THE LONG WAY HOME
MATTHEW 2 13—21 THE LONG WAY HOME
Sometimes, when we were young, we used to take the long way home, just to enjoy the scenery and the companionship.
Christmas is about a lot of things, but it is at least about getting back home. We sing about it: “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.
And “Over the river and through the woods.”
Over the river and through the woods,
To grandmother’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to follow the sleigh
Through he white and drifting snow.
Or,
Dashing through the snow
In a one horse open sleigh,
O’er the hills we go
Laughing all the way;
In our lifetimes we haven’t done much commuting by horse and sled. My family left the farm when I was 10 years old. My 10th year was the last year we owned horses or any animals other than a dog or an occasional cat or fish. When we had horses, there was an occasional ride in a small cart or on horseback. I recall only one magical night when we rode across the fields on a horse-drawn sled. The sled had straw serving as a cushion or mattress. The night was quite cold and though we wore our heaviest coats and scarves, the family also snuggled under a heavy quilt to help banish the cold.
I could not have been more than 4 or 5 years old at the time. I remember we sang jingle bells. That was when I learned the words sleigh and jingle.
I still remember how blue the night looked. Through the clear cold sky, the stars shone brightly and the moon’s reflected light bounced off the white snow covered, rolling hillsides allowing us to see the fences. A narrow woodland hid the creek whose normal babble was silenced by water now turned to ice.
Near the little farmhouse was a weather beaten barn where cattle and horses sought shelter at sundown. My father and mother read the birth stories of Jesus to me from the Bible. I first heard the story of the visit of the three wise men as mother decorated a cedar tree my father had cut from the woodlands. She held up a blue ornament that was concave on one side and contained a single silver star. She placed this ornament at a spot on the tree where I could see that ornament reflecting the light and imagined it glowed as brightly as the stars above on that December night we rode in the sled. At the very top of the tree mother placed a large silver and blue star that she solemnly declared was the star of Bethlehem that shone over the manger where Jesus lay on the night he was born.
I knew what a barn was like. I knew how warm it felt to lean against a cow. I knew what it felt like to lay on a pile of hay or straw. I had seen donkeys and sheep. It was not hard to picture Jesus’ birth place as being very like our little farm on a bright, snowy, December night.
Which brings us to this first trip of the holy family. Of all the dreams of Christmas, this one is the strangest even if it makes common sense. Joseph went to bed with his conversations with the Wise Men on his mind. What should he do? He was terrorized, for that was the way the Puppet King Herod ruled the land on behalf of Rome. Herod maintained control by a reign of terror. He had his own male children killed because he feared they might grow up and steal the throne from him by leading a rebellion. He feared Rome. He feared his own people and his own children. It was said of Herod, better to be his swine than his sons.
In the night, God spoke to Joseph’s mind in a dream. An angel said, “Get up and flee to Egypt. Herod is going to try to kill your child.”
To Egypt? Why such a long way? The recent history of the Mideast tells us why. During the last century there have been large movements of people across the Mideast borders of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Amenia, Palestine, Iraq and Iran as people attempt to escape civil war.
Some 1400 years before Jesus was born, the Hebrew people, perhaps a million of them immigrated from Egypt, not just once, but in waves over decades. They wandered in the desert of Sinai before arriving at what is modern day Palestine. Similarly, they had migrated from Ur of the Chaldeas, the site of Modern day Iraq to Palestine then to Egypt centuries before the Exodus from Egypt. The mass movement of people through the Mideast and internecine wars in that area has occurred throughout recorded history.
Why would the angel say “Go to Egypt?” “Why not? Though it would take days, it was the nearest state, and the way was on a well-marked international trade route.
The long journey is typical of our spiritual life.’ It is the far country, the place outside the gate, the burning bush in the desert we must turn aside to see. It is the dream in the night, the sojourn out of the way, that leads us safely home.
Mary and Joseph’s long way to safety makes a point: Jesus is special. He is the person chosen to be the leader of the people. Holy men had written in Scriptures describing what Messiah would be like and how he would appear.
“Out of Egypt I have called my son,” the Scriptures say (v. 15; Hosea 11:1). To get away from Herod’s search for the heir to the Davidic throne, it made sense to go to the neighboring coutry..
