If you'll turn now to our Old Testament reading, the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 31. We'll be reading verses 1 through 17. So we'll see when we get to Matthew's gospel for our New Testament reading and sermon text. This is one of several Old Testament passages that Matthew cites in his gospel to explain the significance of these events surrounding the birth of our Savior, Jeremiah 31. Verses 1 through 17, if you're using a Pew Bible, you can find that reading on page 835. Page 835 of the Pew Bible. First, let's pray. Our good and our gracious God, we do thank you that you have sent the one who is the word. of the Father from all eternity, by whom you created the very stars of heaven and through whom you continue to uphold all things that are visible and invisible, that you've sent him, your word, and he has become flesh and dwelt among us. We do thank you that we encounter his power through the word of your scriptures. And here we meet Jesus. in all the redemptive grace that he comes to bring. And so do come, O Holy Spirit, and give us eyes to see and ears to hear the one who is the Word made flesh. We ask these things in his name. Amen. Jeremiah 31, beginning in verse 1. At that time declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people. Thus says the Lord. The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness. When Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again, I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel. Again, you shall adorn yourself with tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers. Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria, and planters shall plant and shall enjoy the fruit. For there shall be a day when watchmen will call in the hill country of Ephraim. Arise and let us go up to Zion to the Lord our God. For thus says the Lord, sing aloud with gladness for Jacob and raise shouts for the chief of the nations. Proclaim, give praise and say, O Lord, save your people. the remnant of Israel. Behold, I will bring them from the north country and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth. Among them, the blind and the lame, the pregnant woman and she who is in labor together, a great company, they shall return here. With weeping, they shall come and with pleas for mercy, I will lead them back. I will make them walk by the brooks of water in a straight path in which they shall not stumble. For I'm a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn. Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away. Say, he who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock. For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and he has redeemed him from hands too strong for him. They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, And they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd. Their life shall be like a watered garden, and they shall languish no more. And shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy. I will comfort them and give them gladness for sorrow. I will feast the soul of the priest with abundance, and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness, declares the Lord. Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more. Thus says the Lord, keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears. For there is a reward for your work, declares the Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy. There is hope for your future, declares the Lord, and your children shall come back to their own country. If you turn now to the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 2. We'll be reading verses 13 through 23 for our New Testament passage and sermon passage as well this morning. That's found on page 1,026. If you're using a pew Bible, page 1,026, Matthew 2, beginning in verse 13. Now 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. And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and 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. Then 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 the region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. And it was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah. A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping in loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, She refused to be comforted because they are no more. But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt saying, rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel. For those who sought the child's life are dead. And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But 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. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth. So what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene. Man shall not live by bread alone. If there's any time of year that comes overburdened with hype, it is certainly the Christmas season. that life routinely does not measure up to the romanticized expectations that we set for this time of year. And so, our romanticized expectations often have the power to rob us of the joy that is actually to be found in the midst of all of the nitty-gritty details of real life. Real joy comes sandwiched in between all of the moments of pain and disappointment that we would never dream of putting on our Christmas postcards and mailing to all of our friends and family. The joy of the arrival of the Christ child has come to us in exactly this kind of way. It's a joy that maybe we want to idealize in our imaginations, in our nativity sets, But in truth, it is a joy that is sandwiched in between the pain and the sorrow and the tragedy of the real world. Among the many biblical scenes of Christ's birth, which we love to depict in song and in art and decorations, I would bet that none of you have any sort of Christmas decoration depicting the story of Herod's murderous rage, Jesus and his family's flight for their lives to Egypt, We would just as soon edit this one out of the Christmas lineup. Yet it is a visceral reminder that though Christmas is a celebration of true joy, it is a joy that comes in the fact that God the Son took to himself our humanity with a full dose of its anguish and turmoil. Then he died our death. His joy is a joy that comes to meet the realities of our pain and our sorrow head on. It is a joy that is built to endure, to last, the realities of this life, of this world. For many of you, the holiday season will not go like you want it to go. It will not be what you idealize in your head. Something will go wrong. Some family drama will erupt. Some stress will come pouring into your world. Some tragedy will befall, and your romanticized expectations will come butting up against that nitty-gritty reality of life. For some of you, that's already happened. Some of you have already spent the season dealing with some sort of painful trial that you did not anticipate when you thought what life was going to be like Christmas of 2024. However, the beauty of the true joy of the advent of the Christ child is wrapped up in the fact that his own arrival in the world came in this exact kind of way. Doesn't it come in the fuzziness of some sort of romanticized dream, but in the upheaval and pain of the real world that you and I must live in on a daily basis? He comes to be made like us, in every respect, except our sin. comes this one who tastes our sorrows. He dies our death. And this brutal story, the opening of Christ's life here, is a stark reminder of that truth. And yet it also reminds us that through Christ's experience of this kind of pain, we have this hope that the grim tragedy of the fallenness of this world and all the ways that it plays itself out in our life, that those things are not the last word. And so the truth I want you to see from scripture is this. Entrust yourself to the suffering Messiah who comes to redeem you from exile. Entrust yourself to the suffering Messiah who comes to redeem you from exile. Three points we'll consider from Matthew's gospel this morning. First, another exile. Second, another exodus. And third, another expectation. Don't you love that alliteration, right? Occasionally it comes to you. Another exile, another exodus, another expectation. So let's start with our first point, another exile. Now, one of the things that I love about the song that we'll sing at the conclusion of the sermon, the song, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, is that it is one of only a couple hymns that I know of which mentions explicitly the exile of Israel. It elegantly portrays how what we celebrate at Christmas fits into the longings of God's people as they were framed in Jesus' own day. Maybe you stopped at some point and thought about that song. You've heard the words that run, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here, and thought to yourself, now what is that talking about? What does that have to do with Christmas? Well, it's not hard to figure out from reading Matthew's Gospel and reading the other Gospels that the nation of Israel during Jesus' day was filled with this longing and expectation for the arrival of the Messiah. That's the question that surrounds Jesus' ministry in the Gospels. Are you the Christ? But what we may forget, or maybe unaware of, is the fact that Israel's hope for this long-awaited Messiah, it's intimately wrapped up in what she experienced in her exile and the longings to be reclaimed from it. If you open up your Bible for the very first time and you start reading in the New Testament, you jump straight there, it's kind of like reading the last novel in a series of novels first. You're entering in the middle of this narrative arc that's been unfolding for quite some time, and you're likely to miss the significance of a lot of details that you read across because you don't know the backstory. Well, a key piece of the backstory to the arrival of the Messiah for Israel was what happened to her in her exile. You know, the basic narrative arc of the Old Testament, after being delivered from Egypt and led through the wilderness by Moses, Israel enters into possession of the Promised Land. And most of the history of the Old Testament that we read from the Torah forward focuses on Israel's life in that land. That is, up until the very end of 2 Kings. And then, God finally has enough of His people's disobedience, and He does what He warned them He would do in the Torah. He takes the Promised Land away from them. Or rather, He takes them away from it. The Babylonians and the Assyrians are sent by the Lord to cart Israel off into foreign lands, and they smash the temple and topple the throne of the house of David. And the prophets of the Old Testament repeatedly warned that this would happen. But they also spoke of the days when God, on the other end of that judgment, would come again in His mercy, that He would restore Israel out of her exile. And that promise has a partial fulfillment in the Old Testament, certainly. Partial fulfillment in what happens in the decree of Cyrus, what happens in the days of Zerubbabel and Nehemiah and Ezra. Yet the full restoration of the kingdom after the exile was something that had still not yet happened as the New Testament opens. And so that's the hope that attaches itself to the advent of the Messiah. Israel expected that the Son of David would come to restore the kingdom, restore Israel out of her exile to topple her foreign overlords and to command the obedience of the nations. That's why Matthew's genealogy is so important. It sets the stage for us as it virtually rehearses the entire history of Israel in the Old Testament in the space of its 17 verses. And in the middle of all of those, it reminds us that during the reign of Jeconiah, Israel was deported to Babylon. So if Christmas is about the arrival of the Christ, then the exile of Israel has everything to do with Christmas. It should be in more of our Christmas hymns. Those of you who are poetic writers, go take that task up. And the exile is the key backdrop for the story of Jesus' escape from Herod's attempt to murder