Exploring My Strange Bible - God with Us - Gospel of Matthew Part 2

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

We are going to explore probably the most famous story from the Gospel of Matthew in today’s show. It is the Christmas story, or the story of Jesus’s birth (you know, all the iconic images of Joseph and Mary riding on the donkey). So for this sermon, I tried to shake off all that familiarity and read this text from Mary’s perspective. Because interestingly, the story focuses in on her personal narrative. In today’s episode, We also look at how Matthew keeps connecting these events in the early story of Jesus into large events happening in the Old Testament scriptures. I learned a lot from this, and I hope you do too.

Tim Mackey, Jr. utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 10 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith. And I hope this can be helpful for you too. I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find those resources at thebibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week. All right, well, in this episode, we're going to continue in our series in the Gospel of Matthew. Here, we're going to consider probably the most famous story from the Gospel of Matthew.

It's the Christmas story, the story of Jesus' birth, all the iconic images of Joseph and Mary riding on the donkey, you know, and so on to Bethlehem. So what I did was I tried, even just for myself, to like shake all that familiarity off and read this text from a new perspective. And specifically what I tried to do for myself and then throughout the teaching is to put myself in Mary's experience from her point of view and read and ponder, experience everything that happened from her perspective, because the story uniquely kind of focuses in on her own personal narrative. Also, what we explore is how Matthew keeps connecting these events in the early story of Jesus into large events happening and described in the Old Testament scriptures. And Matthew makes all these parallel connections between

the story of Jesus and the story of the people of Israel. So there you go. It's a famous story. I learned a lot and saw things from a brand new point of view, and I hope this could be helpful for you too. So there you go. Matthew chapter 2. Let's learn together.

These are the stories that Matthew has put here to explore Jesus' family history, and then also all of these stories about his birth, the circumstances of his birth and what happened and so on. And so just to remind us, these stories are here not just because Matthew is interested in history or something. He has this antiquarian interest and wants to be complete or something like that. Because, of course, there are other complete accounts of Jesus in the New Testament that don't say anything about his birth. And so, Matthew's included these stories here, not just to tell us, like, interesting things that happened. These stories are here because they communicate vital truths about who Jesus is for his people today, as he's in our midst as a community of

his followers. And so we're exploring these stories in Matthew 2, and these are some of the most famous Christmas stories. And it's easy for us, I think, because of Christmas songs and the cards we send each other and the bad Christmas plays that we all attend and that kind of thing. So that we become familiar with these stories and we tend to kind of see them through rose-colored glasses, I think. We're so familiar, we stop to think through

how profound and what these circumstances must have actually been like. So I just want us to, first of all, the events of this, the last half of chapter two, these are the parts that don't seem to make it into most Christmas plays. Did you notice that? The flight to Egypt, and then there's all this horrifying death and tragedy, and then the weird thing about moving to Nazareth or whatever. And we're like, oh, it's hard to put. It's not very inspiring or whatever. So we'll just stop it with Jesus being born.

And so that's to, we're missing what Matthew's trying to do here in the genesis of Jesus and in helping us see this here. So here's what I want us to do. Just try and do a little thought experiment. what I want us to do. Just try and do a little thought experiment and try and put yourself into the shoes, imaginatively, of Joseph and Mary and what the story we just read, what happened after Jesus's birth. And actually really think about how terrifying, how absolutely terrifying this all must have been. The way our Christmas plays tell the story is it's like Jesus, Emmanuel, God is with us, God is here to save or whatever, and then we stop there.

We fail to finish chapter two, which is like, and then everything got horrible, and just the plane went down, nosedive. It just, things totally, utterly fell apart. We just read it. We just read it. And so Matthew's told us this story of everything falling apart after Jesus arrived. We just read it. We just read it. And so Matthew has told us this story of everything falling apart after Jesus arrived. He's told it in three movements of terror and tragedy that took place after the Messiah arrives here. And I think these stories, well, they're significant for lots of reasons, but let's just, let's do the thought experiment here. You're a teenage Jewish girl, and you had, you just went through a few months ago this whole deal of like spontaneous pregnancy, your fiance is going to break it off, and then he has a vision, you know, saying don't

