January 1 2023
Matthew 2:19-23
Well, another year has rolled around and here we are at the beginning of 2023. It is so unbelievable to write that number and realize that we are now living in the future that we used to dream about. I mean, every year I have to ask, just where are the flying cars that we were once promised that would be ours by now? After seeing how well self-driving cars are doing maybe not having flying cars is a good thing. As we enter this new year, we not only wonder about what the future holds, especially in the area of technology, but we also, personally, begin to focus more on self-improvement. You know, now is the beginning of a new year, its time to slim down, or get organized or whatever life goals might be on your mind. In Christian circles, this personal emphasis on self-improvement is usually centered around the question,”What is God’s will for my life?”. It is as if to say, that if God has a plan for my life then here at the beginning of a new year, now is a great time to be figuring that out so that I can get on doing whatever God has planned for me. This is a rather unfortunate way of thinking about things because the truth is that searching for God’s will for ones personal life has no support in the Scriptures whatsoever which might surprise some people. No, what the Bible does speak volumes about is the will of God but this will is not some personalized plan that God has for each individual person rather what we find in the scriptures is that God has a will and what each person must do is to conform their life to the will of God. A much better question as we begin the year is to ask the question, “Just what is the will of God?”, and the second question we need to ask once we figure out what God is up to is to ask,”Just what must I take on or let go of in order that I might align myself with this will of God?
If we are interested in knowing just what is the will of God it goes without saying that there is no better place than in the life of Jesus. Throughout the life of Jesus the will of God seems to be always present sometimes in very loud and unavoidable ways and then, in scriptures like our scripture for today, the will of God is given to us in more subtle ways, almost like in a whisper.
To understand just what is going on in this little snippet of scripture from Matthew’s gospel, we need to remember that it is in Matthew’s account of the Christmas story that we have recorded for us the visit by the wise men. Notice I didn’t say “the three wise men” because, truth be told, Matthew does not actually say how many there were. Regardless, these astrologers who watched the night skies for what the future held, one day saw a star rising in the western sky which was interpreted by them that a new king had been born somewhere west of where they lived. So, they set out to discover just which country would soon be under new leadership. Their journey led them to Judaea where they began to ask just where they could find this newborn king of the Jews. This is when the trouble began because when Herod, who considered himself to be king, heard that these travelers were looking for the king of the Jews who had recently been born it wasn’t hard for him to conclude that he and his sons after him, might be out of a job before long.
Herod, admittedly, was pretty smart because instead of going and searching for this newborn king himself he just tells the visitors from the east that before they head for home they were to stop by the royal palace and let him know where they had found the one they were looking for. Well, these astrologers did find Jesus and they worshipped him and, as we know so well, they gave Jesus gifts that they had brought with them. Yet, they did not go and tell Herod where Jesus was because, as Matthew informs us, they were warned in a dream to not to return to Herod but instead they were to go straight home by another route.
Well, it just makes sense that Herod is not just going to let the news that there is a new king in town go without doing something about it. He decides that if he can’t find the young king he would just take and get rid of every boy two years and under in the region of Bethlehem. Now, if we are familiar with the story of Israel being slaves in Egypt, we will remember that this was the same tactic of the king of Egypt. In that story, Moses is saved from the slaughter of the male children by his sister who placed him in a basket and hid him in the reeds along side of the river. So, in no small way, the situation in Judaea had become much like situation which caused the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. What we find in Matthew’s story is that Jesus, who represents the people of Israel, has his own Exodus story because as Matthew records the story, the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him to take his family and flee to Egypt so that Herod might not harm the baby Jesus. Its not hard to be astounded by what a strange turn of events has happened here in this story of God and his people. Where God had to rescue his people from annihilation when they were slaves in Egypt so he brings them from there to the land he has promised Abraham. Now, in order to save Jesus from annihilation, God takes him from the promised land and takes him to Egypt. It does seem that truth is stranger than fiction!
So, Joseph waits it out down in Egypt until Herod at last dies. This is where we, at last, come to our scripture for today. Once again, we are told, Joseph is visited by the Lord in a dream and Joseph is told to, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” It is here in this message from the Lord to Joseph that we have our first clue as to just what is the will of God. We have to wonder just why does God insist that Joseph head back to the land of Israel? And why does God call it the land of Israel instead of stating that it is Judaea as we hear throughout the gospel of Matthew? Perhaps the best explanation to questions such as these is that this phrase, “the land of Israel”, speaks to the promise that God had made to Abraham. In the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, the 18th verse, we hear God promise Abram, “To your offspring, I give this land…”. As we might recall, Israel is the God given name of Jacob who was the grandson, the offspring of Abram. And again, in the seventeenth chapter of Genesis, the eighth verse, God again promises Abram that he would give to Abram and “his offspring after him, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession and I will be their God.”. So, when we hear God tell Joseph that he was to go to the land of Israel, he was speaking to how he had made good on his promise to the ancestor of Joseph, how this land was indeed the everlasting possession of the descendants of Israel. Yet, what cannot be forgotten is that this land was given to Abraham and his descendants solely because this land was just one of the many ways that God had blessed them. This is what God first told Abraham, as we learn in the twelfth chapter of Genesis, the second verse, that God would make of Abraham “a great nation and God would bless him and make his name great.” God had a purpose for lavishly pouring out these blessings upon Abraham and his family and that is, as we learn in that same verse of the twelfth chapter, that they were to “be a blessing.” This land of Israel then was a blessing from God to Abraham and his family but it was given in order that Abraham and his descendants would, in turn, be a blessing to others. So, when God speaks to Joseph about the land of Israel, he was speaking of the land that he had faithfully given to the people of Israel in order to bless them. This land then was very explicitly a gift from God, neither Abraham nor any of his descendants had done anything to warrant them being in possession of this land. Because this land was purely and simply a gift, the expected response from them was to be gratitude toward God for his grace and favor. This graciousness of God was also to create a response to the people who had received it. They were to be gracious toward each other for as they had experienced receiving a gift they had not earned, so now they would want to share that experience, giving to others as they had received from God. It is amazing how this little phrase, “the land of Israel”, is so loaded with meaning and when we consider this phrase carefully we can begin to understand how we can learn much about the will of God from it.
