Matthew 2:13–23

Christmas 1

¹³Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." ¹⁴And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt ¹⁵and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt I called my son." ¹⁶Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. ¹⁷Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: ¹⁸"A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more." ¹⁹But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, ²⁰saying, "Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead." ²¹And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. ²²But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. ²³And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled: "He shall be called a Nazarene."

A young couple had for several years been trying to have a child but with no success. They decided to adopt a child from another country. When they went to tell their parents, they got sharply rebuffed: “Wouldn’t it be better to have one of your own?” After a moment’s hesitation they responded: “This child will be our own, just as if he or she had been born to us. This child will be a part of our family in every way.”

In our Epistle lesson today we are told that God sent forth his Son that we might receive the adoption of sons. In other words, Jesus came into the world so that God could adopt us as his own children. However, as we read the word “adoption” according to our sinful way of thinking, we understand the future grandparents’ thoughts. At the same time, we see the wonder and the excitement of the future parents. Similarly this passage leads to two ways of thinking about being adopted by God.

Our human sinfulness clouds the way we think about things. As sinful human beings, we often see things from a self-centered perspective. We don’t like things that are different from us. The grandparents were thinking this way when they rebuffed their children for adopting a child. She will be different. She is not like you. All too quickly and easily we shut out other people simply because they are different from us. We become critical and set up artificial criteria by which we negatively judge others. The result is that we become prejudice against people who are not of our own kind, our own race, our own language, our own age group, or even our own political party.

All this is because our thinking is clouded by sin. From the fall of Adam and Eve our thoughts and reason is grossly distorted and corrupt. “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” says the Lord. The human heart and mind is selfish in nature. We see things only from the earthly perspective, not God’s heavenly perspective. We are self-centered and only interested in satisfying our own selfish desires and wants. That was the essence of Adam and Eve’s sin; for when Satan said, “You shall become like God,” their desire was to aggrandize themselves. Because of our sinful heart, we place self first. We think we must take care of our self first. “What’s in it for me?” we ask.

When Adam sinned all things became less than what God had created them to be. That includes our bodies, our minds, our relationships and our nature. Not only do we not live up to God’s demands, we don’t even live up to our own expectations. In addition, even our bodies were affected. They become subject to illness, pain, suffering, degeneration and eventually death. The world around us was touched as well. All living things die; all material objects wear out, break, deteriorate, or cease to exist. The world becomes contaminated and weeds, thorns and thistles grow. Plagues of insects destroy crops, storms and earthquakes kill and maim people. The curse of sin is on the entire creation and the affects and evidences of sin are everywhere.

Ultimately sin separates us from God. For “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” We are therefore, “dead in our trespasses and sins,” “enemies of God,” “children of wrath,” “without hope and without God in this world.” Because of that we don’t see being adopted by God as something positive either. Sinful man does not want to have anything to do with God. This attitude is seen in our society as it tries to ban God and Christ from the public forum.

Or conversely, we don’t want God to do anything. We want to do it all ourselves. We try to find our own ways to become children of God. We want to do it by our own actions. We invent our own laws to obey, making up our own definition of what good works are in order to get us closer to God. We try to get closer to God by meditation and inner spirituality. We try to appease our conscience with activism and social causes. In the end we reject the work of the Holy Spirit and want to do it ourselves because we are by nature sinful and separated from God.

Therefore, as “a voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children,” so we weep in a world of sin, darkness and despair. The death of innocent children, weeping, and lamentation is still part of our fallen world today. We come to the manger poor, afflicted and suffering because humankind is separated from God. We are as orphans cast out in the darkness, shivering in the cold, huddled like cattle in a stable. As the babies slaughtered by Herod the king, the slaughter continues even today as poor, suffering, innocents are cut off from life. We mourn ourselves, our poverty, our sin, and our wretchedness. We are orphaned from God.