do that, and then like he decides not to. Like that's just a bad week in and of itself, you know what I'm saying? Like, stressful and like, holy cow, what's happening? And then a few months go by, and then all of a sudden you get this notice that, you know, over in Rome, these politicians have decided they're going to raise taxes again, right? The big bad Roman Empire, they've militarized your whole ancestral homeland for the last 50 years as they occupy it. And so all of a sudden, you're like mid, latter end of your pregnancy. You got to get on a donkey and go 80 miles south to your husband's hometown so he can register for the census so they can take more of your family's money. So they do that, and they go down there. And then we're not told the details, but we're just told somehow they don't make it back, or they're not able to make it back to Mary's hometown, and so

she ends up giving birth here. You're a young woman giving birth, and you're all, you're cut off. You're not in your home. You're not your mom, your aunts, the midwife, all those people that you knew, like you're gone, and you're with your husband's big whole extended family, which is awkward, you know? And so, and you give birth there in this kind of new different place, like that itself would be kind of traumatic and intense. And then it gets even worse, of course, because that night, or excuse me, soon, soon after, we don't know exactly the timeline involved, but you have this infant, baby boy, and all of a sudden you get this message that there are Roman soldiers coming from Jerusalem to Bethlehem because there's a price on your baby's head. They're going to kill your baby.

They're on the way. And so by night, you have to flee. And where do you go? And apparently, Joseph had some kind of connections down in Egypt. There was a large community of Jews living down in Egypt, and so in the middle of the night with your infant, you began a 300-mile trek through the deserts of Israel and the deserts of Egypt to flee for your lives. And then you hear on the road, somewhere on the road, that would have been about a month, at least a month long journey, you hear on the road that Herod and like what those soldiers did after you left and they couldn't find your baby, and that they massacred all of these other people's baby boys. And then that's haunting you as you then arrive in Egypt and you're raising your son in

this place you would have never chosen. You don't know anybody. It's new foreign land. And that's the context that you raise a toddler. And somewhere in the one to three year period. You finally catch a break and you hear that the big bad king who made all of that happen, he dies. So you head back to your husband's hometown. You're going to put down some roots. And all of a sudden you realize, like, you know, it's actually the big bad king's son who's on the throne. It's not safe here in Bethlehem anymore. Where do you go?

What's safe for you? do you go? What's safe for you? And so you end up the 80 mile, after the 300 mile trip, back 80 miles back north again to your podunk, no-name hill country town that you came from, if you're Mary, and where the rumor mill is churning about your mysterious pregnancy, and that will continue to churn for decades, as we're going to discover later on in the gospel. Three to four-year period. If that's your life, how do you feel about your life right now? I mean, just be perfectly honest. It's horrifying, right? And I know that there are stories of real hardship and struggle in our church community, in this room right now. And I dare say that what this family experienced, it's like, can you even imagine? If that was your story, who could survive? Imagine, just put yourself in the untold stories

that are underneath the story of Matthew chapter 2. Imagine the prayers that you're praying as you escape into the night desert with your infant. You know, imagine, to me, what these stories raise is a question, is this whole question of when terror and tragedies and disappointments and loss hit, where is God? That's what comes to our minds, right? Where is God in moments like this? And for many of us, where our minds go, where our hearts go, is we're tempted to go down this road of

feeling like God is absent. The train has come off the tracks. Where is God? He's not answering any of my prayers. And so, you can get like disillusioned or embittered with Jesus because if he was good or if he was real, you know, he would prevent these kinds of things from happening. And many people, they go even a step further than that and they just ditch belief in God all together. Because if God was real and if he was good, stuff like this wouldn't happen. He must not be real. This must be an illusion, this whole deal. And what Matthew chapter 2, I think, is trying to put on the table for us to consider is what if God is good, and what if God is actually working out his purposes, but it happens in a way that you would never expect and that most of us don't actually want to hear.

And I think what stories like this do in the scriptures is they undermine and challenge a myth, a very common myth, that we tend to have or that our culture has about the Christian faith or whatever. I call it the myth of religious fulfillment. And there's actually a number of books of the Bible and parts of the Bible that are deconstructing this in a lot of different ways. And the myth of religious fulfillment is this mindset that I invited Jesus into my life. I recognized my flaws and failures. I'm a screwed up person. Yes, I'm a sinner. I need grace. Jesus died for me. I'm reconciled to God because of what Jesus did for me. Now, once I'm there, I have hopes and aspirations and dreams about where my life could go. And Jesus is good, and he's gracious, and he loves me and died for me. And so surely he wants to help make those happen. And then they don't happen. Or maybe only some of

them happen. Or maybe the opposite happened. Maybe your nightmares are what happened. And then you're just left hanging there like, well, what was the point of this then? I can't catch a break. Where is God in the midst of all of this? That's what I think this story is trying to get us to think about. And some of us, we get jaded or embittered. We think that God must not exist. What's the point? What's the point of all of this? And Matthew is going to ask us to consider a new angle on this whole experience that most of us know, this disappointment that we have with what happens in our lives. And so he tells the story in three movements. And each movement,

you may have noticed as Peter was reading through, he tells some moment of terror or tragedy and disappointment. It looks like everything's falling apart. And then he anchors it with a quotation from the Old Testament scriptures. Did you see that? And then he moves on to another point, anchors it in the scriptures, another point, three movements. And each one of these movements highlights Matthew's invitation to us to think about suffering and God and all of this from a new angle. So let's just dive in and let's see what happens. You guys with me? Okay. Verse 13. So we came right into the middle of the story here. Verse 13 starts, when they had gone. Now, if you weren't here last week, you're like, who's they?

They who? They is the astrologers. Such a strange story. This caravan, this huge caravan of ancient, you know, Eastern astrologers come. And they've, you know, they had their star maps out or whatever, and they're like, whoa, the ruler of the world is born or something, and they make this at least year-long journey through the deserts searching for Jesus. I mean, it's just the craziest story in the world.

And then they arrive, and you do know there are surely more than three of these guys. Our Christmas cards just don't even do justice here on this one, right? Nowhere does it say there's three. There were three gifts offered, you know, to Jesus and to his family. But we're told that the caravan was so huge that the whole city of Jerusalem was in uproar, right? So I'm imagining actually like many, many, maybe even a hundred or so people. And so you have this huge caravan, and what do they do? They come to whom saying, where is the new king who was just born? Just never do this. Never do this, right? So they have this question, oh, where's this new king who's going to be born?

And so who do they go to ask that question? The king, right? Just don't ever do that, right? Don't ever meet Obama and be like, where's the real president? You know, that will not go well for you. It'll be very awkward. And this king in particular, he had a violent streak, a murderous violent streak, and so bad. This just sets, I'm sure the astrologers didn't mean for this all to happen, but it sets in motion all of these horrible events. And so the astrologers, they all go. And then Joseph has this dream telling him, dude, you got to get out of here. You have to get out of here. Soldiers are on the way. You got to

go. Now, just right there, put yourself in that moment. Like, you know, try and think of life experience that you could go through. You're in the hospital. You're in the birthing center, right? 24 hours ago, you just had a baby. And then you're like, you got to go. You have to get out of here. People want to kill your baby. And so they just, they flee into the night desert. Terror and tragedy number one. If you and I were in that experience, you would be praying prayers of like, God, help me, help us get out of here, what's going to happen, where are you, God, what's happening right here, why is this happening to me? And I'm sure that's what was going through Mary and Joseph said, but Matthew invites us to see that what's happening here doesn't surprise

God. What Herod's doing and the evil and the violence that he's plotting, it doesn't surprise God. What Herod's doing and the evil and the violence that he's plotting, it doesn't surprise God because we've actually been here before. This story of God raising up a deliverer and then of some sort of power-hungry or insecure human ruler who's threatened and so using violence and oppression to try and thwart God's purposes, I think I've heard a story like that before, and it's because you have. And that's what Matthew's getting at when he says the train has not gone off the tracks. This is actually a part of the pattern

of how God is at work in history. Look what Matthew says. He says, when this happened, the flight at night and all that kind of stuff, Herod and the soldiers. So was fulfilled what the Lord said through the prophet, out of Egypt I called my son. Now, if you have a footnote, it'll tell you that he's quoting words from what ancient Hebrew prophet? You do have footnotes. Oh, come on. Somebody.

Hosea, there you go. Thank you, Hosea. Yes, I really do mean it when I ask questions. Oh, come on. Somebody. Hosea. There you go. Thank you. Hosea. So, yes, I really do mean it when I ask questions. So, there you go. So, Hosea. The prophet Hosea, chapter 11. And many of us, we read that and we think, oh, oh, okay. So, that's prophecy, right? So, Matthew sees the Old Testament as a collection of predictions about things that would happen in Jesus. And so we have some kind of thing in our head like Hosea, 800 years before Jesus, he had a little movie screen and a vision or something like that, and he saw Joseph and Mary and Jesus escaping into the desert at night. Now for the six of you who are studious and you're like, oh, you know what? Hosea is in my Bible. I'm just going to go look it up, you know? And just

