COMINGS AND GOINGS

January 2, 2011
Christmas 2 – Sunday Before Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6
Matthew 2:1-12

(prayer)

I know that Jake mentioned it last week when he led the worship service on Boxing Day, but just in case some of you missed it, I want to repeat that: Christmas is not over. Granted, from a societal celebration perspective, we have moved on. In fact, I suspect that many Christmas trees are already down and people are now focused on this New Year. As soon as the stores think they have collected as much post-Christmas revenue as possible, they will put up the Valentine’s Day merchandise.

And that’s okay. In our wider society, the Christmas season precedes December 25th; beginning, for some, as soon as Halloween is over. In the church, however, we recognise the anticipation in the season of Advent prior to Christmas.

In the church, Christmas is a twelve day season that start (not ends) with December 25th. Today is the day of ‘ladies dancing’ – the ninth day of Christmas. The Christmas season will end on Wednesday, as it does every year on January 5th – the twelfth day of Christmas. And so, by next Sunday, Christmas will be over...but not yet. In fact (as Jake also pointed out last week), by next week, we will have skipped ahead three decades in the life of Jesus, as we will focus on his baptism and the start of his active ministry. But we are not there yet.

The biblical gospel narrative focuses almost exclusively on Jesus final three years – from his baptism to his resurrection. And so, stories of Jesus first thirty years are relatively few. Only two gospels try to speak about Jesus’ birth. Luke tells the story of one month old Jesus being taken with Mary to the temple for her right of ‘post-childbirth purification’ and the encounters with Simeon and Anna (last week’s focus). Matthew may cover Jesus life up until he was about two years old. Luke tells the only childhood story of Jesus, as a 12 year old, getting lost on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

//

In some ways, the season of Christmas is our opportunity to appreciate what Jesus represents before we are drawn into focusing on what Jesus said and did and who Jesus became for his followers and for the church that grew in the shadow of his death and resurrection.

As a baby or child, Jesus hadn’t called any disciples; he hadn’t spoken a memorable parable; he hadn’t brought healing or acceptance into a broken life ... yet.

During the Christmas season, we focus on what Jesus represents in the life of people, in the life of the world. Jesus is a promise, the fulfillment of a hope. Jesus represents God’s commitment to this world. Six decades after Jesus’ lifetime, a gospel writer would say that Jesus’ life was a sign of God’s love for the world (cf. John 3:16). In the Christmas stories Jesus represents the fact that God connects to humanity at the level of compassion and love and mercy. As Jesus begins his live, we start to be able to see that!

//

A final Christmas story for this year’s Christmas worship services is the story of the visiting Magi (Matthew, chapter 2). Actually, this story is reserved for January 6th, the day of Epiphany but I’m taking the liberty of skipping ahead to the end of the formal Christmas season because next Sunday will seem too late, and I wasn’t sure how much interest there might be for a Thursday church service this week and frankly the Magi are too interesting a part of the broader message of this season to just skip them out.

[For you information, the lectionary gospel reading for the 2nd Sunday of Christmas we are skipping today in favour of the Epiphany readings is the prologue to the Gospel of John – ‘In the beginning was the Word...and the Word became flesh and lived among us’.]

//

Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus is different from the one in Luke. Unlike many other instances in the gospels where the authors are clearly drawing from similar sources to tell us stories of Jesus’ life, these birth narratives are unique enough that we have to conclude they come from different sources. A close examination of the two can highlight some interesting commonalities and maybe surprising differences between how Matthew and Luke each describe the events and circumstances of Jesus’ birth.

I know I have had the opportunity to talk about this with people in Bible studies and sermons before. The overall biblical record of Jesus’ birth is not my focus this morning. I want to focus of what Matthew offers us: what light of insight he can shed on our faith lives for today.

