Infant King

Matthew 2:1-23

Merry Christmas and welcome to this second message in our new series in the gospel of Matthew. John set the stage for us last week, remarking how Matthew tells the story of Jesus from an intensely Jewish perspective. He frequently quotes from the Old Testament to make his case for Jesus being the promised Messiah. In the things that Jesus said and did – even through who he was and what happened to him – Jesus fulfilled many prophesies that foretold the coming of a savior, a leader who would deliver the people of Israel from everyone oppressing them and give them a life of shalom: peace, freedom, and fulfillment. The word Messiah literally means “anointed one,” harkening back to the anointing of David by Samuel to be a godly king over the people of Israel. The anointed Messiah would come from the line of David and reign in righteousness and blessedness, expanding his own divine kingdom into the whole world. The message of redemption would be universal. Matthew emphasizes how the Messiah, though Jewish and coming in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, touches all people everywhere and for all time. We’ll see evidence of this in our passage for today.

As we saw in chapter 1, Matthew establishes the heritage of Jesus with a genealogy. This comes right at the beginning of his narrative. John pointed out last Sunday that this does not seem to us like a very exciting introduction, but it was more meaningful in the culture of that day, and it does confirm that Jesus was a real person with identifiable ancestors, stretching all the way back to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. God had given Abraham the promise that the whole world would be blessed through him. Jesus came to fulfill that promise in a definitive and comprehensive way. The genealogy also identifies Jesus as a descendent of David, placing him in the royal line of Israel as well. His never-ending kingdom, secured by his resurrection from the dead and bodily ascension into heaven, comes to fulfill God’s promise to David in 2 Samuel 7 that his throne would be established forever.

God has these divine purposes that he was working out. And yet this is also a very human, at times very messy story. John mentioned last week that there are 5 women included in the genealogy of Jesus, and it is important to recognize what they add to the picture. Obviously women were involved in producing every generation listed. Why are these five highlighted in particular? They each have a painful story. Tamar was the mother of Perez and Zerah, whom she bore to Judah. She was his daughter-in-law, but when he did not treated her properly, she pretended to be a prostitute in order to get pregnant by him. Not an ideal situation. Next mentioned is Rahab, also a prostitute, who married into one of the leading families of Israel. And in the very next generation comes Ruth, a foreigner from Moab, a traditional enemy of Israel. She had to move to Israel as a widow. Bathsheba is not mentioned by name as the mother of Solomon, but she is identified as the former wife of Uriah. David committed adultery with her and had Uriah killed so that he could marry her. And lastly, Mary, the mother of Jesus, pregnant before marriage and bearing a child to Joseph that was not naturally his. These stories all speak of a level of shame and untidiness that is inherent in the human experience. God worked through these less-than-ideal situations to accomplish his divine purpose. We are reminded that Jesus was fully God but fully human as well. He came to earth as an ordinary infant but also as a king, an unprecedented combination of power and vulnerability.

The actual birth of Jesus is not a significant part of the Matthew narrative. The gospel of Luke provides many of the details that are usually associated with the Christmas story: the journey to Bethlehem, the stable, the angels appearing to shepherds, and the wondrous scene at the manger. In Matthew, Mary becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit and gives birth to a son whom Joseph names Jesus. That’s pretty much it for the actual birth account. The next scene, in chapter 2, which we will look at today, comes at least several months later. Let’s pray as we begin.

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. – Matthew 2:1-3

This is another amazing part of the Christmas story, on par with a heavenly host of angels appearing to shepherds. Not only did a special star appear in the sky when Jesus was born, but some wise men, several countries and cultures away, recognized that this meant something: the birth of a Jewish king worthy of their worship. How could that happen? We have to accept it as miraculous. There has been much speculation about who these Magi were and where they were from. Were they Persian astrologers? Zoroastrian priests? Pagan magicians from various backgrounds who were somehow touched by the power of the Holy Spirit? We don’t even know how many of them came, though by the 5^th century the tradition had been established that there were three, that they were actually kings, and they were given names. The Syriac church, however, still believes that there were 12 Magi who came to see the baby Jesus.

Even if they were not kings, their desire to pay homage to some new king was deeply disturbing to King Herod. Here we begin to see the unusual nature of Jesus’ kingdom, very different from earthly ones. Herod had the backing of the mighty Roman Empire. Last week John mentioned his imposing fortress that loomed over the town of Bethlehem. And yet these foreigners showing up with their tale of a star and infant king touched a point of insecurity. Herod had political connections but no spiritual authority. He recognized that something was going on here that transcended human power. The Magi had come to worship the new king. Something divine was happening, with potential to upset the current power structures. This was disturbing to all the people in Jerusalem, who did not want to create waves in the Roman Empire and bring trouble on themselves.

