Matthew 2:13-23 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
First Sunday after Christmas Sunday, December 28, 2025 “The Son of God Meets Our Wicked World”
Can you believe that today is only three days after Christmas? Since Christmas Day and Christmas Eve are fixed days on the calendar, the length of time from Christmas to the following Sunday can vary from year to year. What doesn’t tend to change a whole lot, though, is what happens to church attendance on the Sunday after Christmas. However long it’s been since Christmas, that Sunday can easily disappoint. The high points of Christmas at church include a big attendance number on Christmas Eve and a solid turnout on Christmas Day. That’s two gatherings with enough people to comfortably sing those familiar and beloved Christmas hymns. But then too often we go from those gatherings with larger numbers, with extra extended family along, with forceful singing that carries us along, to the Sunday after Christmas. It’s not quite the same. The high points give way to some low points, and in a pretty big hurry. It kind of feels the same way when we read the account of the early life of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew’s Spirit-inspired account shares just briefly the fact of Jesus’ birth by a virgin mother engaged to Joseph as his earthly father. We get some high points of an angelic announcement, the fulfillment of prophecies, the birth of a baby. We even go on to hear about the visit of the Magi, the Wise Men, something we’ll see in greater detail next week. We hear about these wealthy and influential Wise Men worshiping a small child. And then all these brief high points quickly give way to one of the lowest points of all. That is our Gospel for today, our sermon text read earlier from Matthew chapter 2. This account comes right after the Wise Men visited the family of Jesus. Those men had first stopped in Jerusalem to ask where to find the newborn King. Experts who understood God’s promises and prophecies directed them to Bethlehem. King Herod, though, was not one to truly appreciate those promises and prophecies. He heard the Wise Men looking for a king beside him and was distraught. He hatched a plan. The Men could track down this threat to his throne. They could report back to him, and he could remove the threat. But God intervened. He sent the Wise Men away without going back to Herod. And he sent Joseph and Mary and Jesus away as well. They went to Egypt. God knew what Herod had planned. God knew the depths to which he would sink, the damage that he was willing to do, the desperate actions he was moving to accomplish. But God had a plan. God had an answer. Herod would not get the upper hand. It was only after Mary and Joseph and Jesus were well on their way to Egypt that Herod figured out that the Wise Men were not returning back with a report for him. He had lost his opportunity to nip this supposed problem in the bud. His plan had failed. God’s plan marched on. God protected his own dear Son from a wicked world that was bent on destroying him. That’s the welcome the Son of God received from our wicked world. That really summarizes the depths of the low points demonstrated by this text in front of us. Within days, a couple years at most, after the birth of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God into the world, the world showed its wickedness to an unmistakable degree. The ruler of the very place where God had settled his own people and was carrying out his plan of salvation was bent on opposing and destroying that plan. The most powerful man in the whole region was not interested in serving others. He was only interested in serving himself. He had no concern for right or wrong. His only concern was for his own goals and achievements and power. We may be tempted to think that the lesson for us is to be careful of power, to be cautious about the people who are put into positions of power. We may be tempted to think that the worst sort of evil is when people willing to do evil have too much authority to accomplish horrible things. Some might even want to make comparisons to modern politics, finding examples in recent years on both ends of the political spectrum. I would even grant that some of those points are reasonable reactions to this true account of what happened at this pivotal point in history, in salvation history. But you and I are not likely to have any outsized impact on things like politics and the grand scope of world history. More important for us is to see how easily we can fall into the same sort of evil mindset that Herod had. We can argue all we want that we aren’t murderers, that we aren’t causing the sort of violence that was accomplished in these events. But a look into our hearts will too