It is in this world of weeping and lamentation; of separation from God as orphaned children; of selfishness and greed that we find something quite the opposite in our text. IN CONTRAST TO THE SINFUL WAY WE THINK,… GOD SENDING FORTH HIS SON SHOWS HOW EXQUISITELY WONDERFUL IS OUR ADOPTION INTO HIS HOLY FAMILY.

God’s love causes Him to look at everything differently. In stark contrast to our selfishness and self-centered lives, God’s love is always other-centered. It is always centered on the people he created. God’s entire existence and being is centered on giving us life, sustaining our life and blessing us. He gives us the goodness of heaven and brings us into a perfect relationship with himself through his Son Jesus Christ. God adopts us as his children through faith in his Son.

God has taken action to restore mankind to himself. That is the story of Christmas. God sending his Son, the Messiah, into our fallen world, in order to rescue us from our own sin and death.

He chose the perfect time to send forth the Messiah. Let’s take a look at the timing here. First of all, at the time Christ was born the Greek language had become international, thanks to Alexander the Great. That made it easy for the Good News of the gospel to be widely spread throughout the world. The Roman Empire had spread to its greatest era so that travel and communication had become much easier. The early believers and missionaries, like St. Paul, could readily travel on good, safe roads and by prodigious sea routes in order to spread the message of Christ quickly and without danger. Moreover, Christ’s birth took place near the beginning of a 200 year period of peace; no wars between the nations; so as the manger was the cradle of Jesus, the Empire became the cradle of the church.

Into this perfect timing God sent forth his Son. He was born just like we are—born of a woman. He was a human being so that he could actually be a substitute for man. In order to die in our place and suffer the punishment for our sin as our substitute, he had to be one of us. No other creature could be a substitute for mankind.

He was born under the Law. From the beginning, God has given the perfect Law so that we could live out our perfect relationship with him. Since we couldn’t, can’t, and won’t live our lives as God wants us to, we were in a hopeless situation. But for this reason God sent his Son who placed himself under the law so that he could live out the law of God without any fault or imperfection as our substitute. The law of God has been fulfilled. It has been obeyed. It was fulfilled by Jesus Christ and when we are baptized into him, we are baptized into his righteous and perfect obedience. That means, in plain, simple terms, that his perfection and obedience count for us. On account of Jesus’ righteousness and perfection, God declares us righteous and perfect. God sees us as having obeyed his law perfectly because Jesus obeyed it as our substitute. When God commands us to “love God with all our heart, mind, and strength,” and “love our neighbor as our self,” he sees us as having loved God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves because Jesus did it in our place.

And Jesus did more than just stand in for us as a substitute—he saved us! God redeemed us! He bought us back. He paid the ransom price. He rescued us from our weeping and lamentation. We are like Rachel weeping for her children who cannot be comforted. There is nothing we can do to find comfort. God had to do it. Only he could restore us to himself. And he did! He lived a perfect life and then gave his life as the redemption or ransom price. How exquisitely wonderful that God would do all that!

The result? We are adopted into his family as his very own. It means that we are no longer orphans. We are no longer enslaved to ourselves, our sin, our addictions, the things of the world, or the power of the devil. It means that Rachel can now be comforted; her weeping can end. We are now truly God’s children and can go to him with our prayers. We can now address God as Father.

What does it all mean? It means that we receive the inheritance that comes to a child of the family. It means forgiveness of sins, being one of God’s own children, and the joy that comes from being face-to-face with Jesus forever. Because God sent forth his Son into the world, when we are baptized into him, we are covered with his blood; that very blood which he shed on the cross to wash away our sin. That is why even at Christmas with all its beautiful decorations and music, we still have the cross prominently displayed. Christmas always points to Good Friday and Easter, when God finalized the action of sending his Son into the world. God sent his Son into the world to make us his sons and daughters as well. It is through that babe in a manger that he washes away our sin and we receive that holy adoption as God’s own children. All praise be to God!

Amen.