Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23
The Second Sunday after Christmas / Year A
Matthew concludes his story of Jesus’ birth
saga with these words: “They made their home in a town called Nazareth.”
Let’s do some historical work this morning
by attempting to weave together what the Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell us
about Jesus’s birth and early years. It
requires some conjecture because their accounts don’t always sync up and
neither writer sets out to create a “straight history” or timeline of
events. Still, here is something like
what seems to have actually happened:
·
Somewhere
around 7-4 BC, Joseph and Mary are betrothed (a legal arrangement typically
lasting about 12 months) in Nazareth.
·
Soon
thereafter the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, who most likely is in her early
teens, and asks if she will bear God’s Son.
She consents.
·
Not
long after, Mary leaves Bethlehem to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is six
weeks pregnant. Elizabeth lives in a
town only identified as being in the Judean hills, which places it around a
week’s walking journey away.
·
Mary
returns to Nazareth after three months.
She is now visibly pregnant and Joseph, startled to be sure, determines
to end the betrothal discretely.
·
After
an angel speaks to him in a dream, Joseph decides to stay betrothed. Mary moves into his home, but they do not yet
become husband and wife and have no relations.
·
A
census is ordered, requiring Joseph to travel to Bethlehem. Mary goes with him.
·
They
arrive in Bethlehem and the time comes for Mary to deliver. Accommodations are limited (perhaps due to
the number of people travelling for the census) and the couple is forced to
stay in an animal shed (or perhaps a cave where animals are kept). It is here Mary gives birth to her baby.
·
Shepherds
from nearby fields visit the Holy Family after receiving direction from angels. They worship the baby and tell their
fantastic story to the parents.
·
Jesus
is circumcised eight days after his birth.
·
Mary
makes the appropriate offerings for the Rite of Purification forty days after
giving birth.
·
Mary
and Joseph take the baby Jesus to the Jerusalem Temple where they present him
and make an appropriate offering. Here
they encounter the prophet Simeon and the prophetess Anna. Both praise and bless their infant son.
·
The
family settles in Bethlehem.
·
Sometime
within the next year or so a group of Magi, having been guided by ancient
prophecies and a star, approach Herod (the local king) to inquire where the new
king of the Jews is to be born. Scholars
direct them to Bethlehem.
·
The
Magi go to Bethlehem and find Mary and the child living in a house. They present the child with symbolic gifts
and then determine not to report back to Herod.
·
Herod
orders the killing of all boys two years and younger in the Bethlehem region.
·
In
a dream, an angel warns Joseph of the danger and the family flees through the
Sinai Desert to Egypt.
·
The
Coptic Church now identifies 26 different places (most located along the Nile
River) where the family stops or stays over a three-and-a-half-year period. Joseph keeps his family on the move to avoid
detection by Herod’s spies.
·
Upon
learning of the king’s death, the family sets out to return to Bethlehem but
then decides to settle in Nazareth to avoid living in a region under the rule
of Herod’s son.
·
The
family makes a home in Nazareth. Joseph works as a carpenter and he and Mary have
as many as six children together, along with Jesus.
By most any standard, Jesus’s first five
years are incredibly stressful.
When I was born my parents were in the
process of transitioning from Pittsburgh to Ohio. A few months later my mother’s father passed
away. I remember none of this, but my
sister does. Three years old at the
time, she remembers living with grandparents while my parents dealt with the
complexities of newborn twins and relocating.
It was a stressful time and my sister’s memories mirror this, but they
are jumbled images because a childhood mind is not fully capable of
understanding all that is happening.
Surely Jesus’ earliest memories attempt to make sense of the traumatic
and a transient life-style marking his first years.
Then the Holy Family settles in Nazareth where,
measured against their beginning, they make a remarkably steady and
unremarkable household. As the Scripture
attests, they make a home.
Gladys Hunt, in her book Honey for a Child’s Heart: The Imaginative Use of
Books in Family Life,
writes this:
What is home? My favorite definition is “a safe place,” a
place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure
relationships and affirmation. It’s a
place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurturing. The people in it do not need to be perfect;
instead, they need to be honest, loving, supportive, recognizing a common
humanity that makes all of us vulnerable.
I hope this rings true with
your experience of home. It may not, and
if so I hurt deeply for you. Still, it
is something for which we long. So Maya
Angelou reminds us when she observes, “The ache for home lives in all of us: The
safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
St. Luke gives us the last words in the
biblical record about Jesus’ childhood: “He increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and people.” We are told the child Jesus advances
cognitively and physically while developing morally and socially. Jesus grows into his teens to be smart,
strong, good, and well liked. Surely,
having a home factors into all of this.
Given today’s
lesson, you might ponder the facts of your early years. What was happening in your family of origin when
you where born? What blessings did it
afford you? What challenges did it
present? How are you the product of
each? What has been your experience of
home? Does it represent safety? Stability?
Affirmation? How do you bring the
story of your beginning before God and give thanks or vent anger or simply
accept the past for the past while being open to the grace and blessings of the
future? How have your origins played out
in the lives of those in your life today?
How might you describe to them the legacies you want to pass on? What mistakes have you inherited and need to
claim, asking for forgiveness?
This much we
know… Jesus’ earliest years must have marked him, but they did not define him
or limit him.