go like see this really cool prediction that Matthew has quoted from. And then you're going to read the passage that he's quoting from and scratch your head and not understand what's going on. And so here, let's just, let's all have that experience together right now, right? So here we go. Here's the poem that Matthew quotes from, Hosea 11. When Israel was a child, I loved him. This is Yahweh speaking through Hosea the prophet. When Israel was a child, I loved him. And out of Egypt, I called my son. But the more they were called,

the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals, other gods. They burned incense to images. It was I, Yahweh says, it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms, but they didn't realize that it was I who healed them. So let's just stop. I think we've got enough to get the point here. Hosea is offering a poetic reflection on what key story in the story of Israel. Yeah, he's recalling the past, the Exodus, when Israel was a child, i.e. being birthed as a nation, right? They went from like 70 to, you know, thousands and so on, tens of thousands in Egypt. And it's the whole story of the Exodus. And Pharaoh is scared of them. He's freaked out. And then so Yahweh loves Israel

and calls them out of Egypt. It's a reference to the past, to the story of the Exodus. Now, why is Israel called God's son? Because that's what Israel is called in the story of the Exodus. Exodus chapter 4. Moses goes and says to Pharaoh, let Israel, my firstborn son, go free. And Pharaoh says, no chance, no chance. And so he goes on to say, I called them out of Egypt and then I brought them into the promised land. And then, I mean, he's just like, what?

What? What did I ever do to you? You know, it's like I brought you into the promised land and you didn't thank me. You didn't follow me. You didn't honor me in any way. In fact, you followed other gods and you didn't know that I was the one who was doing all of this for you. So for Hosea, this is a poem thinking about the past, about Israel's faithlessness and God's faithfulness. and God's faithfulness. And Matthew has quoted that little phrase right there. And so if Matthew sees the Old Testament as a grab bag of different predictions to precise moments in the life of Jesus, then I don't, that's just really strange. That's just really strange because that doesn't

seem to be what Hosea has in mind. It could be the case that Matthew means something different when he says, thus was fulfilled or this fulfilled the scriptures. Maybe our idea of like Nostradamus style prediction is not actually what he's trying to do. And that's what I think. I think Matthew's doing something way more interesting than that. So Matthew, Jesus, and you guys, welcome. Welcome to the wonderful world of how Jesus and the apostles read from and quoted from their scriptures and thought about them in light of Jesus. Jesus and the apostles view the whole story of Israel and the Old Testament story as a story that's pointing forward. And it's a story that creates all of these loose threads of the plot line of Israel called to be

a priest to the nations and follow the Torah and Abraham's family bringing blessing to all of the nations and the covenants and the sacrifices, and it creates all of these loose ends, and then just the whole thing crashes and burns in the story of the people's exile, and you're just left wondering, like, what is this story about? Like, what? It had all this momentum, and then it just… And so, Jesus and the apostles see Jesus, the events of his life and death and resurrection as being the resolution where all of the storylines of the Old Testament come together. And so, what Matthew is trying to get us to see is that the events of Jesus's early life are, as it were, replaying or retelling the story of Israel's earliest history. And what he's quoting from here in Hosea is just one piece of a larger thing he's doing in these early chapters. Allow me to show you with a handy-dandy

chart. But this is really a Bible Geek Sunday, so some of you will be pleased about that. And some of you are bored out of your minds already, but whatever, I don't care. So think through the story of Israel and its exodus, right? How it goes. They go down to Egypt, the journey to Egypt, and they become a numerous nation. You have the oppressive king.

Who is it in this exodus story? Pharaoh, big bad Pharaoh. And so he makes this decree to kill all the Israelite boys, throwing them in the Nile River. And then, but God raises up this deliverer, Moses. And then through Moses' leadership, God calls his son, he calls Israel his son in Exodus 4, out of Egypt. They spend 40 years in the wilderness, and then they pass through the Jordan River into the promised land. That's the shape of the Exodus story. And what Matthew's trying to get us to see is that Jesus, as Israel's Messiah, is the one in whom that whole story is reaching its culmination and fulfillment.

And so he's going to point, he's actually structured the whole genesis of Jesus at the beginning of Matthew to retell all of the key moments in the Exodus story. So he goes down to Egypt to flee from this, except he's going to Egypt, right? There, in Israel's case, they go to Egypt and then have to flee out of Egypt from the king. In Jesus' story, he's fleeing from the bad king to go down to Egypt. And what is that bad king doing? It's not Pharaoh. It's Herod.

