Matthew 2:13-23; Jesus the Refugee

"13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

16 When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17 Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: 18 “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

19 When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, 20 “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” 21 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. 23 There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazorean.”

Introduction

Whenever I read this passage, I get shivers in my body. So many things seem "up in the air," undecided. Everyone seems so vulnerable to the will of an irrational tyrant. People are displaced and killed as passions are sated, and then, after the tyrant is dead, people return. Then, I realize that the story is telling me that all this happened in accordance with the plan of God as expressed in Scripture. Though Matthew's argument isn't, at first blush, very convincing, it takes on a more powerful appeal when you realize the audacity and hope of his claim---that, in fact, the Savior of the world, according to Christian tradition, was none other than a displaced person, a refugee, whose parents fled for their lives because of a "well-founded fear of persecution," to use the language of 20th-21st century asylum law. I would like to think with you today about Jesus the Refugee in the context of our world of 2007-08.

First, however, I recognize that you could do a lot of other things with this passage. I think it provides the occasion for examining the fascinating world of dreams. To what extent do dreams not just "stay" with us but become foundational for our life? Do any of us have the temptation to "live with our dreams" more than we do in our "real life?" Again, one could explore the idea of "The Messiah from Nowhere." Nazareth was a town whose population at the time was estimated to be under 500; it was either a despised (John 1: 46) or unknown town. From "nowhere" comes the salvation of the world. Or, finally, one could explore the Jesus/Moses theme in this passage by comparing and contrasting Matthew's portrait of Jesus and the Exodus picture of Moses.

Refugees and the World of 2007-08

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees collects the best data on displaced people around the world. Its 2006 Global Trends book is available online. In this volume it compares the experience of at least five categories of people (refugees, asylum-seekers, returnees, internally displaced and stateless persons) from year to year. This document is full of interesting, and sad, information about the state of our world. One should see these figures as a prominent measure of the toll that war, famine, disease and other major natural or human catastrophies have on people around the world. Though one can never expect this number to go down to zero, we should hope that the number of these people declines during our lifetime. For, if it does not, we might well ask ourselves, "What have I been doing when the security of many of the world's people has become more precarious?"

This essay provides little space for analysis. Suffice it to say that according to the report, the total number of "people of concern" stood at 21 million at the end of 2005. By the close of 2006 it was 32.9 million, the most dramatic one year increase in memory. This number is made less shocking when we learn that the UN changed its approach to calculating displaced persons, which probably accounted for some of the increase. Yet, the increase is still dramatic. The single largest increase occurred in the category called "internally displaced persons." In addition, the global refugee population (leaving one's country of habitation) also increased for the first time for 2002. In addition, the number of "stateless persons" showed a marked increase over 2005.

Hundreds of thousands of people became newly displaced in Columbia, Iraq, Lebanon, Sri-Lana and Timor. Increased data-gathering in other nations such as the Cote d'Ivoire, Congo and Uganda increased the numbers dramatically. Even North America experienced dramatic rises in internally displaced persons as a result of Hurricane Katrina. The point is that we now have a world that is increasingly "on the move" against its will. Maybe some person will hear the call to engage him-or her-self with the global refugee/displaced person crisis through just hearing about the "numbers." Those of us who deny the issue or consider it unimportant remind me of the lazy person condemned in Prov. 24:33, "A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.."

Jesus and His Flight

People involuntarily leave their homes because of natural or human-induced disasters. In the latter case there is the fear of persecution and the rage of the ruler that normally come into view. And that is certainly the case in Matthew's account for today. Herod was enraged that the wise men hadn't "reported" back to him. Flying into a tyrannical rage, he orders the destruction of the newborn males. Though there is no historcial corroboration of this event, it is consistent with what we know of the later days of Herod, the Roman appointee over Israel. For example, the Jewish historian Josephus records that Herold's later years were full of attempts to defend his throne against the Jewish Hasmoneans, the descendants of the Maccabees. In the final years of his reign his three eldest sons were killed on susspicion of plotting to seize Herod's throne. Earlier in his reign he eliminated all the prominent Hasmoneans. He had an elaborate network of spies, and he often executed people for real or imagined conspiracies against his throne. Josephus even talks about a plan, never carried out, to have all the Jewish nobility slaughtered at the time of his own death to ensure that everyone would be mourning at his death.

Matthew uses the same verb several times to stress the fear felt by people--anachoreo. Though it literally means simply "to withdraw," in the context of Matthew it carries with it the notion of fleeing for one's life. The wise men fled. Jesus' family fled. Those who remained suffered. It has a haunting similarity to life in the 21st century.

Scripture to the Rescue

Perhaps the most astonishing or unexpected thing about Matthew's portrait of the family's descent into Egypt and return to Israel (setting up in Nazareth) is the way that Scripture is used to "explain" what has happened. Scholars generally refer to this as a "typological" reading of Scripture; what is meant by this is Matthew's attempt to establish a kind of correspondence between the Scipture from the OT and the experience of Jesus. Even though the events behind the OT text bear little relation to the events of Jesus' refugee existence and return, Matthew quotes them like clockwork in order to show that every event of Jesus' early life can be explained by the Scripture. For Matthew this indicates the "deeper truth" of Jesus--that God was active in the shaping of his life from the earliest days.

And perhaps that is an appropriate place to leave these reflections. We have a God working through the refugee family to preserve, and then to bring forward, the Savior of the world. Jesus will not grow up in Jerusalem or in any place of prominence in that world. Rather, the refugee returns to a rinky-dink town of no importance or visibility. But that is where everything begins...

3154