Herod did not have the respect of his subjects. He was known for his tyrannical rule, his harsh taxation, and profligate spending on his pet projects. He expanded and renovated the temple area in Jerusalem, including the massive Western Wall that still exists today, but even this was seen as part of his political maneuvering. He said that he was Jewish, but that was not his background and his dissolute lifestyle belied any religious observance. He had murdered three of his own sons to get them out of the way. Emperor Augustus commented that it would be preferable to be Herod’s pig than his son. He was seen as a dangerous, self-serving person. No one would be coming from afar to worship him. He urgently needed to figure out what was going on with these Magi and their star.

 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

“‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
    are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
    who will shepherd my people Israel.’” – Matthew 2:4-6

Herod’s ancestry was from Idumea, formerly Edom, south of the land of Israel. He was a descendent of Esau rather than Jacob. Despite his lack of proper Jewish heritage, he knew of the promised Messiah, longed for by all the people around him who were under the thumb of Rome. If this baby would become that kind of liberating leader his authority would indeed be under threat. He had no such claim to the throne of David.

The star was a sign that had brought the Magi to Israel, but at that point it had not identified exactly where Jesus was. The travelers naturally came to Jerusalem, the center of political power. But this prophecy from Micah chapter 5 was understood to mean that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. That chapter in Micah also indicates the kind of authority this shepherd would have:

He will stand and shepherd his flock
    in the strength of the Lord,
    in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely, for then his greatness
    will reach to the ends of the earth. – Micah 5:4

Someone greater than Herod was here, with strength and majesty derived from Almighty God. He would be even greater than King David, his predecessor from Bethlehem. His greatness and his rule would reach to the ends of the earth. No wonder King Herod felt threatened. Back to Matthew 2:

Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” – Matthew 2:7-8

Herod was clearly being disingenuous here. He had everything to lose by worshiping a new king. Even pretending publicly that he might want to do so would have weakened him politically. So this would need to be his secret with the Magi. He would attempt to find a way to remove this threat as soon as possible, and he wanted the Magi to help him out.

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. – Matthew 2:9-12

Something about the star led the Magi onward and brought them great joy when they realized that they were at the end of their long quest. Joseph had moved his family into a house in Bethlehem by this time, so the classic scene of the shepherds and wise men gathered around the manger together is probably not at all realistic. It must have caused quite a stir in the small town to have this foreign caravan show up to pay homage to baby Jesus. Much has been made of their costly gifts: gold for the royalty of Jesus, frankincense for his deity, and myrrh to foreshadow his death and the preparation of his body. In those days, these three items would have been considered equally precious. Frankincense and myrrh were each produced from the sap of certain trees and were considered to have medicinal value. Modern science has confirmed that myrrh has pain killing and anti-cancer properties. Frankincense has anti-inflammatory and anti-arthritic effects and may also suppress certain cancer cells. It’s interesting that in a world where sin has been compared to a cancer that grows and destroys people from the inside – that these anti-cancer medicines would have been presented to baby Jesus, who would grow up to die for the sin of the world.

One wonders how the teenage Mary would have reacted to all this extraordinary attention. She must have felt continually surprised by all that God was doing. And what did the Magi think in that situation? How could this ordinary toddler from a common family living in a lowly village be considered the king of the Jews? But they were still willing to bow in worship and submit to God’s wondrous plan. As they headed out to begin their long journey home did their joy go with them? Did they feel like they had had a glimpse of the most amazing miracle in the world? Deity taking on flesh, entering the flow of human history to change it forever. They as individuals would never be the same again either. Worshiping Jesus honestly brings transformation.

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.”

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.” – Matthew 2:13-15

So this chapter has several more dreams in the sequence recorded by Matthew, evidence of God directly reaching into human experience. The Magi were warned in a dream not to return to Herod. They must have realized the risk associated with disobeying the king, but they were willing to put God first. The Father was intervening to protect his Son. He also sent an angel to tell Joseph to escape to Egypt with his family. The symbolism of Egypt is important. Long before, the patriarch Jacob had moved his family to Egypt to escape the famine that threatened their lives. God worked through Jacob’s son Joseph so that he could overcome scorn and shameful treatment to serve as their savior in that situation. And generations later, Moses led the nation of Israel, as it had become, back to the Promised Land. This is the event that the prophet Hosea was remembering when he wrote these words, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” He used son as a metaphor for the entire nation. God himself had initiated this back in Exodus 4 when he instructed Moses,

Then say to Pharaoh, ‘This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.” But you refused to let him go; so I will kill your firstborn son.’” – Exodus 4:22-23