But something else is involved here. Getting where we want to go, really want to go, often involves going the long way home. Because it is in the journey that we are given the chance to deal with our brokenness, to discover what is missing in our lives, to confront our unanswered ques tions. Harriett Richie wrote, “In the places where we are broken, in the dark holes where something is missing, in the silence of unanswered questions, the wondrous gift is given.” (1)
A JOURNEY INTO BROKENNESS
The gift is given, “in places where we are broken,” Richie says. We tend to equate brokenness with shabbiness. We toss our spare change into a pot for the entire lot of ill-clad, unkempt people who stand on the street corners and mumble to themselves.
We view them from inside our locked cars. We read their card-board signs and speculate whether they’re scamming us or not. We have words for them like “homeless,” “unemployed,” “marginalized,” and a thousand other subtle ways of saying, “Not like us.”
Not so. The journey into wholeness leads us first to our own broken-ness, to an inner Egypt. We can drive a nice automobile, have a comfortable home and be a pillar in our community but find our souls wandering in the desert wilderness. Each one of us who have lived any time at all have experienced crises within our families, within our sense of who we are at home or at work or both. We are faced with death in the family, personal illness and one or another of the many losses life hands us and we wonder who we are and why there are such large potholes in our spiritual journey.
Father Keating, writing about prayer said that the spiritual journey is into the unknown. We have to get rid of the need for certitude. In his experience, it requires three or four years of deep prayer for a person to understand his motivations and become vulnerable to God. The journey into our brokenness is a journey deep into our own being and outward into the unknown, where God is.
Jesus said it much more simply. Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”
Ah, sweet Jesus. Where is my cross? Where do I find it? We ask.
Jesus said, You can’t be my disciple, you can’t follow me or go where I go if you love father or mother. . . .if you love home and security more than me. You take up your cross and you follow me.
You follow me, and the Cross will find you.
To find God we must be willing to undertake the journey to Egypt, into our own questionable motives and hidden wounds. It means leaving behind the familiar and going where only Gods love can feed us. Then we learn truly what Jesus means when he tells us, “Blessed are the poor spirit,.” for we all are.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.
A DIFFICULT JOURNEY
The journey is about “the dark holes where something is missing.” We don’t like to think that anything is missing. We attempt to impose our definition of perfection on life while the actual process of life is something else altogether.
We imagine the accoutrements we must have to make life bearable and in the clutter of stuff, we lose sight of what makes life meaningful.
Most of us wish that life could be without trouble and trial. But as John Sanford has said, we operate under a false view of a perfection that can be reached without darkness, without trouble and without sin and suffering.
Many a young man and woman have left home to serve their country at very young ages – going far to help heal the brokenness of our time.
At age 17 I kissed mother good bye, shook my father’s hand and with only a suitcase and a couple of boxes loaded in my old car, journeyed to the city. I then searched for an apartment and a job so that I could go to college to prepare for a ministry to a people in yet another strange place. I hoped to find my identity, my place on the journey.
We think of perfection as wholeness. Finding wholeness is a process of discovering the full life God always intended for us to have. It means finding our true selves. “In the long run,” Sanford writes, “the search for our true self is a fascinating journey with rich treasures and great rewards. But it is a painful enterprise and one that never ends.” (3)
The Holy Family’s journey to Egypt is idealized in early Christian lore, glossing over the difficulty of the journey. The infant tales tell of palm trees that miraculously bent down to feed the holy family, lions and leopards that wagged their tails in worship. One story tells that in one of the towns they passed through, all the idols in the local temple fell to the ground. It’s human to idealize our journey, to smooth out the rough places as we retell it.
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But Scripture doesn’t. The flight to Egypt is also a reminder, an anticipation of the costly and painful price of wholeness for us all. If Jesus is the new Moses, come to deliver us into a new kingdom, then we must make a journey from our present Egypt and be brought out a dangerous and difficult way.
It is tempting to sit and wait for life to come to us, to forsake the journey and simply subsist. But doing that, we stop living life and squander it. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, ’It might have been’ “ Our refusal to follow, either as individuals or as a church does not mean that opportunities won’t be missed. There is a price for delay and disobedience.