often reveal that our thoughts are focused on our own comfort, our own concerns, our own needs, our own desires. It is easy to neglect the interests of others whom we ought to serve and to simply serve ourselves. This is the evil of sin. This is the way that temptation worms its way into our hearts. We see people and situations as opportunities to serve ourselves rather than seeing people and situations as our opportunities to serve others. And this sort of evil has serious consequences. In his anger and desperation, Herod ordered all the boys in the area two years old or younger to be killed. This whole episode has been called the slaughter of the holy innocents because the people whom Herod killed had not earned his anger or done something to cause his wrath. What he really wanted was to kill the baby Jesus. What he really wanted to do was end any threat from a new king. In a way all these baby boys up to two years old were collateral damage, but not really. They were the victims directly of the order that Herod gave. We can take some comfort in God’s Old Covenant promises. These young boys had almost certainly been initiated into God’s covenant through circumcision. While their times of grace were short, God had been gracious to his people. But the damage was real. Mothers wept, and comfort was incredibly difficult to come by. It is hard to really imagine this sort of tragedy, but it is not hard to empathize and recognize how truly devastating it would be. Such a tragic event associated with the early life of the Savior reminds us that while God is not the author of sin, he does allow evil to exist and does not always prevent it from causing harm. This reality has worried some. There are people who express concerns that God allows bad things to happen to good people. We won’t fully address that in this sermon, but do recognize that this evil was not God’s doing, it was Herod’s doing. And while God at times chooses to prevent certain harms, he also allows people to be people. He allows certain actions to accomplish their result. The whole idea of God completely preventing evil would mean he would need to take everyone out of the world or he would need to stop allowing them any opportunity to make free choices. This is not what he does. What he does is work through every circumstance and every situation to accomplish his good purposes. And above all his good purpose in history was to bring salvation to people. And so prophecy after prophecy was fulfilled, something God led Matthew to report throughout his Gospel. By escaping to Egypt and returning, Jesus followed the path of God’s Old Testament chosen people. Those Israelites and their nation were to have been God’s own Son. God reported through the prophet that he had called this Son out of Egypt. But the Israelites were unfaithful; they disappointed God in their actions. We might not have recognized this reference as a prophecy of the Savior necessarily, but Matthew tells us that Jesus became the fulfilment of everything God’s chosen people should have been and should have lived up to but did not. And so this description became a prophecy fulfilled in Jesus. When the innocents were slaughtered, another prophecy was fulfilled. And even when Jesus came to live in the hometown of his parents, Nazareth, he fulfilled another prophecy. This one is a little trickier to pin down. We don’t find what Matthew says here to be an exact quote of any Old Testament passage. But it seems that perhaps he is referring to the disdain with which people would view the Messiah, how he would be ridiculed and disrespected. Nazareth was not exactly held in high regard among the people of that day. These were all details in the life and work of the Messiah, the Savior. And Jesus kept and fulfilled them all. That was part of the process of fulfilling the greatest of all such prophecies and promises: that this one would save his people from sin. That he would suffer and die as a sacrifice, and that he would bring people into God’s family just as he is and always has been God’s own dear Son. We may be tempted to be disappointed when things do not turn out as we had hoped. We may be discouraged when Christmas highs give way to too many lows afterward, or when we struggle to find the joy of Christmas because of outward circumstances and challenges. At times we come face to face with the reality of this wicked world, our wicked world. So did Jesus. The Son of God met our wicked world, and he overcame it to make us children of God. Thanks be to him. Merry Christmas.
The Text: Matthew 2:13–23 (EHV) 13After the Wise Men were gone, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared to Joseph in a dream. He said,
“Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, because Herod will search for the child in order to kill him.”
14Joseph got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and left for Egypt. 15He stayed there until
the death of Herod. This happened to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
16When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Wise Men, he was furious. He issued orders to
kill all the boys in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding countryside, from two years old and under. This was in keeping with the exact time he had learned from the Wise Men. 17Then what was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: 18A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and she refused to be comforted, because they are no more. 19After Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. The angel said, 20“Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to kill the
child are dead.” 21Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 22But when he heard that
Archelaus, Herod’s son, had succeeded his father as ruler in Judea, he was afraid to go there. Since he had been warned in a dream, he went to the region of Galilee. 23When he arrived there, he settled in a city called Nazareth. So what was spoken through the prophets was fulfilled: “He will be called a Nazarene.”