So Hosea’s use of the same metaphor hundreds of years later was not by accident. As a prophecy for the future his statement would refer to the Son of God coming out of Egypt, when he eventually returned with Joseph and Mary. This would have been another international connection for Jesus, though he would have been too young to have remembered it. Back to Matthew 2:

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. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“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.” – Matthew 2:16-18

So it likely took the Magi more than a year after they first saw the star to actually make it to Bethlehem. It may have taken Herod a while to realize that they were not returning to Jerusalem but that they had bypassed it on their way back eastward. He was furious, it says. Now what could he do? He clearly had no confidence that he could rely on any of the local people to tell him which youngster in Bethlehem the Magi had visited while they were there. So to be safe, he thought, he needed to kill all the boys in the area who were younger than two. Traditionally this number has been put in the thousands. Coptic sources even quote 144,000. But realistically, based on the expected population of the small town, it was likely not more than 20. In any case, this is still a great atrocity and injustice – so typical of Herod the Great.

The context of the quote from Jeremiah 31 does not explain why it should be connected to what is traditionally called The Slaughter of the Innocents here in Matthew 2. Ramah is actually about as far north of Jerusalem as Bethlehem is to the south. But some scholars think it could be where Rachel, the second wife of Jacob, died giving birth to Benjamin. The account in Genesis says that they were on their way from Bethel to Ephrath, another name for Bethlehem, but still had some distance to go. Rachel weeping as she looks toward Bethlehem is a fitting image for the grief of the area when their children were killed by Herod. Something comparable in our day would be the heartbreak of parents losing their children in school shootings. Or I think of the images of parents weeping over their children killed by bombs in places like Afghanistan and Syria. Children dying in these situations seems so senseless and unfair. How can the joy of Christmas be reconciled with such a tragedy? This is the kind of immense and inexplicable suffering that Jesus came to bear with us. He was the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, as described in Isaiah 53. Sometimes we can make no sense of suffering, but we can know that he walks through it with 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.”

So he got up, 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 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. – Matthew 2:19-23

In yet another dream, God directs Joseph back to the land of Israel. Mary is referred to as the mother of the child rather than as Joseph’s wife, highlighting the fact that Joseph was not Jesus’s natural father. Herod had died, commonly thought to be in the year 4 B.C., so that danger to the life of Jesus was over. Herod had died a horrible death, characterized by “burning fever, ulcerated entrails, foul discharges, convulsions, and stench,” according to the historian Josephus, who was of the opinion that this was God’s judgment on Herod for his awful sins.

Herod’s kingdom was divided between three of his sons and his sister. Joseph would have returned to Judea, but he wanted to avoid Archelaus, the son of Herod who was reigning there, so he went and settled in Nazareth instead. That is where Jesus would spend his growing up years. The prophecy that the Messiah would be called a Nazarene is not found explicitly anywhere in the Old Testament. It could be in a source that is now lost, or another possibility is that Nazarene was generally understood to be an insult, referring to Jesus’ humble and obscure origins. In John 1, when Philip tells Nathaniel about Jesus of Nazareth, Nathaniel exclaims, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” He may have been quoting a popular, derogatory saying or at least reflecting a low view of the place. The Lord of heaven had come to live in Hicksville.

So once again in the Christmas story we encounter the wonder and jarring incongruity of the incarnation. Jesus as fully God and fully man, embracing a human history woven through with sin and other messiness – and yet perfect himself. His birth as the Messiah is heralded by the heavenly hosts, but the message comes to lowly shepherds who go to a stable to meet him. Prominent foreigners follow a special star, of all things, to come to worship him and present this toddler with gifts fit for a king. Shortly thereafter this infant king is chased out of the country and spends some time as a refugee. The prominent ruler of his day thinks he can do away with this supposed rival, countering thousands of years of divine prophecy being fulfilled. But when Jesus does return to the land of Israel he grows up on what could be thought of as “the wrong side of the tracks,” living such an ordinary existence that the majority of his life is not even recorded for us. These contrasts continue throughout the rest of the story, as we will see as we carry on in Matthew.

So what does this mean for us? How do we live with the tension between the divine and human in each of our stories? Jesus has adopted us into his family, so we are children of the King. And yet we encounter all the failings and limitations of human existence. We have the Holy Spirit living within us, but he is like a treasure inhabiting cracked earthen vessels to show that the all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. I would like to close by reminding you of this section of Psalm 103. I hope it will be an encouragement to you.

The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
    slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
    nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
    or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
    so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
    so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

As a father has compassion on his children,
    so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust. – Psalm 103:8-14

Jesus took on our dust at Christmas. The Lord is compassionate and gracious! This is the source of our joy and hope.