The Second Sunday After Christmas (January 3, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.

This morning’s Gospel reading picks up after St. Joseph took the Holy Family to Israel to escape Herod’s inhumane genocide of young males in his effort to prevent a rival king from springing up and threatening his power. We remember Herod’s victims each year on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a day which invites us to make parallels between the Egyptian slaughtering of Hebrew children before the birth of Moses in Exodus and our own culture’s sacrifice of the unborn on the altar of convenience through the abortion industrial complex. When Herod died a violent death sometime between the years of 4 and 1 BC depending on which scholars you listen to, an angel of the Lord came to St. Joseph to inform him that it was safe to return to Israel, a message which is almost identical to the message given to Moses in Exodus 4:19. But St. Joseph, being a noble protector of his family, did not return to Christ’s birthplace of Bethlehem because it was too close to Jerusalem where Herod’s son Archelaus reigned. Instead, he opted to settle the family in Nazareth, a small backwater town that’s about 64 miles from the capital city.

In the closing of the our reading this morning, we see a bit of a mystery: “And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.” Matthew is preoccupied with utilizing Old Testament quotes to correlate various facets of Jesus’ story with prophecies he fulfilled. The flight to Egypt in Matthew 2:15 is thought of by Matthew as a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” But the reference here in our reading this morning about Christ being called a Nazarene is unique from the other instances of Matthew’s fulfillment statements for two reasons. First, he references the prophets in the plural instead of in the singular like he does in other places. And second, there is no Old Testament verse that talks about Jesus being from Nazareth.

This has caused some speculation from scholars. Some has posited some kind of wordplay where the word Nazarene is supposed to be an allusion to the Hebrew word nazir that means “branch,” making this a reference to Isaiah 11:1 and the branch of Jesse. The problem with this hypothesis is that while it does explain the term “Nazarene,” it doesn’t explain the “he will be called” part of the reference. Further, this nifty wordplay is only apparent in Hebrew and would have been lost on Matthew’s Greek-reading audience. Other scholars say this means Christ took a Nazarite vow like Samson. According to Numbers 6, this entails abstaining from anything related to grapes and/or alcohol, refraining from cutting one’s hair, and avoiding dead people (even family members). The problem, besides Samson’s many moral flaws that make him a less than idea comparison, is that we are told Jesus ate and drank with sinners in Matthew 11 and he didn’t avoid dead bodies, meaning he would have violated his vows. So neither explanation put forward really makes sense.

To really understand what is going on here, we shouldn’t look for a specific verse or passage so much as general themes embedded in the Old Testament’s prophetic tradition. We also need to be aware that the town of Nazareth doesn’t exist in Old Testament days, making it a scriptural nonentity. This explains the antipathy demonstrated toward Nazareth by Nathanael in John 1:46, when he cynically asks, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” While the Old Testament prophets emphasize the Messiah as a royal figure, there is another theme that the Messiah would not be recognized even by his own people.

Isaiah 53:2-3: “For he [the suffering servant] grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form of majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.”

John 7:27, the crowds say of Jesus: “Yet we know where this man is from; but when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.”

So to say the Jesus was a Nazarene is to acknowledge that he is from nowhere, that he is unexpected.

It’s easy to think that, during his earthly ministry, Jesus was recognizably special. Maybe we read the Gospels with the implicit assumption that, had we been there, we’d have recognized Jesus as the Christ. But the problem is that Jesus was inconspicuous and, in this regard, as Christians, we affirm a paradox in relation to our Lord: namely that he is the Incarnate Savior of the world, very God of very God but also that he is a particular person who was born in space and time.

In this way, we are shown how God upsets human expectations. Throughout the Old Testament, God operates this way: he called Moses who was slow of speech; he called Gideon who was the weakest member of the weakest clan of Israel; he called David who was the youngest of his brothers; he called Isaiah who was a man of unclean lips; and he called Jeremiah who was too young. He appeared to Elijah not in the violent wind, the powerful earthquake, or in the flame but in the still, small voice. God has always revealed himself in the small, in the little, in human weaknesses. So it is not surprising that the Incarnation and Passion of our Lord wouldn’t shun what is lowly but embrace them. In this way, St. Paul’s preaching in 1 Corinthians 1:25 is vindicated, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

In this way, God has done what we acknowledged in our collect: he has poured upon us the new light of the Incarnate Word; he has opened for us a new way of seeing the world we inhabit where we recognize the divine in the small, in the weak, in the seemingly forgotten. And so we prayed for that light enkindled in our hearts to shine forth in our lives so that we embody that new way of being:

a way of love

a way of self sacrifice for the other

a way of non-competition.

This we do in response to a God who comes to us in the form of a servant, even the form of a Nazarene.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.