So Herod's being depicted as this Pharaoh-like bad guy. And he kills the children in Bethlehem. And so they are down in Egypt. And then God calls his son, his greater and truer son, Israel's Messiah, the Son of God, out of Egypt. And then here, what Matthew's done is wonderful. He reverses the order. Because in Matthew, the next thing that happens is Jesus is baptized where? Where is he baptized? Come on. It's too good, right? It's too good. But why did John the Baptist go down to the Jordan anyway? Because of that event right there. It's like he's saying, let's rewind the whole story of Israel

and start over again. Let's replay the whole story, except this time it will be Israel in the person of its Messiah, who came to do what Israel as a nation was incapable of doing. And then after Jesus passes through the Jordan, so to speak, where does he go from there? Forty days in the wilderness and so on. It's too good. There you go. It's brilliant. So, this quotation of Hosea is just one little piece of this larger puzzle. What Matthew's saying, and here, this is cool Bible theology, stuff like that, but this is actually very practical and pastoral, what Matthew's doing. If you're a young mom and you're fleeing for your life and

your child's life into the night desert, you are tempted to think that God has utterly abandoned you. And what Matthew's inviting us to see is that no matter how horrible human evil gets and what humans do to each other and so on, can God's purposes to bring about the redemption of his people be thwarted by human evil? No. Does that mean that human evil can't wreak incredible havoc in our world? No, it does all of the time.

Does that mean that God's not in control? No. It means that despite human evil, he's still at work. Which brings us to the second movement of this story right here. The second part, the second terror and tragedy, and the way he anchors it in the scriptures. They're fleeing in the night desert down to Egypt. At some point, they must hear this report of what Herod did once he couldn't find the one who was born to be king of the Jews in Bethlehem. And what does he do? He does exactly what his pharaoh counterpart did thousands of years ago. He has all the boys killed. Not all the boys.

He has the boys who are two years old and younger. And so a few things here that are interesting. One is archaeologists who have excavated in and around Bethlehem. They tell us that the rough population of Bethlehem would have been somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000. And so based on average birth rates and size of family and so on, we're talking somewhere in the vicinity of 25 to 50 baby boys who were killed. I mean, it's absolutely horrifying.

Utterly horrifying. And imagine being Mary and Joseph and you are carrying this weight now, because all of this was aimed at your son. And you would be very tempted in an event like that to definitely write off God. Like, where is God? What's he doing? Surely he would prevent something like this from happening. And what Matthew, again, he anchors this in the scriptures to remind us that while this is horrific evil,

the train has not fallen off the tracks. God is still working out his redemptive purposes. And he does this by, once again, quoting from the scriptures. Verse 17, then was fulfilled what to quote it, and we'll talk about that in a second. Now, if you view what Matthew's doing as just pulling different verses out of the Old Testament as precise predictions, then this one will really bother you and keep you up at night

because then what you have is God predicting and apparently ordaining then this act of evil that Herod did and the baby boys and so on and that ought to, I think, really, really bother you. I don't think that's what Matthew is saying here. He's saying something here more profound because, again, he sees the story of Jesus as being the culmination of this long, long pattern. Sometimes he quotes the Old Testament, especially we'll see when we get to the story of the crucifixion as having these precise correspondences. But most of the time he quotes from the Old Testament. I don't think that's what he's doing. And this is a good example of that. So think with me, Jeremiah. Jeremiah predates Jesus by about 600 years. And Jeremiah was one of the main prophets who was an eyewitness to one of the most tragic, traumatic events that took place in Israel's story. And that was when the empire of Babylon

showed up, besieged the city for about a year, broke through the walls, burned the city to the ground, killed a ton of people, burned the temple of Yahweh to the ground, chained up a whole bunch of Israelites and hauled them off into exile. And Jeremiah saw it all. And he both saw it coming. And then he wrote lots of poetry to mourn and lament and express God's own grief over all of what happened. And Jeremiah 31 that Matthew quotes from is an example of that. And here's the passage in its context. This is what the Lord says.

A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping. Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. This is what the Lord now says. Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your hard service will be rewarded, declares the Lord. Your children will return from the land of the enemy. So there's hope for your descendants, declares the Lord. Your children will return from the land of the enemy. So there's hope for your descendants, declares the Lord. Your children will return to their own land. So just stop and think. So this is Jeremiah. He's looking at the fate of the people of Israel. And some horrible event has happened. And so he uses this image of Rachel weeping and so on. We'll talk about that in a second.

But can you see, who are the children up in verse, at the beginning? Who are the children? It's the people of Israel. It's just like Hosea chapter 11. It's the people of Israel, and they're being gathered up at this place called Ramah, right outside Jerusalem. And some of them are being killed, some, most of them are being put in chains, and they're being hauled off into exile. They are no more in God's land that he had given to them. But Jeremiah says there's reason to hope,

because your children will come back. There will be a remnant that comes back from the exile, and God will fulfill his promises to bless the nations through this family. Somehow in the future, your children will come back. So the point is, is that in context, the children are the people of Israel who are being hauled off into exile and killed and so on. Now, what's going on with Rachel? Who's Rachel? Who's Rachel? Rachel has iconic status in the Israelite imagination. Rachel was one of the matriarchs of the nation. She was married to which of the patriarchs? So it goes Abraham and Sarah,

Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and... Well, he had four wives he was dead, he was not a good man and he loved Rachel actually more than any other wives, he was screwed up in every way

Rachel was his most beloved wife and it was through Jacob that the twelve tribes of Israel comes on, twelve sons, twelve tribes of Israel. And so the story about Rachel, Matthew just assumes you know it, right? You know the story about Rachel. Genesis 35, you know it. So is Genesis 35. It's the story of how she dies. Rachel was pregnant with the last of the 12 sons of Jacob, right? And they're on their way back to the land after a long time away, and they're nearing Bethlehem. They're right outside Bethlehem,

and she goes into labor. And it becomes clear, again, Genesis 35, you can read the story, becomes clear that it is not going well, and she's dying. And so it's this tragic scene depicting her weeping and grieving as she gives birth. She hears that it's a boy, and she cries out. Her last words are, call him Ben-Oni, and then she dies. And Ben-Oni means son of my anguish. And Jacob, because he can't handle the fact that his son would be named after this event, he changes his name from Ben-Ani to Ben-Yamin, son of my right hand, And Jacob, because he can't handle the fact that his son would be named after this event, he changes his name from Ben-Ani to Ben-Yamin, son of my right hand, where we get the name Benjamin.

And so that story's right there. And that happened just outside of Bethlehem. And so what Jeremiah is doing is he's depicting the great matriarch of Israel who wept over, you know, in the circumstances of her birth of her own son and when she died. He uses this metaphor of Rachel weeping over the centuries, over the tragedy of what happened to her children, the people of Israel, when Babylon came and destroyed the city and hauled them all, hauled them all away, away. And so what's Matthew doing here? Matthew, he's picking up the storyline.

And here's this event in the life of Israel's Messiah. Yet one more big bad empire, one more evil king, killing and oppressing God's people, right? The people of Israel, the children of Rachel. And it's as if the voice and the weeping of Rachel reaches over the centuries yet again over more of her Israelite children who were being killed and oppressed under another Pharaoh. It would be, I was trying to think of the equivalent. Here would be an equivalent. It would be like a poet who wants to of the equivalent. Here would be an equivalent. It would be like a poet who wants to grieve over those who died at September 11th, right? Over 9-11. And so this poet uses the image of George

and Martha Washington, right? Who were buried south of Washington, D.C., depicting George and Martha as weeping over the deaths of those who died. That's what Jeremiah is doing. It's this iconic figure. And Matthew picks it up once again, I think, to talk about how… So just think what's happened. This is really profound. What is God doing as these children in Bethlehem are killed? And Matthew would draw our attention through the words of the prophet talking about God's own grief and the people of Israel's own grief over what's happening

in his world. Where is God in moments of terror and tragedy? He's grieving. He's weeping. This is very similar to what Paul the Apostle says in Romans chapter 8, where you have the corruption of our world, and it's all screwed up, and things are horrible and tragic here. And what is God doing? God, by his Spirit, is present in our world, groaning and grieving over the tragedy of what human sin and evil has done to his world. That's the second movement of the story.

It's very powerful. That's where God is. That's what God is doing. Which leads to the third movement of the story. Verse 19. How you guys doing? Light, light subject matter here this morning, right? Sheesh.

Verse 19. Herod dies. Finally, right? Sheesh. Verse 19. Herod dies. Finally, we catch a break. Something good happens, right? Like big bad Pharaoh-like Herod dies. And so we have this vision, go back to the land. And so they do. This big 300-mile trek through the desert back up to the land of Israel.

