Did you get many Christmas cards this year? It’s always exciting to open the post in December - besides the bills and business letters, you hopefully get a Christmas card or two each day. You open up the inside to see who it’s from, but it’s the outside that is visible on your mantelpiece or stuck on the door or wherever you display them.
There are lots of types of Christmas card image. Some Santas and snowy scenes. Robins and reindeer. Choirs and carollers. And then there are the Bible images - stars and stables and shepherds; wise men and mangers and angels. But the part of the passage we’re looking at today wouldn’t be found on many (or indeed, any) Christmas cards.
It’s part of the story of that first Christmas, but it’s not the bit we like to think about. Give us angels and shepherds and wise men and Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in the manger, but what about the rest of Matthew 2 - the dark side of Christmas.
Perhaps your Christmas hasn’t been an easy one. Perhaps it was less than perfect. Perhaps instead of joy, and excitement, and perfection, it was hard, and painful, and disappointing. Maybe you struggled your way through Christmas and you’re glad to be out the other side, just waiting for the clocks to roll on to tomorrow night so that 2018 can finally be over, and a new year will begin, a new year that will hopefully be better, because, you say to yourself, it could hardly be worse than what you’ve been through already.
This is the world that Jesus came into. Not a perfect world of tinsel and fairy lights, but of danger, threat, pain and confusion. Our world is messy, but that’s why Jesus came. He chose to step down from the delights of heaven to be born into our messy world. And he did it in order to be Immanuel, God with us, but more than that, God for us.
So let’s see what happened when Jesus was born into the world. Let’s focus on the dark side of Christmas. And we pick up the story in verse 13, where the keynote is the threat of Herod.
Next week we’ll look at the wise men’s arrival, but by verse 13, they have gone back home by a different way - so that they don’t go back by Jerusalem and Herod’s palace. When they had arrived, following the star, they had gone to the royal palace to see the one born king of the Jews. but King Herod was ‘disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him.’ You see, for King Herod, it was a bit like the line you hear in old westerns - This town ain’t big enough for the two of us. To King Herod, this new king was a rival king, a threat to his power and position, and so he determined to destroy the baby at all costs.
Before he could do so, an angel of the Lord was on the ball. Just as he had appeared to Joseph in chapter 1 to reassure him of Mary’s pregnancy, so here he appears to Joseph in a another 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.’
Herod had told the wise men that he wanted to worship Jesus, but his true intention was to kill him. Herod wants to get rid of his rival - and in so doing, is helping the devil in trying to prevent Jesus from completing the work he came to do - to save you and me. You see, if Jesus dies at Herod’s hands, then he couldn’t die on the cross to take away our sins. Do you see the danger here?
But God sends his angel, one step ahead, to ensure the survival of the Lord Jesus at this stage in the story. And as Joseph obeys the angel’s word, getting up, taking the child and his mother during the night, and leaving for Egypt, he is ensuring Jesus will escape the threat, and continue on his lifelong pathway to the cross.
Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the Sunday School class asked to draw a picture of a Bible story. And one wee boy draws an aeroplane with three people inside. And his teacher asks, Jonny, what have you drawn? So he names the people, Joseph, Mary and Jesus, and he says, this is the flight to Egypt.
But as they fly (on land rather than in a plane), as they escape, do you see what this means? It means that Jesus has been through and experienced what we see all too often on the news. For a part of his life, Jesus was a refugee. He and his family were asylum seekers, fleeing for their lives.
Would that knowledge change the way you look at the refugees you see on TV? To know that Jesus had to leave his homeland under threat of violence. To know that Joseph had no other choice but to get out of there straight away. The Lord of heaven and earth, giving up all to be born, and then to be forced to live as a refugee.
At the same time, Jesus is also fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy. Now, if you read some commentaries, they’ll talk for pages and pages about how this isn’t really a prophecy, and Matthew is clutching at straws and reading things into a verse from Hosea 11:1. But Matthew is writing Scripture too, guided by the Holy Spirit. And so he uses that verse ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’ to show that, just as God had called the nation of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt to be his people, so now Jesus follows the same pattern of going down to Egypt and being called out of it.
So the Dark Side of Christmas shows us that Jesus lived under threat, and was a refugee. But the next verses show just how set on violence King Herod was.
‘When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and 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.’ (16)
Herod had been sitting around in his palace, waiting for the wise men to return. But he waits long enough, he realises that they’ve bypassed the palace, and he’s out for blood. Rather than targeting just one baby, he decides to kill all the baby boys, two years and under.
There’s a choir piece I used to sing growing up most years at the carol service in Dromore (The Coventry Carol):
Herod the king in his raging
charged he hath this day.
His men of might in his own sight
all young children to slay.
Such was Herod’s (and Satan’s) determination to destroy the Christ, he would stop at nothing to get rid of him. Some have argued that, if Bethlehem’s population was small, then the number of baby boys under two would also have been small, maybe just four or five were killed. But any would be too many.
Maybe you’ve noticed another link to the people of Israel in Egypt. Do you remember at the start of Exodus, Pharaoh does something the same - slaying the baby boys of Israel - and at that time one baby boy survived, one called Moses, who would lead his people out of Egypt. So here, one baby boy survives, the king of God’s people who would lead them out of slavery for ever.
But Matthew picks up on another connection to the Old Testament. He turns to the prophet Jeremiah (31:15), and these words being 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.’
Rachel is the wife of Jacob, and so the mother of the children of Israel. Here, she is pictured weeping for her children - the Holy Innocents (as their feast day is called). But in Jeremiah, Rachel weeps for her children who have been taken into exile, far away from the land of Israel. And the rest of Jeremiah 31 is full of hope, full of promise, that exile will end, that return will happen, that restoration will be brought about in the new covenant.
So for Matthew to include that verse here, with its wider context, sounds a note of hope in the midst of mourning. Rachel weeps, but Jeremiah looks forward to the day when the exiles will return. And Matthew is signposting that Jesus is the one who will overcome Satan, sin and death, that he will be the consolation of his people. That, in the words of Zechariah: ‘In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us. To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.’
Jesus came into our world of pain; he came to bring comfort to those who mourn; he came to give himself on the cross to die for us, and to rise from the dead to give us the hope of eternal life with him - and, as the Prayer Book Funeral service puts it, ‘a joyful reunion in the heavenly places’.
If everything was all right in the world, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to have come. If all was well, he could have stayed in paradise. But that’s not the world we live in. Every day we hear of others going through danger, threat, pain, suffering, sadness and mourning. And some days, we experience those things ourselves. And this is the world Jesus chose to come to. He came to our messy world, and he wasn’t immune from the mess. He didn’t hover half a foot off the ground. No, he got stuck in, to sort it out, to be our Saviour, Redeemer and Friend.
If you think that Jesus wouldn’t understand what you’re going through - he has been there. He knows. He cares. And he is with you through the mess, to rescue and redeem. That’s why he came. he came for you. Hallelujah! What a Saviour!
This sermon was preached in St Matthew's Church, Richhill on Sunday morning 30th December 2018.
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