Holy Family

Matthew 2.13-23

When the Magi had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarene.”

John Pridmore in Church Times

ONCE AGAIN, an angel appears to Joseph. It is, says one commentator with an impressive vocabulary, “a typical angelophany”. Joseph is told to flee with Mary and Jesus to Egypt. There are others in the Bible’s story who, threatened by a murderous monarch, seek asylum in Egypt (1 Kings 11.40, Jeremiah 26.21).
Others, in our own day, look for refuge on our shores. Some find England less hospitable than ancient Egypt. But what matters for Matthew is less the Holy Family’s escape to Egypt than their departure from Egypt, when at last it is safe for them to return home.
Matthew’s first readers will have remembered, as we do, that a rabble of wretched slaves was delivered from Egypt, and that, by that deliverance, the rabble became a people. For Matthew, a new people of God will be called into being by the mission of Jesus. Jesus’s achievement will be a new exodus (Luke 9.31), and it is fitting that its architect should retrace the path of the first one.
Matthew is less confident than are the other Evangelists that we can put two and two together. So he spells it out. Hosea’s prophecy is fulfilled: “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Hosea 11.1).
Was Jesus’s “exodus” from Egypt a historical event? Or is it a legend, characteristic of an author who, as we shall see as we read more of Matthew, has a taste for tales that call for a pinch of salt? Those questions will seem more important to some than to others. What matters is the truth that Matthew wants the Church and the world to know. As of old, God is setting captives free.
The angel warns the Holy Family to flee from Bethlehem so as to be out of the reach of Herod. Matthew’s account of what befalls the Bethlehem families unvisited by angels is not corroborated by other sources. Some scholars suggest that Matthew might have included this story to allow him to bring in another Old Testament “proof-text”.
Long ago, Jeremiah had witnessed the slaughter of innocent children by a merciless tyrant, and had heard the pitiful cries of their mothers. With hindsight, and with the imaginative reading of the Old Testament which is typical of him, Matthew finds in the words of Jeremiah further evidence that the story of Jesus fulfils what the prophets had predicted.
Whether or not Herod slaughtered all of Bethlehem’s under-threes, it is an action entirely characteristic of him. The man who murdered three of his own sons, not to speak of his wife and his mother-in-law, would have had no compunction in massacring a village-full of infants. But there is a more compelling reason for taking Matthew’s account with the utmost serious-ness. It is that Christian history is a chronicle of the slaughter of the innocent.
Jesus warned that his coming was not to bring peace to the earth, but a sword (Matthew 10.34). According to Matthew, that sword was first wielded in Bethlehem shortly after Jesus’s birth, and those who fell under its edge were children. From Bethlehem there runs a river of innocent blood flowing down the Christian centuries. That terrible truth does not depend on what did or did not take place in Bethlehem at Herod’s behest.
I think of Hannah Fuchs, who was born on the same day as I was. Her cheap little suitcase has her name on it. I noticed it among a mountain of similar suitcases displayed at Auschwitz, with the teeth, hair, spectacles, and prosthetic limbs of all the other victims whom that little girl joined in the slowly moving queue to the gas chamber. She would have been little more than a toddler. If Hannah’s mother was still with her, she would have been holding her daughter’s hand. Perhaps little Hannah wondered why her hand was being held so tightly.
Our Old Testament reading urges us to join the prophet in recounting “the gracious deeds of the Lord”. So we must. “It is our duty and our joy.” But we remember, too, all the children whose suffering since the first Christmas — and because of the first Christmas — was not averted by the intervention of angels.
There are those we remember individually. Every day, I think of Hannah Fuchs. And there are those we think of together. We think of the little ones of Bethlehem long ago, victims of Herod. We think, too, of the little ones of Bethlehem today, victims of a cruel history.
So, as the Talmud urges the Jews at Passover, “we temper our joy.” According to some traditions, the “celebrant” at Passover dips his finger in “the cup of joy” and deliberately sprinkles some drops of wine away from the table. Thus he recalls that, when the Egyptians were drowning, God forbade the angels to sing.
If, next time I celebrate the eucharist, I spill some wine, it will not be because I am losing my grip. It will be because of Hannah.