Flight by Night

A hand on a shoulder in the dark. “Mary. Wake up. We have to go. Now.” No lamp. No noise. Just a sleeping baby lifted from his bed, and a small family slipping out of Bethlehem before the sun comes up.

Only days before, this house had been full of wonder. Travellers from the east had knelt on the floor and laid treasures at the feet of a little boy: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Then they had gone home by another road, because God had warned them in a dream not to go back to King Herod. And Herod was not a king who liked to be ignored. He was old, suspicious and dangerous, and he had heard that a new king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem, just a few miles from his palace in Jerusalem.

That night, Joseph dreams. It is not the first time an angel of the Lord has spoken to him in a dream. Once before, an angel told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife. Now the message is short and sharp. Get up. Take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt. Stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him. Joseph does not wait for morning. He does not argue. Matthew simply says he arose and took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.

Picture the road. South and west, away from the hills of Judea, down toward the coast and then across the dry country where Judea gives way to desert. A carpenter who has never been far from home, a young mother, a child who cannot yet understand what is happening. Perhaps they carry the wise men's gifts with them. Perhaps that gold is what feeds them on the way. Matthew does not tell us. He only tells us they went, and that God went before them. The baby who would one day be called the King of kings begins his life as a refugee, carried across a border in the night.

And there in Egypt they stay, Matthew says, until the death of Herod. Then he adds a line from the prophet Hosea: “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” Hosea was remembering the exodus, the time when God brought his people Israel out of slavery in Egypt, calling the whole nation his son. Matthew sees the same story happening again. Israel once went down into Egypt and was brought out. Now Jesus goes down into Egypt, and he too will be called out. The story of the people is being lived again in one child.

Why Egypt? It was close, a journey of days rather than weeks, and it was outside Herod's reach. Egypt had been a Roman province since the death of Cleopatra, and it was home to one of the largest Jewish communities anywhere in the world. The Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria, who lived at the same time as Jesus, said there were no fewer than a million Jews living in Egypt. A family from Judea would not have been alone there.

Flight by Night. You'll find it in Matthew chapter two, verses thirteen to fifteen. Joseph heard, and Joseph went, in the dark, with no idea how long they would be gone. So here is a question to carry with you. When God asks you to do something hard, how quickly do you obey?