Happy
New Year! Bring on 2017 and good
riddance to 2016. That's what many folks
have been saying, anyway . . . First of all, there was a fractious, contentious
election, which I would say was anything but presidential. Columnist Dave Barry—who, of course, has the
Pulse of the Nation—says that “it wasn't just bad. It the Worst. Election. Ever.” Other not-so-bright spots were that race
relations seem to have reached a new low, internet hacking—including credit
card numbers, personal records, and foreign interference with the Worst Election ever—has reached an all-time
high, and it was the warmest year on
record, prompting many climate scientists—except the seven working for the
oil industry—to say that a tipping point has been reached. When they're not saying “I told you so,” that is.
And
if all that weren't bad enough, we lost a lot of great people in 2016. Two bona fide space heroes—Texas’ Edgar Mitchell and our own
John Glenn, former First Lady Nancy Reagan and Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia. Ellie Wiesel, Umberto Eco and
Harper Lee. Leonard Cohen . . . David
Bowie . . . Prince. And just last week,
Princess Leia—aka Carrie Fisher—and her
mom, Debbie Reynolds, and I kid you not: there is now an on-line campaign to
keep 2016 away from Betty White.
But
if you thought 2016 was bad here in the good old U.S. of A., it doesn't hold a candle to how the year 6 B.C.E. was
shaping up for one Joseph of Bethlehem.
It began on a low note when his fiancée Mary was found to be pregnant, which
wouldn't have been that big a deal in loose-limbed Galilee except for the
fact that they hadn't even lived
together yet. So even though he had
every right to kick Mary to the curb, thus ruining her reputation and her parents’
reputations as well as her aunts’ and
uncles’ and cousins’ reputations, he resolved
to put her away quietly—what a guy!—but then along came the first of four
dreams that would run (some might say ruin)
his life over the next couple of years. In
it, an angel of the lord appeared saying “Joseph, son of David, do not be
afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the
Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will
save his people from their sins.” And as
soon as he woke up, he did what the angel told him and married her, but didn't
have relations with her until she gave birth, and they named the boy Jesus.
Well. Things go along normally enough—unless you
count that little episode with the wise men—until his second dream, when another
angel—or maybe it’s the same one—comes to him and says “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.” And I gotta say, these aren’t
happy dreams, even though they have angels in them: they seem more like
nightmares to poor old Joseph. The first
one had meant he'd have to undergo the ridicule that would come upon him when
he married a woman who was — seemingly — pregnant by another man. Remember: in that honor-shame society, there
would have been a whole lot of shame going on.
But
the second dream was even worse, so
he packed up all his stuff—it was hard, ‘cause he'd grow up there, his family
was there, and his livelihood—but he packed it all up, and Mary’s and the
baby’s stuff, and heads out on the road to Egypt. And though he may not have known exactly why Herod the Great was after them, we
do, we know it was because he was
paranoid and insecure, so much so that he maintained a private security force
and built no less that six—count ‘em six!—fortresses, all in the service of
keeping himself in business as the King of the Jews. Which is why he got a little . . . defensive when the three wise men stopped
in to see him, asking “Where is the child who has been born king of the
Jews?” So he consulted his historians
and theologians and assorted hangers-on, and they all told him the same thing:
Bethlehem, and he told the magi to go
and find the child and tell him who he is so that he could come and worship him
himself. But after seeing the babe and giving
him gifts, the wise men were warned—in another dream, no less—not to go back to
Herod, so they went home by another way.
And
are you beginning to get the point, that dreams are really important here in
Matthew’s version of the birth narrative?
Contrast that to over in Luke, where there is nary a one. Really—check it out. When the angels appear to Zechariah and Mary,
they just . . . appear. The word dream
isn't even mentioned. And there's
another thing: the story over there is told from Mary’s point of view. The angel comes to her . . . she ponders the whole thing in her heart . . . There's none of that over here in Matthew. The annunciation happens to Joseph—in a
dream, natch—and the whole scenario is told from his point of view. There are
no shepherds watching their flocks, by day or
by night, no heavenly choir of angels,
no manger in a barn. In Matthew, Jesus
is born in a house, and unless it was
a really dirty one, there were probably no barnyard animals around, either.
The
point is, the two accounts of the birth of Christ (Mark and John don't have
any) are very different, even though we tend to conflate them, having shepherds
and wise men and cows and chickens gathered all cozily around a manger with
Mary pondering mysteriously away. But
they have very different theological emphases and concerns. Take the dreams . . . Who else do we know
named Joseph whose life was shaped by dreams?
You only get one guess . . . Of course it's the penultimate son of
Jacob, also known as Israel, founder of the nation of the same name. It was a dream that got him into hot water
with his brothers, and after they sold him into slavery—note that it was in Egypt—it was his prowess at interpreting
dreams that elevated him to second in the land.
And
likewise it is a dream that gets our
Joseph to Egypt as well. When the magi
go home by another way, Herod’s plans to go to Bethlehem to kill Jesus outright
are foiled, so he plans to kill all the Bethlehem children under two years of
age. It wouldn't be too hard, given the
size of the town there couldn't have been more than twenty children who fit the
bill. But Joseph is warned in that dream
to go to Egypt, along with Mary and the babe, so he does, and stays there until
the year four B.C.E., the year of Herod’s death. And Matthew casts it all in terms of
prophecy, because that’s his thing, that’s
why he’s telling us about the dreams and everything, to relate the birth of
Jesus back to his ancestors, back to the stories about the great Hebrew
heroes. “This was to fulfill what had
been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” Matthew tells us, “‘Out of Egypt
I have called my son.’”
And
while Joseph and family are off in Egypt, Herod the so-called Great, infuriated
at being tricked by the wise men, does the deed, he has all the Bethlehem
children of the right age murdered, in what's been called the massacre of the innocents,
and they were innocents, just like
the Egyptian first-born that God killed so many years before . . . And can you
see what Matthew is doing here? He’s
drawing comparisons between the birth of Christ and events more than a
millennium before, when Israel was in the land of the Pharaoh. Events that led to the founding of a nation
and their release from bondage, their redemption.
And
he does it not by pointing out that history has repeated itself exactly,
because it hasn't, instead he points
out patterns of similarity, using what literary scholars and other ne’er-do-wells
call typology. Both times there was a guy called Joseph who
was guided by dreams. Both times, there
was a sojourn in Egypt and a killing of innocents, even though in Jesus’ case it
was the bad guy doing the killing, while in the of the slaughter of Egypt’s
first-born it was God. And both times,
they were refugees from a cruel tyrant,
even though the first time it was a whole nation and the second time only one
family.
Well. Once again, Matthew relates events to
prophecy, this time to the voice of Rachel, wailing in Ramah. Then Herod the Great dies—that's how we know
it’s 4 B.C.E.—and in yet another dream, the angel tells Joseph it's safe to go
back to the land of Israel, and once again he packs up and heads out, but he’s
afraid to go home because Herod’s son is ruling there, and in his last dream,
he's told to settle in Nazareth, so Jesus can grow up there, once again as prophesied.
And
so ends the tale of Jesus’ birth, not with a bang but with a settling-in, a
settling-down, so he could grow in
stature and in favor with God and human-kind.
And at first it seemed to me to have little relation to our situation
today, little a hard-working pastor could hang a lesson or a moral upon. Then I started thinking a bit more like
Matthew, I started thinking typologically,
and one type-scene or type-event jumped out at me. For the first two years of his life, the most
formative years, Jesus was a political refugee. He fled his little mid-eastern country
from a brutal dictator bent on his destruction. And hmmmm . . . what today does this remind me
of? Could it be . . . Syria, a small
middle-eastern country where a brutal dictator holds sway? Where millions of refugees—whole families of
men, women and children—are fleeing for their lives?
And
I think to myself: We're supposedly a Christian nation, and yet we're having a
debate about whether to let refugees in.
Isn't it the case that Christian is as Christian does? I mean, what if Egypt—Pharaoh and all--hadn't
let in the refugee who was the Son of God?
Amen.
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