus’ life in the days after Christmas is busy preserving our lives as well.
Yes, life after Christmas is marked by opposition from God’s enemies, preservation by God’s grace, and finally, fulfillment of God’s promises. We’ve already seen how two of the events in this post Christmas narrative were the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, namely, the women weeping over the loss of their children and God’s son being called out of Egypt. In the final verses of our text, Matthew brings up one more prophecy fulfilled in the life of Jesus. Matthew writes, When (Joseph) heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father 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.
Now, you can look through the whole Old Testament and you won’t find a single passage that says that Jesus will be called a Nazarene. What you will find our passages like Psalm 22:6 that says that the Messiah would be “scorned by man and despised by the people” or you think of Isaiah 53:5 where it says that Christ will be despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Now, you match those descriptions with how the people in Jesus’ day regarded those who came from Nazareth. They looked upon Nazarenes, the Galileans, as uneducated and uncultured. Do you remember what one of Jesus’ own disciples said when he first heard about Jesus of Nazareth? “Nazareth? Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46).
You see, a lot of people in Jesus’ day expected the Messiah would ascend through the ranks of the religious elites in the capital city of Jerusalem. They were looking for a military hero who would throw off the yoke of the Roman empire. But that’s not the kind of Messiah that Jesus came to be. Rather than overthrowing the Roman government, he allowed himself to be crucified by the Roman government. As Saint Paul put set, Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross. (Phil 2:8) And again, In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:14).
My friends, that’s what Jesus came to do for you and me—all in fulfillment of God’s promises. In a sense, it’s kind of ironic that God preserved Jesus from death at the hands of one Roman official, namely Herod, only so that he could later hand him over to death at the hands of a different Roman official, namely, Pontius Pilate. But that’s how God works. He has his time and his way to carry out his plan to rescue sinners like you and me from sin and hell forever.
If you think about it, there are parallels between what Jesus experienced after Christmas, that is, from the time of his birth to the time of his death—and what we’re experiencing between Christmas and the end of our lives. Jesus faced danger and opposition and yet God preserved his life in perfect fulfillment of the promises God had made in his holy word. The same thing is still true for you and me today. We too will face opposition from the enemies without and the enemy within. But by his grace, through his word and sacraments, God still preserves our lives, so that in the end our death will be nothing but the passage into heaven. May God keep us in his grace, to that blessed end. Amen.