At times I have thought, and I’ve heard other Christians say after an apparent failure, “It wasn’t meant to be.” We try to blame God or Providence for our failures. The Kingdom will come, even if we have no hand in it, and our improvidence is not to be interpreted as the Providence of God.
The Magi didn’t have to follow the star.
Joseph didn’t have to wed Mary.
Joseph and Mary didn’t have to present Jesus at the temple.
Old Simeon and Mary didn’t have to be waiting at the temple and take the opportunity to inform the nation that Messiah had come. Their words have become part of our Evening prayer liturgy. “And now let your servant depart in peace. . . .”
God can and will bring in the Kingdom with or without us. We should be diligent so as to eventually enjoy the welcome into peace our Lord offers.
Joseph and Mary could have sought an easier way to avoid Herod’s wrath than the journey to Egypt, but what disaster might an easier way have invited? What might they have missed?
Mary didn’t have to say to the Angel, “Be it done according to your Word. She didn’t have to be a mother.” But had she avoided the opportunity, she would have died unknown in obscurity.
Life will not come to us on our terms. Joseph’s dream was a call to enter the full danger of the spiritual journey
A JOURNEY WITHOUT ANSWERS
God’s wondrous gift is given, says Hamett Richie, “in the silence of unanswered questions.” Joseph and Mary knew some of the reasons for their journey. Their preeminent motivation for leaving was to escape the possibility that Herod would come after Jesus. But here we meet the question of suffering head-on. Innocent baby boys are killed for nothing more than political insecurity The point is not how many died, but why God, who could intervene to save Jesus, did not intervene to save these twenty or thirty little innocent babies.
Never is the idea of life’s purpose more at risk than in the face of innocent and undeserved suffering. Many come to Christmas every year with some unbearable sorrow that seems to render life senseless. “Why did this happen?” they ask. And there is no answer.
Matthew makes a subtle grammatical point in the text that we cannot see in the English translation. There are three significant quotations from the Old Testament in Matthew’s birth story one about the birth to a virgin in Bethlehem (2:6), this quotation about the flight to Egypt (2:15), and the third about returning to Nazareth (2:23). All are to show that Jesus’ life was a fulfillment of the Old Testament.
But in this one, Matthew leaves out the purpose word, “in order that.” He softens his quotation to make the point that God is not the author of evil, even though God knows that this will be Herod’s response.
Yet even this does not eliminate the problem. Evil is not God’s will, but its occurrence is still God’s dark mystery of how he creates good from evil. Jesus did not escape death at the hands of tyranny so much as postpone it. The death of the innocents was not a tragedy Jesus avoided but a tragedy that anticipated the darkest tragedy of all: the saving tragedy of Jesus’ cross.
Matthew affirms that God is not the author of evil. But he does assert that God is evil’s editor. God has the final word. God reframes, restates and corrects evil until it fits within God’s deeper purposes. That is what we want to know in our tragedies and sorrows—that they are not in the end merely empty and sad coincidences, random and broken bits of unfortunate pain.
Billy Graham’s choice of his successor in his organization was his son, Franklin. Years ago, Franklin could only have been elected “Least Likely to Follow in His Father’s Footsteps.” By his own admission, Franklin’s rebellious ways eliminated him from contention for the place. His three main achievements during college were chain-smoking, whiskey drinking and expulsion. But at twenty-two he was converted to the Christian faith. And he has continued to grow and mature. Said a friend, “[Billy Graham] has been waiting for Franklin to mature, but he’s had this in mind for fifteen years.” (4)
I like that. And God is like that. God’s way is to outwit and out wait evil.
We hear from friends all over the United States during the Christmas season. Sometimes in their Christmas letters there are hints of a long journey: a death, an entry into a nursing home, an illness that has changed the course of life forever, a child~ accomplishment. Some of the letters we receive are from people asking help, as they have experienced disaster or failed in an undertaking. Others are reporting recovery from failures.
There is a long way into and out of Egypt that leads us home. It is not the way we would necessarily choose, given our perfectionist ideals and our reluctance to experience pain as a price for joy. But that way is there.
It is not only in the struggle with evil and tragedy that our questions come. There are other questions: “Does my life add up to anything at all? What does my life mean?”
