Tuesday
Tuesday
The Flight into Egypt
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.”
Matthew 2:13
The Magi had left Jerusalem to begin their journey home, and Herod had been foiled in his plot to destroy the baby Jesus. So now Joseph was instructed to take Jesus and his mother and flee south into Egypt. There is something very poignant about the Son of God becoming a refugee baby and so identifying himself with the dispossessed people of the world.
But Matthew detects something else. He sees the flight into Egypt as a fulfillment of Scripture. “So was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet:
‘Out of Egypt I called my son’” (v. 15). It is not that these words from Hosea 11:1 were a literal prediction of the holy family’s flight into Egypt, for their original reference was to the exodus. It is rather that Matthew sees in the story of Jesus a recapitulation of the story of Israel. This is apparent in at least four ways.
As Israel was oppressed in Egypt under the despotic rule of Pharaoh, so the infant Jesus became a refugee in Egypt under the despotic rule of Herod. As Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea, so Jesus passed through the waters of John’s baptism in the River Jordan. As Israel was tested in the wilderness of Zin for forty years, so Jesus was tested in the wilderness of Judea for forty days. And as Moses from Mount Sinai gave Israel the law, so Jesus from the Mount of Beatitudes gave his disciples the true interpretation and amplification of the law.
We can only marvel at the providence of God in this repetition of the pattern of sacred history.
For further reading: Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:13–18