And it's clear from verse 22 that they were aiming to go back to Judea. And almost certainly, they're trying to land in Bethlehem, which is in the heart of Judea. Bethlehem was David's hometown. Joseph is from the family of David. Jesus has been adopted into the family of David. We're going to raise him. We're going to raise him here. And then, nope, that's not going to happen, right? Nope. Because Herod's son is on the throne. He's about as bad as his father. And so it's like, then what do you do? Holy cow, you have this last-minute decision you've got to make. Eighty more miles on that donkey, right? Up to Nazareth. Now, why does Matthew tell us that? I mean, Jesus grew up in Nazareth. We know that much from... Why is this moment significant? And it's because it was clear they were intending to land

somewhere else, and then Nazareth is like the second option. And it's a disappointing option, right? Because Nazareth was not known for anything good. Do you know there's a kind of a well-known story in John chapter 1 where somebody finds out that Jesus grew up in Nazareth, and some of the other disciples, they're like, hey, we found the Messiah. He's from Nazareth. And do you remember this guy, Nathaniel? And what does Nathaniel say? He's like, yeah, whatever. Like anything good can come out of Nazareth, you know. It's a no-name, podunk hill country town. Nothing good comes out of there. And that's where the Messiah grows up. That's so odd.

That's so strange. And look at what he says, though. He says, actually, here we go again. He anchors it in God's redemptive purposes. So, look at the last sentence. Verse 23. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that he would be called a Nazarene. So apparently you can read somewhere in the Hebrew prophets that Jesus would grow up in Nazareth.

And you will do a word search for Nazarene or Nazareth or something like that, and you will find, oh, Nazareth didn't exist in Old Testament times. It actually was only about 150 years old when Jesus was around. And you will search for these words, he will be called a Nazarene, and you will turn up how many hits in the Old Testament prophets? Zero. You will turn up zero. So what on earth is he doing?

I am in heaven right now, by the way, you guys. That's just all this Bible stuff or whatever. And I think Matthew's in heaven. But remember, all of this has a very practical, practical point. So go with me down one more rabbit hole here. Notice he anchored each terror and tragedy and disappointment with a quotation of the Scriptures. He quoted the prophet Hosea.

He quoted the prophet Jeremiah. But here he's simply saying the scriptures. He quoted the prophet Hosea. He quoted the prophet Jeremiah. But here he's simply saying the prophets. You know, the prophets said he would be called a Nazarene. So he's not actually quoting a line out of any of the prophets. He's quoting an idea. He's quoting a theme that he says you can find throughout many of the prophets. quoting a theme that he says you can find throughout many of the prophets. Now, this is brilliant. Holy cow. This is so cool. So he's making a wordplay in Hebrew and Greek that actually reveals something really profound about who he understands Jesus to be.

There was a famous Old Testament prophecy in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 11. Old Testament prophecy, in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 11, and Isaiah developed this image of the Messiah coming as like fresh growth, like a little sprouting tree growing up out of an old stump. So think like a dead stump, and then a little green shoot coming up, and that was what Isaiah said the Messiah would be like. In Isaiah chapter 11, he says a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse. Jesse was David's father. A little, and from his roots, a little branch will come bearing fruit. And then he goes on to talk about he's the Messiah from the King of David, and he'll bring peace and justice to all the nations, and so on. The lion lays down with the lamb. It's that whole story, that whole poem. That's Isaiah 11.

And he calls the Messiah the branch. And what happened throughout the rest of the history of the prophets is Jeremiah and Zechariah, they all picked up on this. They liked this image. And so this is a whole theme in the prophets. Isaiah is, the Messiah is called branch, stick man. Stick man, right? Jeremiah 23, Zechariah 6, and so on.

The hope for the Messiah is the hope for the stick, the hope for the branch. Now, this is brilliant, what Matthew's doing. So, the name in Hebrew for where Jesus grew up is Nazareth, upper top left right there, Nazareth. And in Greek, that got spelled as Nazareth, or Nazareth, what we call it, and that's the name of the town Jesus grew up in. The name for branch or stick in Hebrew is Nazer, which in Greek would be spelled as Nazer, or calling him a Nazarin. Do you get it? Do you get it? So he's stick man.esus is stick man or even better and i didn't make up the pun jesus is from the sticks come on he's from the sticks he's from stick town i mean nazareth means stick town he's from the sticks and it's not my pun he made it up right here and so so there's a word play going on here and that's brilliant on on Matthew's part. He's linking Jesus

