2nd Sunday after Christmas - Hosea 11.1 - January 4, 2014
1) In
the last chapters of Genesis a famine sweeps across the known world,
threatening to take the life of Israel, his eleven sons, and their families. It threatens not only their lives but the entire promise
of God. The Lord had promised that the Messiah would arrive through the seed of
Abraham, grandfather of Jacob. But in this famine the Lord provides an escape. There
is but one place in the world which had an abundance of food. Jacob tells ten
of his sons in Genesis 42:2, “Indeed I have heard that there is grain in Egypt; go down to that place
and buy for us there, that we may live and not die.” By the end of Genesis
Israel, His twelve sons and their families are living in the land of Egypt,
safe from famine and the messianic line still intact so that Lord’s promises would
not fall to the ground unfulfilled. Years later Egypt would enslave Israel.
This suffering would last for four hundred years until the Lord called Israel
out of Egypt by the hand of Moses. The Lord could have averted the whole
disaster and alleviated four hundred years of suffering and servitude but He
did not. He allowed this persecution and cross upon His people so they might
learn to trust the true God all the more and rely solely upon His promises:
that He would save them for their persecutors and give them the land He promised
to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so that Messiah would come forth.
2) The prophet Hosea recounts this
salvation history to the people of Israel when He writes in the eleventh
chapter of his prophecy, “When Israel was
a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” (Hosea 11:1) The
exodus is, and ever will be, one of the chief signs of God’s love and tender
compassion for His people. The Lord calling Israel out of Egypt shows Israel
the Lord’s faithfulness to His promises. No foreign nation, no worldly power,
no satanic Pharaoh will stand in the way of the Lord making good on His Word.
The exodus also shows forth the Lord’s love for Israel in that, at the exodus,
the Lord adopted the nation of Israel as more than His people, but as His son. The
Lord tells Moses in Exodus 4:22-23, “Thus
says the LORD: "Israel is My son, My firstborn. So I say to you, let My
son go that he may serve Me. But if you refuse to let him go, indeed I will kill
your son, your firstborn.” Israel is a son to the Lord, not servant or
slave. The adoption of Israel as the Lord’s firstborn son is then the reason
why the Lord kills every firstborn son in the final plague upon Egypt. The Lord
tells Israel, as they stand on the border of the Promised Land, “in the wilderness where you saw how the
LORD your God carried you, as a man carries his son, in all the way that you
went.” (Deuteronomy 1:31) Israel was God’s adopted son whom He loves, so
that “he who touches you touches the apple
of His eye.” (Zechariah 2:8)
3) It
is this verse, Hosea 11:1 that St. Matthew quotes in today’s Gospel lesson. He
writes: “When he arose, he took the
young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt, and was there until
the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord
through the prophet, saying, ‘Out of Egypt I called My Son.’” (Matthew
2:14-15) Hosea’s prophecy isn’t predictive as other prophecies are. The promise
that the virgin will conceive and bear a son is a predictive prophecy. But
Hosea 11:1 doesn’t specifically refer to the Messiah, or to a future event in
the life of Christ. It looks back to the exodus: “out of Egypt I called my son.” (Hosea 11:1) This passage isn’t
predictive, which makes some think that St. Matthew is playing fast and loose
with the Scriptures. But this is not so, for the Holy Ghost is the author of
Scripture. St. Matthew is simply the human instrument through which the Word of
God is put into human language. So it is more than St. Matthew making this
connection between Jesus’ flight to Egypt and Old Testament Israel’s flight to Egypt.
It is God the Holy Ghost inspiring this connection.
4) How
is this passage, “out of Egypt I called
my son,’ fulfilled by the Christ child? Christ fulfills this passage
because where Old Testament Israel was the adopted son of God, Jesus is the
Only-Begotten Son of God, the Son of God who is of the same substance with the
Father, by whom all things were made. What St. Matthew is getting at with this
citation is this: the life of Old Testament Israel is all a foreshadowing of
the life of Christ promised to come. The entire reason Old Testament Israel
existed was that it was to the nation from which the Messiah of the world would
sprout. That is why after the Messiah came there is no longer any need for God
to have a physical nation of Israel. Israel’s history, laws, and customs had
served their purpose in being the incubator for Christ, the One who is Son of
God not by adoption but by right and essence. The parallels can be seen easily.
Joseph is told in a dream to flee to Egypt because the life of the Christ child
is in danger. Just as Jacob’s family and their lives were in danger because of
famine, now the Christ’s life is in danger because of the madman Herod, who was
seeking to kill the infant king. Egypt was to be a place of safety for the
Christ child just as Egypt was a place of refuge for Israel during the famine.
