coming home

There were three locations in the prophesies of the Messiah that needed to be fulfilled: Jesus would be born in Bethlehem, God would call him out of Egypt, and he would be called a Nazarene.

And so we read in Matthew 2:13-15 that an angel speaks to Joseph in a dream, and he takes his little family to Egypt to hide from Herod. And we read in verses 19-23 that after Herod died, they came home, but went to Nazareth because they feared Herod's son.

I imagine that scholars across the years looked at all the prophecies and tried to predict what was going to happen. I can see them poring over the scrolls and parchments, arguing about which location was correct (they couldn't all be, surely), flaming each other on Twitter. Well, maybe not the last one.

But it's all so . . . improbable. Convoluted, even. I wonder why. After all, God could do it any way he wants to. He could have put Jesus right into the palace in Jerusalem.

No, there's something important about Jesus being born in Bethlehem. There's something significant about him being called out of Egypt (my pastor preached that it's an echo of God's people being called from a land of death and captivity under the hands of another tyrant who killed all the boy babies). There's something necessary about him being a Nazarene.

I'm sure Bible scholars know why all these locations are important to the prophecy. I don't, so I imagine people who met Jesus or chatted with Joseph or brought Mary a casserole. I imagine little one-person restorations happening in each of these locations.

True? I don't know, but I do know God's work is never about just one thing. He might and often does work in the lives of many, many people who don't even know each other with one single event. Sure, I think I'm the center of it all, but sometimes the work he does in me is a byproduct or offshoot or somehow related to something bigger he's doing for someone else.

In the end, I realize that this seemingly-complicated moving of Jesus' family all over the map is as simple for God to imagine and do as just putting Jesus directly into Jerusalem. It only looks hard to me.