//

Sometime after Jesus was born (in Bethlehem), while Herod was still king of Judea, magi came from the east to Jerusalem looking for the child born to be King of the Jews: that’s how our passage begins today. There is a lot of information there. It tells us when this happened. Since Herod is still alive, it is sometime before the year 4BC. Yes, Jesus was born “before Christ” – highlighting that 1486 years ago when the Anno Domini system of dating the years was developed, Dionysius must have been off by a few years in his calculations.

[Aside – if Luke is right that Jesus was conceived while Herod was king of Judea and when Quirinius was governor of Syria, we can date Jesus’ birth as sometime between 6 and 4 BC. Quirinius began his governorship in 6BC and Herod died in 4BC.]

The word ‘magi’ since the 4th century BC has been associated with people who had the ability to read the stars and to manipulate the fate the stars foretold. We can be quite certain this is how Matthew’s author is using it because the first thing these magi talk about is...a star.

The text doesn’t tell us how they came to the conclusion, but the magi interpreted the star to mean that a child had been born to be king of the Jews. They assumed that this event was known to the leadership in Judea, so they travelled to the capital of Jerusalem and were granted an audience with King Herod himself. Herod, of course, was not aware of any heir to his throne. He seems to have associated this with the coming of the Messiah – who he sees as a threat to his political power. His team of scribes and priests help him learn that the scriptures point to Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Messiah. So, Herod knew the place. His desire to meet the magi was only to learn the date the star first appeared so he could tell how old the child would be now. More on that later, but Herod did ask the magi to let him know when they find the child.

The Magi did not need the book of Micah to find Jesus, they simply continued to read the location of the star in the sky. It not only led them to Bethlehem but to a specific house. Note: contrary to the Christmas cards, or pageants or even the powerpoint slide I started the service with, Jesus and his family were not in a manger when the magi arrived – Matthew’s gospel is clear that by this time, they were in a house in Bethlehem. The truth of Matthew’s version is that Jesus could have been as old as two and was still living in Bethlehem when the Magi arrived. [This is one of those significant differences between the details laid out in Luke compared with Matthew. The two gospels agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and that he grew up in Nazareth, they just disagree on how that came to be.] Regardless, the Bible tells us that when the Magi saw the child and Mary, they honoured him with gifts of treasure which signified that royal claims made about young Jesus – gold, frankincense and myrrh. After they left the house, the Magi were warned in a dream to not re-visit Herod. They did not go through Jerusalem on the way home.

That’s where the formal lectionary reading stops for today, but we are short-changing the fuller message, if we ignore what happens next. Verses 13 to 23 tell a disturbing story:

Herod was enraged when he realized that the magi had left without revealing the exact location of the messiah-child. The date of the star must have meant that the child could be as old as two; the book of the prophet Micah said he would come from Bethlehem. All he knew was that it was a boy, he was less than two years old and that he should have been born in Bethlehem. How was he supposed to find the child without more information? Herod responded to this problem with incredible brutality and lack of concern: since, he had no way of finding the specific child, he set out to slaughter all of the possible children who might be the one he was looking for: so, Herod orders the deliberate execution of all baby boys under two years old in and around Bethlehem. This massacre of innocents is an intentional parallel to the story of Moses (a wider theme of Matthew’s gospel is that, in many ways, Jesus is the New (and Better) Moses).

Jesus only escaped this tragedy because (like the magi) Joseph had been warned in a dream to take his family to Egypt.

//

//

This story is filled with moments of insight that effect what happens next. The magi see a star and “Aha! It means that a jewish king has been born.” Herod learns of the magi’s interpretation and “Aha! His power is threatened and this treat must be stopped.” The star stops over a house and “Aha, this must be the place.” The magi find Jesus and offer regal gifts.

Angelic dream messengers offer warnings and “Aha, we must not tell Herod where the child is, let’s go home by another road” and “Aha, we have to move to Egypt, now!”

Herod had no information on where in Bethlehem the child was, so “Aha, he’ll just have to kill them all.”

