Grant to your people, Lord, grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow you, the only True God; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Promise Survives
Reflection on Matthew 2:13-23
Matthew 2:13-23 builds upon the narrative found in the previous chapter. In this passage, Joseph is communicated with, via a dream and the angel of the Lord, and told to do something he might otherwise not do. He is asked to do something extraordinary in an extraordinary manner, and he doesn’t back down from the challenge. We never hear a verbal response from Joseph to these supernatural requests. We only get his response in action. Yet, his action is critical. The survival of God’s promise depends upon it.
If a story about a character named Joseph whose life is changed because of dreams seems familiar, there is a very good reason. Just the way that Melville wants you to know something about Captain Ahab just from his name, the gospel writer leverages associations with an ancient and earlier Joseph (Genesis 37-50) — a Joseph that also provided a means of survival for God’s promise. But this association is only one of many collective memories conjured by this passage. Egypt is the place Joseph brings his family to survive a famine, but it is also the place that the ancient Hebrews will emerge from the Pharaoh’s rule by signs and wonders.
As in those Old Testament narratives, the gospel writer tells us of a clear danger to the persistence of God’s promise. We learn of Herod’s rage and paranoia as he attempts to snuff out any perceived threat to his throne. Evil is present in this story, and it is no small theological feat to explain why such a horrific act takes place in a story about one named “God with us,” other than to say in the midst of great evil and the possible extinction of God’s promise, a faithful person acts and the promise survives.
This is the elemental plot that flows through those Hebrew tales: God has promised to bless all people. In the face of certain extinction of this promise, God finds a way to fulfill the promise. In this plot, a key element is the faithful person without whom the plan would fail. In this gospel story, Joseph is that faithful person. He believes in the promise, and acts on it. In this way, he foreshadows the faithfulness of Jesus, who will ultimately be faced with the final threat to God’s promise and will be asked to do the unthinkable. He will be asked to die.
The Rev. Don Fleischman
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Richland Center, WI
1 comment:
I like that Joseph's willingness to act comes out of a sense of faithfulness...nothing requiring superhuman effort, but everything requiring persistent effort.
Since we can't help but read this story as people who already know how the story will end, I find it helpful to constantly remind myself that, in the moments when Joseph was confronted with the dreams and visions, he had no idea how the story would conclude. All he had to go on was his commitment to the faithfulness of his ancestors -- and in living out that faithfulness, he was de facto, faithful to God.
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