him. Because in these geographical movements, here in Matthew chapter 2, what happens is that our Savior relives Israel's history, in a sense. We read in verse 12, the Magi are warned by God not to go do what Herod asked of them, but instead to leave without going back to him. Down in verse 16, we read how Herod figures this out, that he'd been deceived. The Greek word there usually is translated as mock. They've made a fool of Herod. They figured out what he was up to, and they left. And Herod figures out now that he has been stood up. They outwitted him. And thanks to a revelation from the Lord, they don't believe this subterfuge he's trying to sell, that he wants to come and worship the Christ as well. And so he flies into a murderous rage. Hence, in verse 13, the angel is sent to Joseph to warn Joseph to flee for their lives in the middle of the night. But the angel does not merely tell Joseph, go somewhere else, anywhere else, just get out of here. Joseph could not just as well have headed for Beijing. The angel's very specific. He tells him in verse 13, arise, take the young child and his mother, flee to Egypt. Stay there. The reason for that is important. Because what Matthew says in verse 15, this happens in order to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Hosea. Out of Egypt, I called my son." That's a quotation from Hosea chapter 11, verse 1. Now, if you were just to read through Matthew's gospel without knowledge of that Old Testament passage, you would see that, you might think, oh, that's neat, and you would keep reading on. However, one thing I would advise you to do in your regular, hopefully daily, Bible readings is to pay attention to the Old Testament quotations that appear in the New Testament. When you come across Old Testament quotations like this one, don't just keep reading. Sometimes take the time to go look them up. Read it in the Old Testament, and don't just read the single verse that's cited. Go read the whole chapter, the whole surrounding context, and I promise you that it will enrich your own meditations on God's Word. But if you were to do that with this passage here in Hosea 11, verse one, you might be a bit perplexed at Matthew's citation of it, because the full context of Hosea 11, one reads this. When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son." Reading that, you might think, what does that have to do with the coming of Christ? Hosea is talking about how God brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt, in the Exodus. What does that have to do with the arrival of the Christ? But if you read the whole of Hosea 11, you will find that the prophet's talking about how God is going to send Israel away into exile in Assyria. So this passage in Hosea 11 has massive associations with Israel's exile. Furthermore, the very location of Egypt itself has those same sort of associations. If you read through 2 Kings, and you get towards the end of it, in 2 Kings chapter 25, verses 25 through 26, after Israel is defeated and they're deported to Babylon, we discover there that the remainder of the people who were left behind decide to flee to Egypt, to try to escape from the Babylonians. And that's significant, as Ian Proven comments on that passage. He says, the epic saga that began with the exodus from the land has turned into a horror story of sin and judgment, and Israel now returns to whence it came. As Proven notes, what the exile is is the undoing of the exodus. It lands much of Israel right back in Egypt. And when Herod orders this terrible act in verse 16 of the slaughter of every male child in Bethlehem, two years old and under, Matthew explains that this too fulfills something from the Old Testament. He quotes it in verses 17 through 18. A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping in loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted because they are no more. That's an Old Testament passage from what we read for Old Testament reading in Jeremiah 31, verse 15. And if you go back and read the context of that passage, as we did this morning, you will find out that Jeremiah is talking about the exile. Rama, the location mentioned there, We read later in Jeremiah 40, verse 1, that is the place where the exiles of Judah were gathered together to begin their forced march into Babylon. Rachel, of course, she's one of the wives of the patriarch Jacob. And so here in chapter 31 of Jeremiah, she's personified as every mother in Israel. And the reason they're weeping for their children is because their children have been slaughtered in the conquest of the land. And now those mothers are about to be marched to live away from home and country in exile. So you see, in mapping out the fact that Jesus has to flee into Egypt and out of the promised land, Matthew is showing us how Jesus comes as this Messiah who identifies with his people completely. Identifies with their pain, identifies with their sin, identifies with the fact that they're in exile, and he relives that exile in his own experience. And yet through Christ's exile, God is redeeming and undoing his people's exile. It is in his identification with your sufferings that Jesus brings to you your redemption. That brings us to our second point, another exodus, another exodus. Hosea 11 is not only about Israel's exile. Like many of the New Testament authors, Matthew quotes this passage from Hosea. He doesn't just think of that one verse, but he really does have in mind the whole context of the passage that's being referenced. Because when you look at Hosea 11, that chapter ends with a promise of Israel being restored from exile. Hosea writes, they shall go after the Lord. He will roar like a lion. When he roars, his children shall come trembling from the west. They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt and like doves from the land of Assyria, and I will return them to their homes, declares the Lord. You see, Hosea 11, this is not only about Israel's exile, it's also about Israel's return, the promise of her restoration. And Hosea portrays that promise of restoration Like he does in many places in his book, and like many other of the prophets do, he compares that bringing back into the land to the original exodus that established Israel as a nation to begin with. Hosea's picking up this theme that's threaded throughout all the prophets of the Old Testament, this promise that on the other end of the exile, God would perform a second exodus. another exodus. God would once more make a highway in the wilderness to lead his people back out of their captivity. And so that promised return, it's evoked then in the dreadful words that Matthew quotes to explain the tragedy of what happens in the slaughter of these innocents. Matthew quotes Jeremiah chapter 31 verse 15 there and verse 18 as a way of showing how Israel's experience of the exile is being reenacted in a certain way through the brutality of what Herod does. But in quoting this dark passage to a listener who would be familiar with the Old Testament, Matthew's pointing beyond the tragedy of the slaughter of the children to the hope that's presented by the prophet Jeremiah. If you read the whole of Jeremiah chapter 31, what you're probably most familiar with is the fact that it ends with the promise of the new covenant. The remainder of Jeremiah 31 is about God coming to comfort Israel in her grief, returning them from the exile. As the prophet says in verse 17, There is hope for your future, declares the Lord. Your children shall come back to their own country. And then, of course, he comes and makes this promise of establishing a new covenant, a new covenant that would not be like the covenant they broke when he took them out of Egypt, but a covenant where he would write his own law in their hearts. He would be their God, and they would be his people. He would forgive their iniquity, and he would remember their sin no more. And so even oddly, in the details of the massacre of these children by Herod, we have something pointing us to hope. The hope that God, through all this tragedy, is still working in his mysterious purposes to bring about this second exodus. And the story of Herod's slaughter of the children, it should seem familiar to those of you who are acquainted with the Old Testament. If you're reading Matthew's story and you're thinking to yourself, you know, I feel that somehow Charlton Heston should be lurking around here saying, let my people go, you're onto something. There's another important story in the Bible when a wicked king orders the male babies of Israel to be killed. Pharaoh. Pharaoh does it in Exodus 1. Just like here in Matthew's story, God intervenes to protect one particular child, the child through whom he will enact his redemption. That child in Exodus was Moses. And you see, what Matthew's doing in this story about Jesus' childhood is the first instance of something Matthew will do repeatedly in his gospel. He's showing us how Jesus is a second and a greater Moses. This whole story which sends Jesus to Egypt and back again is a story that points to what God sent his son into the world to accomplish. Christmas is about Passover. Get out your matzah. Christmas is about Passover. It's about God coming to his people once more to deliver them out of the house of bondage, to deliver them from their captivity, to lead them through the wilderness and into his promised land. And this time, he is doing it not through one who is a servant of the house, but through the one who is the son of the house. Moses leads Israel into a land that only foreshadowed something bigger, only foreshadowed this new creation into which Christ would lead his people. And Christ comes not only as the one who will lead his people in the final exodus, but also he comes as the Passover lamb whose blood accomplishes this exodus. You see, Jesus' full experience of reliving the exile of his people doesn't conclude when Mary and Joseph bring him back in verse 20. This episode only points forward to the much greater exile Jesus would endure. The cross is, for Christ, an experience of everything Israel's exile signified, but an even graver and more climactic way. Because the cross is the experience of curse. That's what Israel's exile was. It was her experiencing the curse of the law. She met with the consequences of having broken covenant with the Lord. Driven then from his loving presence, and having his judgment poured out upon her. And that's exactly what happens to our Savior in his crucifixion. The covenant curse of the law is poured out upon Jesus, the God-man, in full. The reality that's being adumbrated in Jesus' repetition of Israel's exile here at the beginning of Matthew's gospel is pointing us forward to the end of Matthew's gospel that the Christ child comes to endure the malediction of God and his own exile at the cross. Let's understand this, what I've stated repeatedly throughout Matthew's gospel here in the opening chapters, that Christmas is, for Jesus, the beginning of a death sentence. He is born a child in order that he might grow up and become a man who is executed for crimes that he did not commit. so that you and I, as the perpetrators of those crimes, might be set free, might hear God's voice of pardon instead of curse. And Jesus relives in himself, in the experience of Israel's exile, he relives your experience of exile as you too, along with all humanity, have this birthright that comes from your first parents. of having been driven from the loving presence of God into the wilderness. Christ comes to be left and forsaken by God so that you can hold in your hands the promise that God will never leave you or forsake you. And so he escapes Herod's infanticide here, but he only does that so that one day he might again face wicked authorities who want to murder him, but this time succeed in doing so. The inevitability of the cross casts its shadow over Christ even from his very first steps as a toddler. The son of man must suffer many things and be killed. Jesus' death by the hands of lawless men, it unfolds