Written by: Mal Calladine – St Thomas’, Crookes - Sheffield

Matthew 2 v 7-8
Then Herod had a secret meeting with the wise men and learned from them the exact time they first saw the star. He sent the wise men to Bethlehem, saying, “Look carefully for the child. When you find him, come tell me so I can worship him too.”

Notes 
This week, as we leave behind the events of Christmas and look to the promises of a New Year, we mainly follow the story of the wise men. Most of us can’t help understanding this story through our experience of nativity plays, me more than most - this year my family between them have been an angel, a shepherd, Joseph and a foxy princess (part of the wise men’s posse). It can all be a bit saccharine and naff. Yet the story is real, and the issues it raises are real.

The wise men were spiritual searchers looking for answers. They’d come from eastern lands as astrologers who had studied the heavens, a pursuit similar to “the stars” in our newspapers. They, like today’s horoscope readers, were travelling in hope of guidance and were now looking for the full meaning of the sign in the sky that suggested cataclysmic events in the world. 

As they homed in on their long search, the first person they encountered was not the answer to their searching, although they were looking in the logical place for a new king. Instead, they had gone to the person of most significant opposition, who lied about his motives. He didn’t want to worship a new king; he wanted to eradicate any threat to his power. Later this week, we’ll see how Jesus and his family will flee this man’s attempt to kill him.

Spend a bit of time… remembering your “story” of your search after God. Identify your times of opposition and being sent in the wrong direction. Lift that journey to God, thanking him for where he has brought you. Pray for those you know who are searching but right now aren’t in the right place and are dealing with difficulties on their journey.

Matthew 2 v 9-10
After the wise men heard the king, they left. The star that they had seen in the east went before them until it stopped above the place where the child was. When the wise men saw the star, they were filled with joy.

Notes 
Their hunch had been correct. The phenomenon the wise men had followed, always possibly a wild goose chase, had turned out to be for real. They were at journey’s end. The wise men were filled with joy because, like pirates searching after buried treasure, they’d worked out the map, and after all the uncertainties and digging around they’d found the treasure. They’d acted on what they’d read in their Bibles. They’d come here because of the prophet Micah who’d written 700 years earlier that out of Bethlehem would come a ruler who would be the “shepherd” of the people of God. The star was now putting a spotlight on the fulfilment of those words.

It’s only when we reach the destination that a journey makes sense. The journey can be fun, just for the adventures of a journey, but if it hasn’t got purpose then it remains a shallow experience. It’s all about the fulfilment of chasing your dream. 

My wife says she’s achieved her greatest dream: to be a wife and a mum. Now she has the reality of three children to whom she has an amazing, mystical link, and who look to her for protection and support. My dreams were about fame, success and money. God had other ideas and slowly but surely got me by the scruff of the neck and changed my priorities. Our dreams now are about seeing the kingdom of God come in the people and the places where we’re following the star.

Spend a bit of time… bringing before God the dreams you’re chasing and your hopes of fulfilment. Are these the dreams God has for you? Spend time in his presence, allowing him to impress on you his affirmation where things are right and his conviction where they are not.

Matthew 2 v 11-12
They came to the house where the child was and saw him with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. They opened their gifts and gave him treasures of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But God warned the wise men in a dream not to go back to Herod, so they returned to their own country by a different way.

Notes 
Let’s do some myth-busting. Although many of us have sung the Christmas carol, “We three kings of Orient are”, some of it’s rubbish! Verses name each king and what they are bringing to Jesus, yet nowhere in the Bible does it say this! This is just a tradition that has evolved over the years. The wise men are not named, nor do we have any idea of how many there were. All we know is that the wise men (who probably weren’t kings, but astrologer academics) brought three gifts to the one they understood to be a special, new king. They were gifts full of meaning and symbolism in their culture, gifts of great thought, given to honour the greatest of the great: the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Gold, the most precious of metals, was the gift associated with kings, frankincense was a gift burned to the gods, and myrrh was a spice used to anoint a body for burial. These gifts are symbols of who Jesus was and what he would accomplish. 

Spend a bit of time… in God’s presence, giving to him the same worship symbolised in each of the three gifts given to God come to earth as a baby. 

Give him gold, acknowledging him as king – the ruler of his kingdom. Ask him where you want to see his kingdom come and his will be done.

Give him frankincense, acknowledging him as God who stooped down to become the servant king, embracing a guilty world in love.

Give him myrrh, the remembrance of why he came – to be the one sufficient sacrifice for everything each of us has got wrong to separate us from God. Appreciate the death that opened a way to life and the promise of the fulfilment of a new kingdom.

Matthew 2 v 13-15
After they left, an angel of the Lord came to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up! Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt, because Herod is starting to look for the child so he can kill him. Stay in Egypt until I tell you to return.”
So Joseph got up and left for Egypt during the night with the child and his mother. And Joseph stayed in Egypt until Herod died. This happened to bring about what the Lord had said through the prophet: “I called my son out of Egypt.”

Notes
Crisis time. Herod, who’d already shown that he was threatened by this “new king” who could be a challenge to his power, showed his hand. For the first time, we see Jesus encounter REAL opposition. This led to the family of the son of God, supernaturally guided through the visit of an angel, fleeing the persecution of a tyrant, in the same way as the Kurds, the Serbs or other refugees we see on the TV news. 

In the book of Acts (the action-packed story of the early church’s attempts to follow Jesus), the boffins who study this stuff tell us 80% of the church’s decisions about following Jesus were not God speaking to them directly, but good, old common-sense. Only 20% of their decisions came from God clearly directing them. Most of the time, they knew the general direction of what they needed to do and made common-sense decisions to make that stuff happen.

Joseph and Mary were just getting on with life, travelling to the city where they needed to register, making the best of it in a town with no accommodation, and looking after a new baby to the best of their ability. But when the going got tough, God stepped in to guide supernaturally. 

Spend a bit of time… thanking God for the times and places you recognise his guiding hand in this last year, both in the logical outworking of the stuff in which you are involved, and the times you’ve seen him guide supernaturally. 

Then consider the general direction that God is calling you in and the practical things you need to do to make that happen. Give the flow of your “common-sense” plans and ideas to him, and as you live it out now expect him to intervene supernaturally where he wishes!

Matthew 2 v 16
When Herod saw that the wise men had tricked him, he was furious. So he gave an order to kill all the baby boys in Bethlehem and in the surrounding area who were two years old or younger. This was in keeping with the time he learned from the wise men. 

Notes
There are loads of deep realities in this little snippet. There will always be opposition and evil in our world, and it’s real. My knee-jerk tendency is to ask “Why?” – why does God allow hassles and suffering? I get all self-focused and sorry for myself, forgetting what reality is. The reality is that we’re in a war which we haven’t yet won, that life won’t be perfect, that there will be hard stuff, AND that God promises to be with us and guide us in the battles each of us are in.

The king of England addressed his nation on the radio at the turn of the year during some of the darkest times of the world wars in the last century. During his broadcast he said: 

“I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ 

“And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’”

As we focus on the next year, it’s not just about new resolutions but knowing that really “living the life” will bring suffering. As Jesus said: “In this world you will have trouble, but be brave! I have defeated the world.” (John 16 v 33)

Spend a bit of time… remembering your hardest times and lift them to God, thanking him for when you know he guided you and brought you through the tough stuff. Look forward to the next year and pray the prayer of the former king of England. Identify the opportunities and threats through the next year and give them to him.

Matthew 2 v 17-19
So what God had said through the prophet Jeremiah came true:
“A voice was heard in Ramah of painful crying and deep sadness: Rachel crying for her children.
She refused to be comforted, because her children are dead.” 
After Herod died, an angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph in a dream while he was in Egypt.

Notes 
Matthew seems to have majored on two themes through this story: supernatural guidance in opposition (which we’ve already seen and see here again in Joseph’s dream), and the fulfilment in the story of Jesus’ birth of all the Old Testament prophecies of a “Messiah”.

Prophecy is someone “speaking out” under the inspiration of God and may point to something he’s going to do in the future. When faithful Jews pray, they use a mat, at the end of which are well over 400 tassels. Each one of those tassels represents a prophecy in their Bible (the Old Testament) that speaks of a coming saviour who will rescue and restore. As Christians, we believe that all of these have been fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This passage mentions the one in Jeremiah, but there are loads of others (in fact over 400!), many of which we hear at Christmas time, some even in the passages we’ve looked at this week. 

So God speaks to us: through others, through his word, as we pray and talk to him, sometimes miraculously (like Joseph in his dream) and through our situations. And he will do what he’s said he’ll do.

Spend a bit of time… considering how God is speaking to you at the moment. Take some time to be still and quiet, and see if you sense the “still small voice of God” impressing something on you. 

Then consider the things you feel God has promised you. They may be things people have said to you, or bits of the Bible that have jumped out at you that God was speaking straight to you, which you may have written down somewhere. Lift those things back to God in prayer and rest in his presence.

Matthew 2 v 19-23
After Herod died, an angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph in a dream while he was in Egypt. The angel said, “Get up! Take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, because the people who were trying to kill the child are now dead.”
So Joseph took the child and his mother and went to Israel. But he heard that Archelaus was now king in Judea since his father Herod had died. So Joseph was afraid to go there. After being warned in a dream, he went to the area of Galilee, to a town called Nazareth, and lived there. And so what God had said through the prophets came true: “He will be called a Nazarene.”

Notes
Once again supernaturally guided, Joseph was told that the threat was over, Herod was dead and they could now leave Egypt for Israel. However, Joseph didn’t believe the threat was entirely over as Archelaus was now in power. So Joseph took his family to Nazareth where he thought they would be safer.

On first glance, Nazareth would not have been a fitting place for a Jewish Messiah to have been born, or live, as it was an insignificant village and part of its population was Gentile. Even Nathanael, one of Jesus’ followers in the early days, said, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1 v 46). As it happened, Jesus coming from Nazareth fitted perfectly with the way the Old Testament prophets had said he would be treated, not as a king but with scorn as a Nazarene.

How often do you treat people badly because of where they come from, their country, their parentage or their colour? Maybe you are treated that way by others. If so, Jesus understands - he too received the same sort of prejudice.

Spend a bit of time… thinking about how you treat others. Jesus calls us to love one another, no matter which country others come from or background they have. If you have been treated badly by others, try to forgive them just as Jesus forgave those who mistreated him. Jesus calls us to love our enemies. 


word-on-the-web uses the Scripture text taken from the Youth Bible, New Century Version (Anglicised Edition) copyright 1993 by Word Publishing Milton Keynes