After Herod died, another dream angel encouraged Joseph to return to Israel. “Aha, just in case Herod’s successor is also looking for the child, Nazareth in Galilee will be Jesus’ new home.”

//

At these moments of insight, the path of life is at a crossroads – an opportunity is there to make a significant choice.

‘Epiphany’ is a word that means ‘shining forth’. It is the image of the guiding light. Like Jesus as a child, light can represent hope and promise.

In our part of the world (northern locale), we are living in a time of short days and long nights (winter). Coincidently for us, Christmas always occurs when the pattern is beginning to reverse. It is a slow process, but at the same time when we recall the prophet saying, ‘your light is come’ and we hear of Magi following a bright star, we are seeing the sun come up just a few minutes earlier and setting a few minutes later each day. Each year as we read the story from Matthew, chapter 2, we are living in a time, when – literally – the “light is come”!

//

The prophet said: ‘Arise, Your Light Is Come!’ These words were for the people of Judah some 600 years before Jesus, who had endured decades of exile from their homeland and were finally able to return to the land of their forbearers.

Into that time of hope and promise, the prophet says, ‘Arise, your light is come’. You no longer need to cower in the dark times of exile. You are bathing in the love and warmth of God’s hope and promise. This is the start of something very good in our lives.

//

We can see why the modern compilers of the lectionary link this exilic passage from Isaiah with the story of the Magi’s visit from Matthew. And we can see (again as Jake noted last week) why the book of Isaiah was such a valuable source for understanding the impact of Jesus on emerging Christian Church of the late first century.

//

‘Epiphany’ is a word that is commonly associated with a ‘fresh insight’. To use the light metaphor some more, an epiphany is like having a light go on – it is the light bulb above the head; it is the moment of “a-ha”; it is when we realize a valuable truth and cannot ignore it as we move forward.

That’s important. An epiphany is when we recognize a valuable truth which we cannot ignore. The future has to be seen in the light of this epiphany. To have an epiphany (in either a small or a big way) is a life changing experience.

//

So, throughout Advent and for the last two Sundays in the season of Christmas, we have shed light on the coming of Jesus into the world. How does that affect us?

//

For me, I am struck by the unique way we experience Jesus at Christmas. Now, I realize that it is impossible to be able to ignore the rest of the life of Jesus. We are an Easter people, through and through. But even as that child, who had not yet taught or healed or invited his first sinner to dinner, who had not yet been crucified and resurrected, the infant Jesus has life changing impacts in this world.

Just in the birth stories, we can imagine that those shepherds who first came to the manger because they had heard the voices in the clouds knew that some new truth had been revealed to them. How could they just go back to the fields unchanged?

The Magi, saw the star and it motivated them to travel westward and honour this new king. The fact that obviously Herod did not know must have told them that this was even more special than they first realized. When the star led them directly to Jesus and they gave their gifts, they must have realized that a new truth had been revealed to them. The angelic warning must have been the icing on the cake.

Even Herod realized that some new truth had been revealed within his kingdom. That truth was that Herod’s power was not assured. He did was thoughtless, selfish, power-hungry people always do, he tried to tighten his grip on power by eliminating completion.

//

For me, the birth of Jesus represents hope for what is to come. Jesus birth is a sign that the Herod’s of the world are not really in control; that selfishness and inhumanity are not the final word. Jesus is Emmanuel – Christmas reminds us that God is in the world and that God’s vision for our lives is alive and well. No matter how hard Herod tried, he could not eliminate the hope and promise the life of Jesus represented.

It is a new year: sure just an artificial turn of the calendar page, but metaphorically, it is a new beginning. And new beginnings are opportunities to consciously set out on a new and better path.

I desire to be a better follower of Jesus – to believe in hope over greed, promise over power and the inclusion of love over the violence of hate. To know that it was out of God’s love that Jesus came into this world and this love is contagious and possible for all.

Aha!

Amen!