"Fulfillment (a palimpsest)"

     I love words.  I love to learn new words, and I especially like to share them.  And the word of the day is "palimpsest".  I may have encountered this word back in seminary, but I first remember the word from a preaching workshop I attended last fall.  My two very favorite preachers were there, two preaching giants: the very short Fred Craddock, and the very tall Barbara Brown Taylor.

     Fred Craddock used this word, palimpsest, which comes to us from the Greek.  Fred said if we used this word, people would think we actually knew something.  A palimpsest is a parchment that has been erased, but you can still see some of the earlier writing on it. You could scrape or rub the parchment to remove the writing and re-use the parchment.  Like when you write something in pencil and then try to erase it completely.  Often you can see what you had written earlier, a faint ghost of what was there before.

     Today's story, found only in the gospel of Matthew, is loaded with ghosts from its Jewish past. There are palimpsests all over the place.  These ghosts serve a very important purpose.  They all point to something very much alive: the fulfillment of God's promises in Jesus.

     Right away we encounter the ghost of Joseph the dreamer. You remember how important that early dreamer Joseph was to the people of Israel.  To their very survival.  How God took something that was bad (Joseph sold into slavery by his own brothers!) and turned it toward the good (Joseph becoming the Pharaoh's right hand man, saving up food for the time of famine) (Exodus 45:5-7).  So we have Joseph the dream in Egypt, and Joseph, Mary's husband, receiving critical messages in dreams.

     Next we see the large and looming ghost of the great Exodus.  The Holy Family's flight into Egypt recalls the Family of Jacob's flight to Egypt during the time of great famine (Exodus 45:9-11).  God had called the family of Jacob into Egypt in order to preserve Israel.  God calls the holy family of Joseph into Egypt in order to protect Jesus.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, "Jesus lives now in Egypt, where his people were. In his own body he lives through the sorrows of his people.  In Egypt, Israel suffered hardship, in Egypt the hardship of Jesus began. . .  God led his people out of Egypt into the Promised Land, and from Egypt God called his Son back to Israel.  What the prophet once had said about the people of Israel, is now fulfilled in Jesus:  "Out of Egypt I called my Son".¹  A palimpsest.  Israel called out of Egypt.  Jesus called out of Egypt."

     When Herod orders the young boys to be slaughtered, we see faint outlines of Pharaoh's long-ago decree to slaughter all the Hebrew baby boys.  One Hebrew baby boy, however, was saved, Moses.  Jesus is saved, too, whisked away from the killing fields near Bethlehem.  We seen what Matthew is doing, sketching new outlines----Jesus as the new Moses, the baby boy saved in order to save his people.  In drawing out these connections to Joseph the dream, Exodus, and Moses, Matthew leaves no doubt about who this Jesus is---the Messiah, the one who is to come, God's fulfillment.

     When Jesus is pursued and hunted down, great suffering comes over the people.  In Bethlehem, innocent children die.  Rachel weeps for her children.  There is a strange echo of a voice heard in Ramah. Ramah---where the prophet Jeremiah left the Hebrew exiles (Jer 40:1).

     This weeping ghost from Israel's past is not the final sound, however.  Rachel's tears flow in the context of hope, even in the prophet Jeremiah's writings.  Another palimpsest---suffering Bethlehem and the suffering of the Babylonian exile.

     Jesus is the Messiah who appears amid tears, yet still with hope.  One scholar says this: "Despite the tears of the Bethlehem mothers, there is hope because Messiah has escaped Herod and will ultimately reign"².

     These palimpsests echo forth in Matthew's story to tell us God fulfills God's promises.  God has a plan. Fulfillment.  To reach an end, to be filled with what God had intended all along. Even things that were evil were used to fulfill God's purpose.  Nothing could happen to Jesus which God had not already determined beforehand³.

     It is easy, now, to notice the half-erased handwriting, these palimpsests of fulfillment when we look at the story now, as we squint and read between the lines, as we remember echoes of promises long past.  "Oh yes", we say, "that's why that happened in that particular way".  "Oh yes", we say, "God intended that for good".  "Oh yes, I see the connection, Joseph to Joseph, the earlier Exodus and the new Exodus, Moses to Jesus, Pharaoh to Herod.  It is all good in God's time".  But it sure didn't seem good at the time.  No, it seemed the very opposite of good.

     Trudging around in deep darkness, with fear on their tail, surely Mary and Joseph must have been wondering what they had gotten themselves into, what they had signed on for, when they had nodded to angels bearing divine messages.  "Let it be done to me according to thy will."  "Yes, I will marry her, if you say it is right."  The Holy Family walks on through the night, over 75 miles of terrain, into ghosts of the past and beyond into the fulfilling but not always bright future God has planned for them.

     I hardly think they were reviewing the Exodus story in their heads as they threw their meager belongings into a sack and ran out into the night, trying to hush a fussy baby roused from sleep.

     Great artists have been depicting the Flight into Egypt for centuries.  There are at least a dozen such paintings at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Beautiful, bucolic landscapes, pastoral settings.  Often the paintings show Mary, seated and peacefully nursing the infant Jesus, Joseph off to one side, tending the donkey.  A restful and beautiful scene, a picnic in the country.  They do not seem to be in a rush, or worried.  I know there must be reasons why the artists chose to paint the scene this way, but I think the reasons have more to do with Art History than with Biblical accuracy.  In my mind's eye I do not think their journey was very peaceful at all.

     I rather think it was more like the experience described in The Road, a popular Pulitzer prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy.  The Road is the story of another journey, another flight, of a father and his young son.  Like Joseph, this father takes the son away from death and danger, but they meet with death and danger everywhere they turn.  It is a world without hope.  There is no food, no life, no clean water.  There is no warmth.  The world is completely grey and desolate.  It has been destroyed by fire.  Despite all this, the father pretends to keep hoping, all evidence to the contrary, for the sake of the son.  "Are we gonna die?"  the boy repeatedly asks his papa.  "Are we the good guys?"  "We're the good guys, aren't we?"  "Yes, we are, we carry the light."

     I think Mary and Joseph's road trip was more like Cormac McCarthy's description, but with one enormous difference.  In their flight into Egypt, Hope had not died.  Life had not fled.  Mary and Joseph knew God was with them.  God had a plan for them and for this baby they carried so carefully.  Mary and Joseph carried Hope in a tiny wiggling bundle close to their heart.  They carried the Light, not just in their imaginations, not only in words and promises of the past, but in the Word made flesh, in the fulfillment of God's past, in the expectation of God's future.

     We are about to enter a new year.  Many plans and failures, much disappointment and distress, will surely come along with us as we journey through the year.  Some of us will have to endure deep sorrows.  We will weep and mourn.  Others will experience firsthand the joyous fulfillment of God's promises.  So long as we walk with Jesus, so long as we carry the Divine child close to our hearts, we can be certain nothing will happen outside of God's plan.  God's plan is for us, here and now.  God's promise doesn't just point forward to some far-off future, which we have to wait for; the future is already present in the promise itself. . .⁴

     Unless we take the divine perspective, we will not see fulfillment when we are walking down the road.  We need God's view, the palimpsest, in and from the Book that God has written again and again, with its many layers and meanings, with its deep connections and with its astonishingly surprising, ever living story of fulfillment.