If we do the math of Herod’s years and death we see another parallel, namely
that while the people of Israel spent 400 years in Egypt, Christ spend four
years in Egypt. Finally Christ was called forth from Egypt, back to the land of
Canaan, to fulfill all the promises of God regarding His Christ.
5) There
is great comfort in this for us. God called His Son out of Egypt because this
is how God deals with His sons. In His divine wisdom, which far surpasses all
human wisdom, intellect, and reason, God the Father allows His Only-Begotten
Son to be persecuted by wicked Herod. He allows this trial and suffering to
come upon the holy family. Mary would have only given birth to Jesus a few
months prior to this event and would still be healing. Joseph would have the
difficult task of relocating His newborn son and healing wife to another
country in which they knew no one and no family or support system. This is a
great cross which the Lord has laid upon the holy family. But it is necessary
because it is through this cross of traveling to Egypt that the Lord saves the
Christ child so that He might live to save sinners from their sins by His death
at the appropriate time. Just as God allowed Israel, His son, to dwell in Egypt
under the heavy hand of Pharaoh so that He might demonstrate His abundant mercy
and might to Israel, so the Father allows His Only-Begotten Son to endure such hardship
and cross so that by this child’s death at the proper time, He might demonstrate
the might of God over Satan’s tyranny and the mercy the Triune God has for
sinners.
6) This
is how God treats His sons. In the exodus, the Lord is already conforming His
adopted son Israel to the image of His Only-Begotten Son. This is also then how
he treats the New Testament Israel, the church, both collectively and
individually. The Lord allows sufferings to come upon us, not out of spite and
anger, but to teach us to turn to the true God in faith, looking to Him alone
for aid. The Apology to the Augsburg Confession has this to say about our
afflictions: And although these
afflictions are for the most part the punishments of sin, yet in the godly they
have a better end, namely, to exercise them, that they may learn amidst trials
to seek God’s aid, to acknowledge the distrust of their own hearts, etc., as
Paul says of himself, 2 Cor. 1, 9: But we had the sentence of death in
ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the
dead. And Isaiah says, 26, 16: They poured out prayer when Thy chastening was
upon them, i.e., afflictions are a discipline by which God exercises the
saints.” Old Testament Israel was afflicted in Egypt that they mighty learn
to call upon God in every trouble and place their confidence in His Word, not
in the imagination of the their hearts or any external work they might do. So
Christ was disciplined in the days of His humiliation, not because He needed to
learn true faith, but to serve as an example of how to endure in hardship,
trial, and cross. Christ endures all His fatherly chastisement in patience and
faith, living not by bread alone by but every word that proceedeth from the
mouth of God.
7) So
it is true for all the baptized faithful. Baptism is God’s act of adopting you
as His sons and daughters. It is not your act of adopting God as your Father,
for what child ever chooses their parents? St. Paul writes in Galatians
3:26-27, “For you are all sons of God through
faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put
on Christ.” In Holy Baptism God adopts you as His beloved son or daughter.
In Holy Baptism your sins are forgiven and you are united with Christ’s death
and resurrection. In Holy Baptism God clothes you with the garment of Christ’s
righteousness so that in Holy Baptism the Words of the Father at Christ’s
baptism become words to you: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
(Matthew 3:17)
God is pleased with you because you become His adopted child, just as Old
Testament Israel was His adopted Son, yet you are righteous in God’s sight
because your sins are forgiven in those waters and as St. Peter teaches in his
first epistle, “Baptism now saves us.”
(1 Peter 3:21) God gives so many blessings and gifts in baptism, and one of
those blessings is the promise of suffering. St. Paul teaches us in Romans 8:29
that “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed
to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.” But the suffering, trial, and crosses of this life are
not given without any consolation. In the verse that precedes this one St. Paul
writes, “We know that all things work
together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according
to His purpose.”
(Romans 8:28) That purpose of God is to conform you to Christ’s image, for you
are truly sons and daughters of God by Holy Baptism. This is how he treated
Israel, leading them into Egypt for safety and then for suffering. This is how
God the Father treated His Only-Begotten Son in the days of His humiliation,
leading Him to Egypt for safety as He suffered the wrath of the world and the
hatred of Herod. In our crosses He leads us into Egypt as well, but the
suffering has the purpose of comforting us to the crucible which is Christ
Jesus, for it is in afflictions that we exercise faith and learn all the more
to trust no in ourselves, our knowledge, our works, or the thoughts of our
hearts, but to true only in God, who is our loving and gracious heavenly
Father. Amen.