Joseph upon hearing from the Lord heads back to the land of Israel yet he doesn’t know exactly where in this land he was to call home. He wanted to live somewhere in Judaea but as Herod’s son was now reigning there, Joseph was afraid to settle down so close to him. Once again, we have another dream, this time warning Joseph to get out of Judaea and the question then became, just where should he go? Well, he headed for the hills, the hills of Galilee, that is. We have to wonder, is there any significance to this place, this land in the northern part of Israel that is anchored by the Sea of Galilee? The answer is that this land was spoken about by the prophet Isaiah, as found in the ninth chapter, the first two verses. Isaiah writes, “But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulon and Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness on them has light shined.” Here we learn of the reputation of Galilee, that it was a land of the nations. People from all the surrounding nations could be found there because Galilee was situated on the northern edge of Israel, at the interface between Israel and the rest of the world. As Isaiah tells us, this land was once the part of the land of Israel that was given to the tribes of Zebulon and Naphtali but because of their rampant idolatry, God allowed the Assyrians to take these people in the northern part of Israel into exile. This is the contempt, the shame that has come upon these northern tribes, that Isaiah writes of here but Isaiah also writes that into this sad situation, God is going to do something glorious. Into this place called Galilee, the place where people from all the nations could now be found, into this place of spiritual darkness there was the promise that a great light was coming. It is this place of Galilee, this is where Jesus would grow up. Think about Jesus being known as the light of the world living in the very place where Isaiah foretold that those who walked there in darkness were going to at last see a great light. So, Galilee, the place of the nations, was indeed very significant primarily because it was this place in between the people of Israel and the rest of the world. You are probably wondering just why was this being a land of the nations was so important? The answer, again, is found in the story of Abraham. There in the twelfth chapter, in the third verse, God tells Abraham, “…in you all of the families on earth shall be blessed.” You see, the whole reason that God had been so gracious to Abraham, the purpose for his blessing of Abraham and his descendants was solely because they were to be a conduit through which the blessings of God would flow out until every family on earth would experience the blessing of God. So, here in Galilee of the nations, Israel did not even have to leave home in order to bring blessings upon other families that were not their own. At least that was the theory. The truth was that the people of Israel stood just as much in need of blessing as the rest of the nations. Instead of being gracious they had become greedy; instead of being grateful they had turned their back on God. In response, God took his people and sent them out of the land that he had given to them because this land was a blessing from God given so that his people might be a blessing to others but God’s own people had taken God’s blessing for granted and they found themselves cursed by God, exiled from the promised land.
Galilee of the nations thus spoke of the mission of God to bring blessing to every family which made up those nations and it also spoke of Israel’s inability to do so because they themselves were under the very same curse, the same darkness that plagued the nations. What was needed was light, a light that could deliver God’s people from their cursed spiritual darkness so that they could at last be the people of blessing that they were supposed to be.
This hope that a light would come into the darkness which the people of Israel found themselves in is found in the last destination that our scripture speaks of when we are told that Joseph, “…went and lived in a city called Nazareth.” Now, we have to ask just what is the significance of Jesus having to call this place his hometown? There is a lot of speculation about the meaning of the name, “Nazareth”, however there is a lot of similarity between that name and the Hebrew word for branch which is, “netzer”, The importance of this word “branch”, is that it is used throughout the prophets for the king who would come out of the line of David to bring in the reign of God once and for all. The term, “branch”, then is another name for the Messiah, the one who would be anointed by God who would remove the curse from Israel so that they once again could be blessed by God and through them all of the families of the nations could at last be blessed. We hear of this Branch in the first two verses of the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, where we read, “ There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” Here in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, this one called the branch is the very one on whom the Spirit of God would rest, the Spirit who would be a powerful presence in the life of the Messiah. This is what the name of Nazareth points to, the one whom the prophets call the “Branch”, the very one who would fulfill the promise God had made to David that his house would be an everlasting kingdom. Isaiah further writes about this king in the forty-second chapter, where he calls this king, the servant. There in the first verse of that chapter, God speaks of his servant, saying, “Behold my Servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights. I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.” In a similar way, God again speaks of his servant in the forty-ninth chapter, the sixth verse, saying, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, to bring back the preserved of Israel. I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” So here, at last, we begin to tie the land of Israel, the region of Galilee and the city of Nazareth together in their deeper meaning. It is the Branch, the “netzer”, the root of the name of Nazareth, this is the one who will be the servant of God, anointed with the very Spirit of God, he is the one who will bring back the people of Israel, the people who God desired to bless, and he will not only restore the people of God so that they could once again be people of blessing he will also be the one who will bring light to the nations, the people represented by the region of Galilee. This is the very will of God, that all might come to be blessed no longer living under the darkness of the curse of sin. This is why Jesus went to the cross and took upon himself the very curse of the world, our sin, so that through his death the power of this curse might be destroyed and we might receive his blessing. Here then is the will of God that those who have received God’s blessing, the blessing of Jesus, they are to take that blessing out into the world and give that blessing to others. As we begin this new year then we must ask ourselves just how will we be faithful to the will of God? How will we bear
the blessing we know as Jesus, out to those cursed by sin? In this new year may our faithful God find us faithfully doing his will! Amen!
No comments:
Post a Comment