I've been away for a bit (long story) but am doing better physically and emotionally and hope to get this going again!
I started this around Christmas and it seems a little off going back into it in the Summer, but here goes anyway. :)
The story that immediately follows the birth of Jesus in the second half of Matthew 2 is dramatic and disturbing. You can find it here in the NRSV or here in the Message. It starts after the Magi go home, when an evil king (Herod) plans to kill the male babies of the community. God intervenes, (warning Joseph in a dream) and the baby sent by God (Jesus) escapes from harm (his parents secretly take him to Egypt.)
If this sounds like a story from a different part of the Bible, it's supposed to. Matthew is often called the most Jewish of the Gospels because scholars believe it was written for a Jewish community. That's why the author tells the story in a way that would sound very familiar to an audience familiar with the book of Exodus.
Exodus begins with an evil king (Pharaoh) who plans to kill the male babies of the community. God intervenes (through the devout women of the community) and the baby sent by God (Moses) escapes from harm (he is sent down the river in a basket and the Pharaoh's daughter finds him and raises him.)
It would be an amazing coincidence it Matthew was writing a factual biography, but he's not. Herod never sent the soldiers to massacre the innocents and Mary and Joseph never fled to Egypt with their baby. The author of Matthew has made up these details to try to make a point about Jesus. He wants his Jewish audience to understand that Jesus is very much a Jewish Messiah. His ministry will extend beyond the Jewish people but that is not a rejection of his Jewish roots. In fact, Matthew asserts, Jesus is just as Jewish as Moses. That's why Joseph (who only appears in this Gospel) is someone who gains knowledge through dreams. He's supposed to remind us of another Joseph from Genesis who God gave the gift of interpreting dreams.
Matthew tells a very different version of this story than Luke (Mark and John don't deal with the infancy of Jesus at all) because he's talking to a different group of people. Luke is writing to a Greek-speaking Gentile audience. There's no need for him to try to show them how Jewish Jesus is because that is not relevant to them. Matthew, on the other hand, is writing to people who know and love the Hebrew Scriptures and he has to deal with the rumor going around that Jesus and his followers rejected the laws of Moses and the traditions of the Prophets.
That's something we'll see time and again, as Jesus asserts that he hasn't come to abolish the laws of Moses, but to fulfill them. Matthew sees him as a kind of New Moses, leading the people out of a different kind of slavery and giving them a different kind of law, but not as a rejection of the old but as an extension or fulfillment of it.
That's also why Matthew says so often "…this happened to fulfill the prophecy…" He does that twice in just this short section.
The first time is when he says that Mary Joseph and Jesus fleeing to Egypt was the fulfillment of Hosea 11:1 which has God calling his son out of Egypt. When you read Hosea 11 you find that it wasn't originally about Jesus at all. The "son" is the people Israel, who God rescued from slavery in Egypt.
The second example is the mourning of the mothers of the murdered children, which Matthew says is a fulfillment of Jeremiah 32:15-17. Actually the mourning in this passage was originally for the Jews carried off in exile to Babylon, and the hope was that they would soon be set free and allowed to come home.
Matthew was adding new meaning to these scriptures. He used them to make the case that Jesus wasn't promoting a new religion about a new god, but that he was faithfully following the same God in a way that was consistent with Moses and the Prophets. By choosing stories of liberation from captivity for his prophecies, Matthew also made a statement about Jesus' ministry. He had come to lead the people to freedom.
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