Sometimes life seems never to go anywhere. Occasionally we meet people who lived their entire life in the house in which they were born. Sometimes we are envious of people with such roots.
On the other hand, some are stuck. Sometimes we feel we are stuck. We wish we could go even to Egypt—somewhere! But even if we never physically leave home, there is still a journey we can and must make. “In the endless, some-times meaningless daily grinds, in the comings and goings of our lives,” says Harriett Richie, “our souls are often far from home whether we know it or not.” (5)
The spiritual journey does not depend upon geography for its drama. It may seem to us that our lives are disconnected, or insignificant, or full of pain, with no real or obvious meaning. We see no thread running through our lives, no words to make sense of them. We just mutter and hum something that sounds like the right words, hoping we are close. The danger in such mumbling is that we can lose hope that there really are words for me, for my life.
Frederick Buechner once wrote, “If God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that [God] speaks.” (6)
It is not that some people get a real song and you just get a sad and tragic little ditty whose words were never completed. Every life is a song penned by an Author who knows every word. Every baby boy in Bethlehem is a song whose words God knows. Every hungry refugee is a song. Every forgotten prisoner in a faraway tyranny is a song. God knows those songs.
Every dozing old man in a nursing home hallway is a song; and so is every unpopular child at the schools; and every suburban housewife with a world of trouble on her mind that no one knows. God knows the musical score for every one of us who lives to keep up appearances in this success-worshiping society of ours. There may be no words in the local songs for failure and dark-ness and suffering. This may cause us to fear that there are no words at all.
Henrik Ibsen wrote a play in verse that became an opera: Peer Gynt. Peer was the son of an alcoholic who wasted the family fortune. Peer tried a number of things in his life but could never find himself. He too became a wastrel. He met a woman who eventually deeply loved him and wanted to be his wife, but he couldn’t remain in one place. and build a home. He wandered the world and finally, at the end of his life returned home. As a broken old man he met Solveig again.
Peer looks for a priest to confess his sins, and a character named the Lean One (who is probably the Devil), turns up. He believes Peer cannot be accounted a real sinner who can be sent to hell. He has not done anything serious. Peer despairs in the end, understanding that his life is forfeit. He understands he is nothing. But at the same moment, Solveig starts to sing - the cabin he himself built, is close at hand, but he dares not enter. The Bøyg in him tells him "around". The moulder shows up and demands a list of sins, but Peer has none to give, unless Solveig can vouch for him. Then he breaks through to her, asking her for his sins. But she answers: "You have not sinned at all, my dearest boy". Peer does not understand - he believes himself lost. Then he asks her: "Where has Peer Gynt been since we last met? Where was I as the one I should have been, whole and true, with the mark of God on my brow?" Solveig answed; "“You have made all my life as a beautiful song. You have been here, in my faith, in my hope and in my love.” ". Peer screams and calls her mother, and hides himself in her lap. Solveig sings her lullaby for him, and we might presume he dies in this last scene of the play, although there are no stage directions or dialogue to indicate that he actually does.
Behind the corner, the button-moulder, who is sent by God, still waits, with the words: "Peer, we shall meet at the last cross-roads, and then we shall see if. .. I’ll say no more".
Solveign’s role is the role of the church and it adds meaning to all our lives. We should be there with similar words of welcome to everyone we meet.
You are a song with all the words. Words that God knows. Start singing it, keep singing it, this holy song that is yours, until one day when you can go look in the old piano bench, and there, under the old Broadman hymnal or the Reader’s Digest~ One Hundred Favorite Songs Americans Sing, you will find your song. And the words will come back to you again. And though it is a long way, you will be home.
Notes
1. Hamett Richie, “He’d come here,” The Christian Century 112 (December 13, 1995),
p1206.
2. John Sanford, The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus’ Sayings (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987), p. 70.
3. Ibid, p. 71.
4.JohnW Kennedy, “The Son Also Rises,” ChrIstianity Today (December 11, 1995), p. 59.
5. Richie, p. 1206.
6. Frederick Buecimer, The Sacred Journey (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers,
1982), p. 1.
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Charles Scott, Church of the Good Shepherd
Indianapolis, Indiana
crscott@email.com
http://www.goodshepherdindy.org
