11. The Flight into Egypt Matt. 2:13-23

 The child Jesus did not stay long in Bethlehem, the city of David. The cross was immediately laid upon his cradle. God warned Joseph through his angel about the ambush by King Herod, and Joseph took the child and his mother at God’s command and went up to Egypt. This also fulfilled a prophecy, the words of the prophet Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” This meant that the Son of God, like the people from whom he came, was to remain a stranger in Egypt for a while. Thus God held his protective hand over the chosen child, over the holy family. Thus God, the faithful Father, protects his children on earth, who are pleasing to him through Christ, his only Son, against the threats and rage of the hostile world, and gives them his holy angels as guardians and watchmen. With motherly hands he constantly guides his people to and fro.

Instead of the infant Jesus, the wrath and sword of King Herod fell on the poor children in Bethlehem who were two years old and under. Then the lamentations, weeping and wailing of the mothers could be heard in the fields of Bethlehem, as had been foretold by the prophet Jeremiah (31:15). Rachel, one of the foremothers of Israel, who was buried near Bethlehem, wept as it were with her daughters for the bitter woe that had befallen them. The children of Bethlehem are rightly regarded as the first martyrs who had to give up their lives for Christ’s sake, but now live and soar with Christ in eternal joy and bliss. And from the outset it is hereby indicated that Christ brings no earthly happiness to his people, that rather cross, misery and heartache are a gift from this King Christ. Christ has reserved a better portion for his people in the other world.

When the cruel King Herod died—as we know—a terrible, painful death, Joseph returned to the land of Israel with the child and his mother as a result of a revealing dream But he did not return again to Bethlehem in Judea, where Herod’s son Archelaus, who was of the same mind as his father, ruled. Instead, at God’s command, he went to the land of Galilee and settled in his former place of residence, in the small, despised town of Nazareth. It was to come to pass as the prophets had predicted (Is 11:1,5; 2 Zec 6:12): Christ was to be and be called a Nazarene. He was to grow up as a lowly little shoot, as a despised rootling. Anyone who stands with Christ can expect nothing but disgrace and contempt in this world.

In Nazareth the child Jesus grew into a boy. The evangelist Luke reports this: “But the child grew and became strong in spirit, full of wisdom, and the grace of God was with him” (2:40). “He walked and was brought up like any other child, without being, as some children are more skilled than others, so Christ was also a more skilled child than others.” “And although he was always full of the spirit and grace, the spirit did not always move him, but awakened him to this, according to how things happened. So also, although he was in him from the beginning of his conception; But as his body grew and his reason increased naturally, as in other people, so the spirit also sank more and more into him and moved him more and more the longer he got.” “Thus it also happened in the simplest way that he truly became, the older he got, the greater, and the greater the more rational, and the more rational he became, the stronger in spirit and full of wisdom before God and in himself and before people” (Luther). In all of this, “the humanity of Christ was a tool and house of the Godhead.”