Escape and Slaughter: Matthew 2:13-23

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him."

Another dream. Another urgent command. The Magi had barely disappeared over the horizon when Joseph received his warning: Run. Now. Tonight.

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt.

During the night. No time for goodbyes, no time to sell the house or pack properly. Joseph gathered his family in darkness and fled—south toward the border, toward the ancient land where Israel had once been slaves, now become refuge.

Where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."

Hosea's words, originally about Israel's exodus, now applied to Jesus. The nation and its Messiah shared the same story: down to Egypt, up from Egypt, called out by God.

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious.

Outwitted. The proud king, manipulated by foreigners. The careful plan, collapsed. The rage that followed was predictable—and horrifying.

And he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

All the boys. Every male child under two. Bethlehem was small—perhaps twenty children, perhaps fewer. But each one was someone's son, someone's hope, someone's future.

Soldiers moving house to house. Mothers screaming. Fathers fighting uselessly against armed men. Small bodies going limp.

Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."

Rachel—the matriarch buried near Bethlehem—weeping again. Her descendants slaughtered by a madman's paranoia. The grief was ancient and present, the mothers of Bethlehem joining their tears to centuries of sorrow.

The Messiah escaped. The innocents did not. The shadow of the cross fell early on this story.

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead."

The tyrant was dead. His rotting body, eaten by disease, testified to the limits of human power. The child he hunted would outlive him by eternity.

So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel.

The return journey. Egypt to Israel, retracing in reverse the path of the exodus. The child who had fled as a refugee now came home.

But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there.

Archelaus—Herod's son, equally brutal. Judea remained dangerous. Jerusalem and Bethlehem were too close to the new tyrant.

Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Nazareth. A nothing town in a backwater region. "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" Nathanael would later ask. The answer was yes—the best thing that ever came from anywhere.

Jesus the Nazarene. The title would follow him to the cross, nailed above his head in three languages. But it started here, in a small house in a small town, where a carpenter settled his family after years of running.

The child who escaped Herod's massacre grew up in Galilee, waiting for the day when his own blood would be spilled—not by accident but by design, not as victim but as sacrifice.

The weeping of Bethlehem's mothers would one day be answered by another mother's weeping at the foot of a cross. And that death would redeem all the others.