by this necessity of the purposes for which His Father has sent Him into the world. And the judgment and the agony of the exile of His cross is foreshadowed here in His reliving of Israel's exile and His flight from Herod. But it's only through that, only through the exile of Christ, only through Jesus' full experience of the curses of the covenant that the exodus, the greatest exodus, could come to you and to me. It's only through the slaughter of this Passover lamb that you might experience what it means to be delivered from the house of bondage and into God's liberty. But the second exodus doesn't come in exactly the way Israel thought it would. That brings us to our third point, another expectation, another expectation. Israel, during Jesus' day, they thought much about this moment. They thought much about what would happen when God finally fulfilled the things he promised to do from the prophets, when he would send the Messiah, he would set up the throne of David, and once more he would restore the glories of the kingdom out of its rubble. The problem was that the idea they had constructed in their imagination did not match what God intended to do. They anticipated that the Messiah would enter into history all in glory. They expected him to come, beat up the dirty Gentiles, overthrow Rome, give the self-righteous Pharisees a pat on the back. and immediately restore the kingdom of Israel to its former magnificence. What did not compute in their brains was the notion that what Isaiah said in chapter 53 about the suffering servant was actually about the Messiah. Israel did not expect that the Christ would be the Messiah. the suffering servant. He did not expect that he would come as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, come as one who would be pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. Jesus is constantly running up against that false expectation in the course of his ministry. He even does it with his disciples. Matthew 16, Jesus finally acknowledges who he is before them. Peter steps forward and he confesses, you are the Christ. But then Jesus immediately sets out to define for his disciples exactly what that means for him to be the Christ. It means that he must go to Jerusalem, that he must suffer many things from the elders and the chief priests and scribes and be killed, and on the third day to rise again. But then Peter doesn't like that. He says, in effect, whoa, whoa, whoa, Jesus, time out. What are you talking about? That's not going to happen. You're the Messiah. And then Christ pronounces some very strong words for Peter in the middle of his disciples' expectations of triumph and glory and strength and power. The true glory of the Messiah is a glory that comes wrapped in the rags of humiliation and suffering and degradation and pain and death. And that relates to this other thing here at the end of this chapter. Matthew says, fulfills something from the prophets. When Joseph brings his family back after Herod is dead. We read in verse 22, he could not go back to the region of Judea because Herod's son, Archelaus, psychopath junior, is now on the throne reigning. And so instead, he goes to Galilee, specifically in verse 23 to a town called Nazareth. And Matthew tells us in verse 23 that this fulfills something in the prophets. However, there is much misunderstanding about what Matthew is saying there. Some English Bible translations even put the end of verse 23, that phrase, he shall be called a Nazarene, in quotation marks. That's a troublesome translation effect because there is no such passage anywhere in the Old Testament. Now, before you jettison your belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, hold on and listen. First of all, note that there are no quotations in the Greek New Testament, excuse me, no quotation marks in the Greek New Testament. And I don't just simply mean that there are no quotation marks in this passage in the Greek New Testament. I mean that there are no quotation marks anywhere in the Greek New Testament. Because quotation marks are a literary device that did not exist in ancient Greek. That makes it a bit tricky, then, to figure out when New Testament authors are quoting something. And so usually, when New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they use some phrase to introduce it to indicate that that's what they're doing. Matthew is most assuredly quoting Old Testament prophecies in three places here in chapter 22. Back in verse 5, in verse 15, and then in verse 18, those are all most certainly direct quotations from the Old Testament. And in each of those places, he uses a Greek phrase to indicate that. Verse 5, he has the scribe saying, it is written. But in verse 15 and verse 18, he introduces those Old Testament passages with the Greek verb, which means saying. Unfortunately, the ESV is chosen not to translate that, but in both verses, Matthew writes, this fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet, saying, and then he introduces the quotation. However, he does not do that in verse 23. There's no introductory formula for a quotation in verse 23, and that indicates that this is not a quotation. It's a general reference to something. Another little detail that's important to that effect in verse 23 is this. Notice that Matthew refers to the prophets, plural, and not to the prophet, singular. He does not have in mind some very specific passage in one of the particular Old Testament prophets like he does in verse 15 and verse 17. What Matthew is saying instead is that Jesus' residence in Nazareth fulfills something that the prophets in general indicated would be true of the Messiah. And many commentators have rightly pointed out, though this is perhaps a bit puzzling to figure out, that likely what's happening here is the fact that this is indicating that Jesus comes as a humiliated Messiah. You see, Matthew includes this here to help us understand how even though the Messiah is born in Bethlehem, he becomes known as Jesus of Nazareth, not Jesus of Bethlehem. As we saw back up in verse 5, people were pretty well aware of the prophecies of the Old Testament that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, the city of David, David's hometown. That's why we sing of it in hymns as David's royal city. But Nazareth? It did not carry those kinds of royal associations. We get the sense of what Jews thought of this town in what John records in John's Gospel, John 1, 46. When Jesus first calls his disciple Philip to himself, Philip runs to tell his brother Nathanael that he has found the Messiah and that his name is Jesus of Nazareth. What is Nathanael's response? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Nazareth was a backwoods town. I grew up in New Mexico, and there are plenty of places in the middle of that desert of a state that are nothing more than a gas station and an intersection with tumbleweeds blowing through them. And never, when I drive through those towns, do I think to myself, you know what? I bet the next president of the United States is growing up here. That was Nazareth in the minds of the Jews during Jesus' day. Whatever they expected of the Messiah, they did not expect he would come from there. Leon Morris puts it this way. He says, had he been known of Jesus of Bethlehem, he would have had the aura of one who came from the royal city. There would have been overtones of messianic majesty, but Jesus of Nazareth carried with it overtones of contempt. We are to understand the prophets as pointing to one who would be despised and rejected. And Jesus is fulfilling this by his connection with obscure Nazareth. Morris's comments put us on the right track here. Even in this little cozy detail of Matthew chapter two, he's showing us how Jesus upsets Israel's expectations. And Jesus comes upsetting our expectations as well. Too many Christians have in their head a romanticized idea of what it really means to follow Christ. We foist onto Jesus all of these false expectations, just like Israel did, we try to tame him, we try to turn him into a kind of divine vending machine who will give us all the things that we want, or maybe a divine therapist who will make us feel better about ourselves, or maybe a divine conqueror who will allow us to retake the world. And that temptation to idealize Christ with these false expectations is especially dangerous around Christmas time. Because the songs that we hear on the radio station, the Christmas radio station, they often glaze over all the details of Christ's birth that's connected with his humiliation. Being in a live delivery room has ruined silent night for me. Alistair Begg says this about our little nativity scenes. He says, who can relate to this unrealistic depiction? Mary always looks remarkably unexhausted for someone who's just given birth. And then the animals look surprisingly unbothered at being kept from their feeding trough. Begg's comments are on point. We want to idealize Jesus' birth in our heads, because much of Jesus' contemporaries in Israel, in our flesh, We would much rather not follow a Savior who from his earliest moments of his childhood had to flee the tragedy of a genocide in what was an opening installment of a whole lifetime of humiliation that would conclude in his own brutal murder at the cross. We flinch from that on some level because that same Savior calls to us along the way saying, and take up your cross and follow me. But if we do that, if we foist upon Jesus these false expectations that are really more about our idols than they are about him, we will miss the reality of the true consolation that he comes to bring. comfort of the advent of our Lord is not a comfort that seeks merely to distract us with some momentary merriment. It's not a comfort that hands us a glass of eggnog and says, here, this will take your mind off things for a while. No, the comfort of the advent of Christ is the comfort of the God who takes our deepest sorrows upon himself, buries them in his own grave, and then hands us the hope of his kingdom. It is the comfort of a Savior who comes to take flesh and to join Rachel in her weeping. Many of you are going to leave here and you're going to go about your holiday season, all of your activities over the next several days, and they're not going to be what you imagine them to be. Drama, dysfunction, stress, and pain will find ways to upset your expectations, and perhaps they've already done that. And what's more, you're gonna wake up the day after Christmas, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and still have to live in the real world, a world that is filled with tragedy and grief, filled with unspeakable tragedies, like the one that Herod commits here in Matthew 2. Yet if you're in Christ, and you will also wake up to a world in which God has interjected His joy, A joy that is to be found in the midst of all of that trial and pain. A joy that is found as you carry around the death of Jesus in your mortal body so that the life of Jesus might be manifest in your mortal body. And so go and make merry, but let your merriment spring up from something that is far more durable than fuzzy nostalgia. Let the joy of the Lord be your strength, the joy of knowing what it means to belong to a Savior who was born as one of us, suffered as one of us, died as one of us, so that through all of that, you might have this kind of joy that can endure being drugged to Egypt and back again. And trust yourself to the suffering servant who comes to redeem you. from your exile. Let's pray. Our good and our gracious God, we do bless your name. In your mercy, you've sent your son that he might endure everything of the afflictions that we know, and that through that he might emerge victorious holding in his hands the keys of death and Hades, exalted to your right hand to draw us up to heaven where he sits. And so do give us your comfort this season, we pray. For whatever might hound our lives, we would know the joy of Jesus and what he has come to give. We ask these things in his name, amen.