Flight Out
Matthew 2:13-23

December 26, 2004

It is often said that what happens incidentally along the way on a journey or pilgrimage is more important than what happens when you arrive at your destination. Breakdowns, chance meetings with odd and different kinds of people, places you saw that you were not intending to see - such is the stuff of a full life.

The Gospels have a kind of veil covering over the life of Jesus and his family. The veil is lifted briefly, but spectacularly, on the way to and around the manger, but then redrawn pretty much until maybe 30 years later. Oh, a few glimpses, a flitting back and forth the veil: perhaps most memorably at the Jerusalem Temple at the age of 12, the newly bar mitzvahed young man talking energetically and insightfully with the rabbinic college assembled there. The sole version in Luke sounds just like one of those family stories told with great pride at the achievement of their young son, an adult in his intellect, albeit an adolescent in his forgetting about family obligations.

Once every three years, the brief tale of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt is recounted. Matthew is the only one to mention the escape and it does create an entirely different scenario. The details are typically scant, but they tell us some interesting things. Other people, however, were quick to pick up the slack and fill in the itinerary of Joseph, Mary, and the infant Joseph. There is no absolute way to vouch for the authentic historicity of the travels of the Holy Family in Egypt, but it can tell us a little about how we go about imagining the traveling of the Christ child in our minds and hearts.

The Coptic Church in Egypt has lovingly collected and remembered the places along the way for the Family, a marvelous set of traditions that they believe to be authentic and in fact, Biblically intentional. The principal Old Testament prophecy is Isaiah 19 that speaks of ”See, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud and comes to Egypt; the idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence, and the heart of the Egyptians will melt within them” (19:1). And then in verse 19, “On that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the centre of the land of Egypt; and a pillar to the Lord at its border.”

How long way down in Egypt land, where the ancestors of the Family laboured and slaved for 480 years? This time, the world has been turned upside down and the oppressor has become the protector. So Jesus, Mary, and Joseph spent 3 years 6 months in this land - a year and half traveling to the center of Egypt, six months in sanctuary there, then 18 months back to Palestine, and eventually all the way up to Nazareth, where once again the veil is drawn on Jesus’ life.

Nothing in the Biblical story hints at this timetable, nothing prevents it. This very story, however, provides the reference points for the usual dating of the birth of Christ in our modern Gregorian calendar.

Herod connivingly sent the Magi to seek out the child, but when they refused to report back to him he went ballistic and sent soldiers to massacre all the children in the vicinity of Bethlehem, “two years old and under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.” The “time” was the appearance of the star of Bethlehem, not exactly the birth of Jesus. Historians start calculating that Jesus could have been as old as two years when the massacre of the innocents began, though he certainly could have been a good deal younger.

Meanwhile, Joseph was warned and escaped in the middle of the night to Egypt where the Family stayed until he was informed by an angelic dream that Herod was dead. The one thing we know for sure from Roman records is that Herod died in the year we now call 4 B. C.

At the latest, Jesus was born in 4 B. C., and only in that year if Herod’s Massacre was the very last thing he did, and if Jesus had just been born when the Massacre began. Otherwise, Christmas Day is up to 6 B. C. or even earlier if Herod didn’t decide to die for a period of time after the Massacre. If you weren’t good at calculus in school, this may be a little challenging!

Don’t worry about it, Jesus was not born before he was supposed to be born. Some guy who set up the dates for the Gregorian calendar in the Middle Ages, correlating the Roman and Greek calendars in use then to the Christian calendar, goofed and left out a few years. Jesus was born not on our time, but on the right time.

It was Pope Theophilus of Alexandria (384-412) who received a vision from the Virgin Mary outlining the steps along her family’s pilgrimage through Egypt that became the standard version, confirming all the local traditions.

The Family began in Bethlehem and made their way through southern Palestine into the fierce Sinai wilderness, protected by the Spirit along the way. Eventually passing through El-Zaranik they made it into Lower or northern Egypt and stopped at Basta where Jesus caused a spring to gush up and all the idols crumbled into rubble as they passed.

Next they arrived at ‘Al Mahamma or “the Bathing Place,” just 10 kilometers from Cairo where Mary bathed Jesus and washed his clothes. On their way back home several years later another spring was made to well up, a spring still there today.

In the semi-wilderness, water sources were not only worth gold, but the possibility of sustainable life. To find a new source of water was not considered accidental; it assuredly had to be attributed to a miraculous divine agent. God is with us in the matters that count the most.

Meniet Samannoud received the Holy Family graciously and the village residents point to a large granite trough today where Mary kneaded her dough. Sakha or “Pekha Issous” (the foot of Jesus) preserved a bas relief of Jesus’ foot on a rock that was hidden for centuries and rediscovered about 20 years ago.

They traveled down the Western Desert into Wadi El-Natroun, eventually one of the most famous regions for monks and monasteries in the third-fifth centuries. Recrossing the Nile, they reached Matariyah or “Mary’s Tree,” under which the Family rested in its shade and, surprise, another spring burst forth from the ground to refresh them, and many afterwards.

A short sojourn throughout the precincts of Old Cairo or Misr El Kadina provoked the violent reaction of the governor who enraged by the destruction of the idols wherever the Family walked sought to kill Jesus. The Family took shelter in a cave, over which the Church of Abu Serga sits today.

On to Maada where they boarded a sailing boat headed up the Nile. There is a church on the spot of their embarkment, ‘Al Adaweya, the Church of the Ferry, and stone steps leading down to the Nile’s bank are publicly accessible through the church courtyard today.

They continued south to Gabal El Tair, a monastery of the Virgin Mary now, where a tree still standing is said to have bowed its unique appearing branches in worship to Jesus Christ as he was passing. The tree today is nicknamed ‘Al Abed - The Worshipper.

Crossing the Nile again they traveled through a series of towns where leaving behind idols in rubble enraged the citizenry and forced them to march on until they reached a hospitable town called Meir.

Finally they landed at Gabal Qussqam (Monastery of Al Muharraq) - the exact centre of Egypt as was then thought to fulfill Isaiah 19:19 (“there will be an altar to the Lord in the centre of the land of Egypt”). They stayed there for six months, with Jesus sleeping on a slab of rock that became the altar in the monastery church. It was here that Joseph received an angelic dream to return home because Herod had died and the coast was clear. Essentially, the Family then retraced their route back home.

So in the middle of one’s world the meaning of the world lives in sanctuary. Is that indeed why this church is downtown on purpose? There in that centre of the universe the Bible itself happens among them. They never forget what happens because maybe it will happen again, as if for the first time.

We live in a world today in which Christmas Day, the birth of Jesus the Christ, is an historic event - finished, over with, done, no longer living, but a good excuse for a party. God Is With Us is still the name of that event, and it is still happening in the very middle of our lives and in our downtown, as if for the first time. God is never finished With Us the rest of the world has yet to figure out. They assume God has punctuated his story with a period, a full stop. But instead, it seems God prefers commas.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan