Matthew 2: - God With Us (Christmas in September)

Listen in as we look at Matthew 2

Reading: Matthew 2:1-23

“the birth of Jesus is a threat to thrones and kingdoms.”  -Stanley Hauerwas

“the gospel tells the story of a prophetic figure who suffers the worst that the empire can do to him, execution by crucifixion. But his resurrection and subsequent coming in power expose the limits of Roman power. The gospel constructs an alternative world. It resists imperial claims. It refuses to recognize that the world has been ordered on these lines. It offers an alternative understanding of the world and human existence centered on God manifested in Jesus. It created an alternative community and shapes and anti-imperial praxis.”   - Warren Carter

“When he quotes Hosea 11:1 in verse 15, it looks for a moment as though he is ignoring the fact that the prophet was looking back to Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, not forward to a ‘son of God’ yet to come. But this itself ignores the fact that, for Matthew, part of Jesus’ role and vocation is precisely to make Israel’s story complete: as ‘son of God’ he is, as it were, Israel-in-person, succeeding at last where Israel had failed.”  - N.T. Wright

“Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children. Jesus is born into a world where children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants. Christians are tempted to believe that the death of the children of Bethlehem “can be redeemed” by Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. Donald MacKinnon, however, insists that such a reading of the gospels, in particular the destruction of the innocents of Bethlehem, is perverse. For MacKinnon, the victory of the resurrection does not mean that these children are any less dead or their parents any less bereaved, but rather the resurrection makes it possible for followers of Jesus not to lie about the world we believe has been redeemed.”     -Stanley Hauerwas

“There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.” (Isaiah 11:1)

“For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:2-5)