The OT [Christmas 2; St. Matthew 2:13-23]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.

Jesus speaks to you all through His Gospel, saying:

“This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet,

‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’”

On this 12^th day of Christmas, something has triggered you to fly off the handle at someone. Maybe it was a funeral. Maybe its a baptism. What triggers the world is 12 Christians praying in freedom and peace. For Christians, their trigger is the Old Testament. Now before you say, “How dare you, pastor”, how many times do you turn to the Old Testament in your personal study of God’s Word for something more than moral encouragement?

It turns out that God seemed to be pretty strict in the Old Testament and it was triggering some Jewish converts who were then, in turn, triggering gentile converts, in the book of Acts with all of its strict demands. The Jewish converts wanted the Old Testament laws continued and the gentiles were preaching grace and inclusion without the laws.

So what is an early Church to do? It holds the first ecumenical council in Jerusalem in 50 AD and decides, unilaterally and universally, that most of the Old Testament was not applicable to converts and that the gentiles are included the same way the Jews are included, in Acts 15. Thus begins a battle that rages even to this day: deciding what the value of the Old Testament is.

In the 2^nd c., the battle rages on when a Christian bishop named Marcion proposed throwing out the entire Jewish Bible and never hearing from it again in Christian Churches. As time goes on, super-spiritualism began to creep into churches and teachers of God’s Word kept Marcion’s teaching alive, favoring finding the god within, as opposed to the objective God in the Word. There are still people today that want to do this and that teach this.

So it is that the Church found herself for awhile, without an Old Testament reading, having found that the Epistles and the Gospels harmonize much better. The old TLH hymnal is a testament to this, only using Epistle and Gospel readings. This is not to say that the Old Testament was never heard from, but that it was relegated to the daily offices and lesser services of the Church as opposed to the High Mass.

And we can get on board with that. Not only have we been set free from the Law (Rom. 8:2), but Christ has fulfilled the prophets, so what need do we have of hearing these old, jewish stories which may or may not line up with the command to love, as Jesus gives us? Plus, we have things to do on Sundays. Can’t sit all day and listen to God…

Or can we? Or are we supposed to? Indeed, if we are to be followers of Jesus, then all we should listen to is the Old Testament. That’s all He had back then, after all. Whenever Jesus or the Apostles mention Holy Scripture or the Bible in any way, they are only referring to the books of the Old Testament. 

When Jesus goes to the Temple or synagogue to teach, He teaches from the Old Testament. In Luke 4, the scroll of Isaiah was handed to Jesus and He read from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

It is this Scripture that was heard and is heard today and it is this Scripture, from the Old Testament that is fulfilled even in our hearing. It is this same Scripture that Jesus says only speaks of Him, in Luke 24. 

Turn to all three of our readings for today. St. Matthew quotes the Old Testament twice. Not just to show off how much he knows about the Bible, but to give us Jesus. For the Egypt quote from Hosea 11 may seem to talk about Israel, but it is talking about Jesus returning for us.

In the quote from Jeremiah, it appears as if he is only giving bad news, but in the next verse in Chapter 31, Jesus says that those children are going to return from the land of their enemy, death. Another verse of hope. Another verse about Jesus from the Old testament.

In our Epistle, St. Peter chooses Proverbs 11 to quote, because the righteous Jesus is scarcely saved, being raised from 3 days in tomb, but the ungodliness and sin that He took upon Himself, caused Him to suffer and die on the cross.

Even the Old Testament is full of Old Testament quotes!

Jesus is the Messiah, not from the New, but from the Old. Jesus is the Crucified and Resurrected from the Old and the New. Jesus justifies us and gives us His Spirit in the New, as Kelton taught us this morning. 

It was not in the Old that we baptized our children, it was only things that we baptized. In the Old, God only interacted with things, in the New He interacts directly with people. He says that what was imitated poorly in the Old, is revealed in the New and is to be given to people.

It took “God made man” to get us to realize that we need to be baptizing our children, that we need to be showing them Jesus from both Testaments, and that we need to love our Old Testament. Not just because “that’s what Christians do”, but because we have heard the Lord in it, we have found Jesus in it, and we have believed that from it comes our salvation in Body and Blood.

Going back to our reading from Genesis today, we hear a very important point in verse 4. God tells Jacob to not be afraid of going to live in Egypt, not just in a “pull up your bootstraps” way and deal with it. God tells Jacob to not be afraid, because He is going with him. The Father tells Jesus to not be afraid, because He is going to call Him back from Egypt.

We too should not be afraid to dwell in the midst of sin, death, and even to read the Old Testament, because God is going with us and will bring us out again. He will take us down to things we don’t understand, like sin and death, and bring us up to show us His Son, baptizing and feeding us salvation we can understand, but not without the Old Testament.