Sermon Tone Analysis

Date: 2022-01-09

Audience: Grass Valley Corps

Title: The King’s Childhood

Text: Matthew 2:19-23, Luke 2:39-52

Proposition: Jesus grew up just like a lot of kids

Purpose: Be amazed by Jesus

Grace and peace.

Examining Matthew’s bio of Jesus

We’ll sneak in pieces from other gospel writers

Some of my favorite parts of scripture are the in-between bits.

Stuff that gets glossed over or passed by on the way to the next big story.

Today, we’re going to look at a couple of those passages.

Ancient biographers wrote differently than modern biographers.

Modern focus: Details of the life, from the family born into, the circumstances, info about each stage of life.

Ancient focus: What were achievements and failures of person being written about.

What was their character.

Should they be imitated?

Similar ideas, but nowhere near the same in what they write about.

Moderns may spend 25-50% of time writing about childhood.

Ancients often skipped it altogether as being unimportant.

We are fortunate that both Matthew and Luke gave us some snippets about the birth and growing up of Jesus.

All four of the gospel writers spend most of their time writing about his last weeks.

Tells you what they thought was most important.

But we’ll get to that end of Jesus’ life later!

Today, still at the beginning.

Joseph and Mary and the baby had been visited by the Magi, wealthy power brokers from the east who came to acknowledge Jesus as King of the Jews.

Their presence had alerted Herod the Great to the potential threat to his throne and it took a dream warning from God to get Joseph and his family running to exile in Egypt, narrowly escaping the soldiers Herod sent to kill all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem.

We are given no details of the escape, of the border crossing, or of how the displaced refugee family chose to live while they were there.

We don’t know where in Egypt they went.

We don’t know much, really, because Matthew didn’t think it was important to the story he was telling about Jesus.

And it’s not.

But we humans are an inquisitive species, and when we aren’t given answers that satisfy us, we make things up to bridge the gaps.

About 200 years after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, someone wrote a great piece of fan fiction about him which is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

It tells a remarkable and highly improbable account of the growing up years of Jesus.

Mostly it seems to exist to teach that having knowledge without developing wisdom to go with it is a bad thing.

Jesus is depicted as a shallow, spoiled, tantrum-throwing brat who maims and kills people around him when he doesn’t get his way or when anyone is foolish enough to challenge or discipline him.

As much fun as this kind of Twilight Zone speculation might be, we want to stick to the hard data facts here, so let me share with you all that we know about the time Jesus and his family were in Egypt.

19 When Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt.

20 “Get up!” the angel said.

“Take the child and his mother back to the land of Israel, because those who were trying to kill the child are dead.”

21 So Joseph got up and returned to the land of Israel with Jesus and his mother.[1]

We don’t know if this was days, weeks, months, or even a year or two later.

We do know Herod the Great died in 4 BC.

Or maybe it was 1 BC, or 1 AD, or possibly 5 BC.

Okay, I guess we’re a little fuzzy on the specifics around when Herod the Great died.

We do know that when God asked him to do something, Joseph did it.

There is some immediacy in the instruction: Get up and go!

And it looks like Joseph got up and went.

To me this suggests they weren’t in Egypt for long – possibly just a few weeks of couch surfing or staying in inns here and there while they waited for God to tell them what to do next.

It’s not impossible to leave an established life in a moment, but it is harder.

We also know that they didn’t have time to make a plan for where to go…

22 But when he learned that the new ruler of Judea was Herod’s son Archelaus, he was afraid to go there.

Then, after being warned in a dream, he left for the region of Galilee.[2]

I think he was going back to Bethlehem.

Joseph and Mary had started to build their new lives there.

It was somewhere they didn’t have as much stigma as they would have in their home town.

Remember, the people there thought that Mary had stepped out on her betrothal to Joseph and had ended up pregnant.

And he had, for whatever reason, married her anyway.

There was a lot of shame wrapped into that in their society.

Herod’s son, Herod Antipas, had been in line to be his father’s heir.

But some last minute whim or fancy or madness had seized the king, and he had divided his lands between his sons.

His sister would somehow end up with a section as well, once the Roman emperor had taken all claims and Herod’s will into account.

Antipas would end up ruling over Galilee and Perea in the northern regions of Israel.

Herod Philip was given Iturea and Trachonitis, to the north and east of the Jordan.

Salome ended up in charge of three small, separate regions within Israel’s other provinces.

And Herod Archelaus, after some political machinations and sucking up to Caesar, came out with the three large, southern districts of Israel, including Judea, where Jerusalem and Bethlehem were.

Archelaus had a reputation for being harsh and cruel, and after only nine years, in about the year 6, the Emperor had him removed for poor governance and Rome began to rule those territories more directly.

Wow, that’s a lot of history in a couple of minutes.

Especially since knowing all that bring us to this:

When Joseph heard that Archelaus was going to rule over the area he’d been thinking of going back to, he became very worried.

And God send him another dream to steer him away, into the territory of Antipas instead.

23 So the family went and lived in a town called Nazareth.

This fulfilled what the prophets had said: “He will be called a Nazarene.”[3]

Speaking of things we don’t know, we don’t know what Matthew is talking about here.

There is no prophecy which says that Messiah would be a Nazarene, and Matthew is clearing referring to multiple prophets.

Current thinking is that he is referring to several references to the Messiah coming from obscure or humble backgrounds.

This fits Nazareth.

It was a backwater village, surrounded by more important places.

When Jesus began teaching and attracted his first disciples, one of them went to his friend Nathaniel and said:

45 Philip went to look for Nathanael and told him, “We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about!

His name is Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.”

46 “Nazareth!”

exclaimed Nathanael.

“Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

“Come and see for yourself,” Philip replied.

[4]

This backwater became the home town of the Messiah.

We know that Joseph was a carpenter or a stonecutter who probably could have found work in the nearby city of Sepphoris to support his family.

As time went on, there may have been more to do locally, but in those first years the shame we’ve discussed would have made him a less desirable hire to the people of the village.

When you live with integrity, the shames of the past, real or imagined, do fade.

As their family grew the notion that God was displeased with them would have less to recommend it, though some stigma remained attached to Jesus over the coming decades.

We see places in the stories of his life where he is referred to as “Mary’s Son,” a way of suggesting that he was illegitimate and a somewhat offensive way to refer to someone in those days when sons were always called by their father’s name.

But the ins and outs of the next twenty-five or thirty or more years before Jesus began his public ministry are largely unknown to us as well.

In truth, there is only one other story recorded by a gospel writer about the formative years of Jesus, and it’s over in the book of Luke in chapter two.

Luke doesn’t tell us about the detour into Egypt.

It isn’t important to the story he is telling about Jesus.

Remember that Matthew is trying to show us how Jesus is the long-promised Messiah, the king of kings who was both human and also God in the flesh.

Luke, on the other hand, is telling a story of Jesus as the defender of the weak and savior of the oppressed.

He is connecting Jesus to the Prophets, particularly to Samuel, who was a holy man in the midst of an unholy nation.

He wants to show his readers the wisdom of Jesus, the Divine Son of God, but also that Jesus was a normal person who we can learn to emulate.

He wants his readers to know that they can also be comforters of the weak and oppressed, bringing justice to an unjust world, just like Jesus.