Community Christian Church
Dec. 19, 2010 Advent 4
Roger Ray, Pastor
Matthew 1:18-25
18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah* took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, '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. 21She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.' 22All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 'Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel',
which means, 'God is with us.' 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son;* and he named him Jesus.
For the next year, on the Sunday's when we have a gospel lesson, with the exception of just a few passages taken from John, our gospel lessons will come from the Gospel of Matthew. Next year it will be Mark and in 2012 it will be Luke. In this way we allow each of the synoptic gospels to speak most authentically in their own voice.
There are only two birth narratives in the Bible. One is in Matthew and the other is in Luke. Our Christmas carols and decorations add the two accounts together, ignoring parts of one in deference to the other and blending it all together with a good measure of Catholic mythology and the poetic interpretations of Christmas carols.
All of the shepherds, the trip to Bethlehem, the no room in the inn, the angel choir, the birth in a stable, the songs of Mary and Elizabeth and the cousins relationship of Jesus and John..... that's all in Luke. And so, I would like to set all of those images aside so that we can let Matthew tell the story from his perspective. It is rather short, especially compared to Luke. Just a chapter and a half sandwiched in between a genealogy and the story of John the Baptist.
Everyone who spent their childhood in Sunday School as I did can tell you that Matthew is the most Jewish of all of the gospels. What is immediately obvious is that Matthew quotes from the Jewish bible a lot more than the other three gospel writers. What is less obvious to the untrained eye is just how much Matthew strives to make Jesus look like Moses. Matthew is organized around five sermons the same way Deuteronomy is organized around five of the sermons of Moses. And Matthew has the first of those sermons being delivered on a mountain, just as Moses makes his major address at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
Even the rather tedious genealogy which begins this gospel, if you compare it to the equally tedious genealogy in Luke, is entirely focused on the traditional patriarchal accounting which is intended to demonstrate that Jesus was in the lineage of David, Moses and Abraham..... not especially interesting to us but of some importance to Matthew's intended audience.
All of that being said, the Christmas story in Matthew is the least Jewish thing about the whole gospel. And, frankly, it wouldn't take much to demonstrate that it is an account which would not have originally been written by the guy who wrote the rest of the gospel. Everything else in the gospel demands that you believe that Jesus was the promised Jewish messiah.
Everything in the Christmas story seems to undermine that saying that being Jewish is either no big deal or not really such a good thing. Not especially anti-Semitic but you can bet that no one would buy you a drink at Jerusalem's Ramada Shalom bar for telling this story.
One of the things that Matthew talks about a lot in his account is men having dreams. Women don't get any speaking parts in Matthew's account. Mary has a role to play but Matthew doesn't let her sing or talk about it..... you know how religious people can be sometimes.
Luke says that real, flesh and blood angels show up and make pronouncements. In this account, angels show up in dreams. There are five dreams in this Christmas story and only one in the rest of the gospel and that is at the end where Pilate's wife has a dream, and, as I have mentioned, girls don't get to have dreams in this Christmas story.
Mary read the first block of Matthew's Christmas account, the part that tells us that Jesus was born of a virgin by divine parentage. While this has been a bit of a hot topic in modern churches, in ancient times this is the sort of thing a biographer would say about any ruler, philosopher or prophet. Virgin births and divine parents litter the annals of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia and Judea.
If I tell you that my friend, Kim, is the most beautiful woman in the world, I am not pretending to be giving you the results of a global survey of all the women in the world. It is a poetic statement and should be heard as such. There are some parts of the Bible which are intended to stress the importance of Jesus which should not lead one to believe that he had glow in the dark DNA..... come on, let Matthew tell the story to make a moral point, not a bad biology lesson.
The real meat of Matthew's spin on Christmas is in the second chapter.
In chapter two, this account which Matthew, against all odds, preserves for us is one of the strangest things in the Bible. The narrative takes us from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, to the palace of the half Jew who rules as a procurator for Rome.... Herod.
Into that most Jewish of scenes, right next to the temple in Jerusalem, comes a small band of what Matthew describes as "magi," which is a term used in that era for priests of the Persian religion you will remember me mentioning last week: Zoroastrianism. If you ask anyone in the world how many magi visited Jesus in the stable on the night of his birth nearly everyone would tell you that there were three of them. Catholic tradition even tells us their names: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.
It being so close to Christmas, I'm not quite sure how to say this as gently as I ought, but nearly everyone would be wrong. As I pointed out earlier, Matthew does not set the birth in a stable. Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem and Jesus was born in their home. And there is nothing in Matthew to suggest that there were three magi. There were three different kinds of gifts named but there could have been two magi or two dozen.
When I tell you that I got money on Christmas when I was a child, does that tell you how many uncles and aunts sent me cards with a little cash in it?
What Matthew is telling us about is not an overly sweet creche with three kings bearing gifts to a child in a manger surrounded by donkeys and sheep.
Matthew is telling us about an even more peculiar scene..... Zoroastrian priests visiting in the palace of the Jewish king just down the street from the Temple. This was the most unlikely of circumstances and therefore it is the point of Matthew's story.
Every nation on earth believes that they are God's favorite. Most nations on earth have at least one nation in mind which they believe to be the nation that God hates. The Jews coined the phrase, "God's chosen people" but, in this story, the Jews didn't know anything about the birth of the Jewish king and had to be alerted to his arrival by astrologers from a distant nation.... The nation which had most recently invaded and enslaved the Jews. They were from what Ronald Reagan would have called the Evil Empire, and what George Bush called the Axis of Evil and what we we probably be calling North Korea before long.
As a caveat to everything else that Matthew is going to tell us about Jesus and just how special and how Jewish he is, we have this story in which the Jewish authorities not only didn't know anything about him, but once they learned, they were willing to kill every male child in the region to be sure he didn't survive. This is a tale of reversals in which the Taliban come to the White House to try to talk some sense into the Americans.
Matthew is very Jewish. One can only expect that he was as much of a patriot, as much of an enthusiast for his people as we are for ours. But he sets up this gospel with a more universal message. Don't be too sure that you know who your enemies are.
And even if you have allowed yourself to paint any other religion, nation, political party, or race as being the ones that it is divinely approved to hate.... Don't be so sure that they are not the ones God will send knocking on your door.
To every nation's prayer for "God bless Israel," or "God bless America," Matthew's Christmas story is more like the prayer of Tiny Tim, "God bless us everyone...... no exceptions."