by the name of the town he grew up in, a stick town, to the prophecy of the stick, the messianic stick that Isaiah talked about. But there's even something more significant here, because Nazareth, stick town, did not have a positive reputation. Nobody thought the Messiah would ever come from there. In fact, when people heard that Jesus was from there, they were like, well, this guy's not a Messiah. Messiah wouldn't come from stick town. And here, I think, Matthew's linking up Isaiah's prophecies about the stick Messiah with what Isaiah is going to develop his portrait of the Messiah to become, which is of the king who would come to his people and be rejected and despised and killed and actually die on behalf of the sins of his own people. One of the most famous poems of Isaiah to depict the suffering servant king is in Isaiah 53. And can you guess how Isaiah opens up that poem, how he describes

the Messiah? Lo and behold, he calls him a stick. He grew up like a young branch, like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, no great appearance to attract us to him. He was despised and forsaken by others. He was a man of sorrows, familiar with grief. Sorry, next one.

Surely he took up our pain and he bore our suffering. Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, afflicted. But in reality, Isaiah says, he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. And the punishment that brought us peace was on him. And by his wounds, we are healed. In other words, everything about Jesus from the town that he ended up growing up in epitomized his identity of who he was and what he came to do. And where is Emmanuel in our terrors and tragedies? And where is God when

our lives are disappointing, like none of our dreams are coming true, or your nightmares are coming true? Like, where is God? And Matthew invites us to consider the fact that God is with us and that he's with us by actually becoming subject to all of the same terrors and tragedies and disappointments that you and I experience. The Messiah's life was a disappointment from one point of view. I really doubt that as Jesus is kneeling and crying in the Garden of Gethsemane, that he's feeling like all of his wildest dreams are coming true, right? Who is this God revealed in Jesus? He's the God who redeems and saves,

but not by making all of our dreams come true. In the story of the scriptures, the world is the way it is because God has actually granted us a huge degree of dignity and freedom in the choices that we make. And we have created a world that's hell on earth. And how is God going to

redeem and save that? He's going to become a part of it. He's going to become a baby to utterly terrified parents who have to run for their lives. He's going to be born in a place where nobody thought anything. He's the utter underdog. He was despised and afflicted. But in reality, Isaiah says, that's where God is at work. Precisely at the lowest moments where you think God is totally absent, the story of Jesus invites us to see that's exactly where Emmanuel is. And what Jesus comes to do is not solve everybody's problems.

Jesus shows up and everything gets worse. I mean, he's born with a price on his head and he dies with a price on his head and the only moment that changes everything is what happens at the end, which is Jesus's resurrection from the dead and that the suffering servant who's identified with all of our disappointments and all of our tragic dreams that get destroyed as we live through life and we get jaded and disillusioned. And Jesus journeyed right alongside us through all of that. And it forces us, as it forced Jesus, to ask as he kneeled in the garden and just be like, what? I don't want this. I don't want this at all. And his prayers were not

answered that night. He ended up on the cross. And the only thing that keeps this from being a tragedy is this moment of hope of resurrection from the dead. That Jesus is the one human being whose life was just as tragic as the rest of ours, but because of his utter love and commitment to preserving his good world, in God's love, Jesus was raised from the dead to give us hope that the sin and the evil and the disappointment that besets our lives and our world doesn't get the last word.

But it doesn't mean all our dreams will come true. It means we live in a world that's groaning, and that God's groaning along with us as we have hope in the resurrection from the dead and a new creation. And so, dude, you guys, this is deeply theological, but it's so, so practical. Because I know that there are so many stories in the room of people who are struggling. You're struggling to believe that Jesus is good, and you're struggling to believe that Jesus is even real. Because look at how your life is turning out. And it seems to me Matthew 2 is inviting us to consider another angle. That Jesus is actually suffering alongside of you. And it allows you to lock arms with him

because he's the one who went through the curtain and was raised to new life and hope out the other side. And for my money, I'm wrapping my arms around him in faith and in hope. And that's what it means to be a community of Jesus as we support each other through our disappointments and the terrors that take place in our lives. Amen? Amen.

So we go to the bread and the cup in worship. I just encourage you to reflect on what this means for you, to think about the ways that you are living your disappointments or through your struggles, and what it means for the suffering Messiah to come alongside of you and to give you hope in the midst of that. Thank you guys for listening to Exploring My Strange Bible. We are going to continue on in the Gospel of Matthew in future episodes. So there you go. I'll see you next time.