God did not go out of his way to make Jesus’ first years of human life easy. In fact, Jesus’ infancy was overshadowed by the very real threat of death, causing his parents to flee from their homeland with their baby son and live as refugees in a foreign country.
Only Matthew records these events. He states:
“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’ So Joseph got up and took the child and his mother during the night and fled to Egypt.” (Matthew 2:13)
There is an urgency inherent in these simple statements. Joseph did not wait until morning to arrange for their departure. He woke his wife in the middle of the night, quickly gathered their possessions together and left immediately. It was an urgency born of great and immediate danger. Herod the Great, the Roman appointed ruler of the Holy Land and beyond, had heard rumours of the birth of a baby in Bethlehem who was prophesied to be a future King. This Herod the Great (there were other Herods, as we will soon see) was a violent megalomaniac who became increasingly paranoid and cruel toward the end of his reign – which is precisely the time when Jesus was born. He killed one of his wives (Miriam), as well as Miriam’s mother, her two sons and his own eldest son at around the same time, simply because he thought they might one day try to overthrow him as king. Thus, when he heard that another potential King had been born in his kingdom, he thought nothing of sending soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all the baby boys under the age of two (Matthew 2:16).
Make no mistake about it, the life of the infant Jesus was in great danger at his point, but because of God’s timely intervention, he escaped Herod’s clutches. Historians believe Jesus may have been about six to twelve months old when this occurred, and the fact that Mary and Joseph were still residing in Bethlehem indicates that Joseph may have planned to make the town their permanent home. That Jesus was probably about one year old by this point, explains why Herod ordered the killing of all baby boys under two years of age in Bethlehem: Herod was not searching for a newborn baby by this time.
Mary and Joseph left Bethlehem in the middle of the night and fled to Egypt, a journey of over 400 kilometres (260 miles) which would have taken several weeks on foot. There is no indication in the Bible that they had any friends or relatives in Egypt. It was a foreign country that had only one attraction for them: it was beyond the reach of Herod’s violent intentions. It is difficult to overestimate the terror that Mary and Joseph must have felt at this point. An unhinged King was trying to murder their infant son, forcing them to leave behind everything that was familiar to them and seek refuge in a distant, unfamiliar land.
The best estimate Is that they stayed In Egypt for between one and two years, until Herod the Great died in the year 4 BC. This date is clear from Roman and Jewish historical records which indicate that Herod reigned as king from 37 BC to 4 BC when he died. (I will explain the implications this has for dating the birth of Jesus in the next chapter).
Upon Herod’s death, Mathew then records yet another angelic dream given to Joseph:
“After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.’” (Matthew 2:19-20)
Now, once again, their lives are disrupted. They must now pack up their belongings and undertake the arduous return journey of 400 kilometres on foot, this time with a child who is about two or three years old. Despite the long trek home, we can imagine the sense of excitement and anticipation that they must have felt. They were returning to their friends and family and to the life they had started to build for themselves in Bethlehem. And even more importantly, the threat to their son’s life was over. The unhinged tyrant was dead and they could finally live in peace in the land of their religious heritage.
But their peace and joy were short-lived. They had barely set foot in their homeland and hadn’t made it as far as their previous home in Bethlehem when they learned that the new king, Herod Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great, was even more unhinged and tyrannical than his father. Historical records indicate that Archelaus, who reigned from 4BC to 6AD, began his reign by slaughtering 3,000 innocent people whom he believed were a threat to his power. No doubt Mary and Joseph heard this disturbing news as they entered the Holy Land and they realised that Jesus’ life was still very much in danger. It became clear to them that they could not return to Bethlehem as they had planned, nor could they remain anywhere in Judea, which was ruled over by a cruel and paranoid king. Matthew records this dramatic turn of events, which involves yet another angelic dream to Joseph:
“But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.” (Matthew 2:22-23)
If they wanted to keep their infant son safe, the northern province of Galilee was their only option. This is because Herod the Great’s kingdom had been divided into three after his death, with each of his three sons ruling over a different region. The unhinged Herod Archelaus ruled over Judea (where Bethlehem was located) and its surrounding areas, but the slightly saner Herod Antipas ruled over Galilee (although this Herod would eventually murder John the Baptist and, soon after, seek to meet and interrogate Jesus[1]).
Thus, instead of returning to their previously established lives in Bethlehem, the beleaguered family turned left and travelled to the northern province of Galilee. They chose Mary’s home village of Nazareth as their new home, a tiny subsistence village in the remote hill country of the province.
We can imagine Joseph’s frustration at this point. Bethlehem was a modern, thriving city, filled with opportunities for them to flourish as a family. Indeed, the southern province of Judea was a region of sophistication, education and prosperity. The northern province of Galilee, by comparison, was an unsophisticated agricultural region with low literacy rates and a lower standard of living. Galileans even spoke differently, with a coarse accent that their southern counterparts treated with derision[2]. And Nazareth was one of Galilee’s smallest and most insignificant villages – not even warranting a mention in the Jewish Talmud’s list of the 63 towns and villages of Galilee.
But such was the dire danger that the infant Jesus faced and such was the fear that his parents felt that they had no choice but to ensconce themselves in a remote mountain village in a backward region of the Holy Land.
The story of Jesus’ infancy is not how we would have scripted it if we were writing the story. We would have had him born into a palace, living in safety and luxury as befitting the King of the universe. Instead, he was born to a poor family who, twice, had to uproot their lives and flee to remote obscurity in order to protect their child from assassination. For the first couple of years of his life, the Saviour lived as a refugee in a foreign land, and for the remainder of his childhood he grew up in a poor subsistence village in the mountains, with the perpetual risk of discovery and assassination hanging over him even there.
You could be excused for thinking that Jesus was cursed by God. The outward signs of God’s blessing were not apparent at all. In fact, they were totally missing. Every manifest circumstance of his early life – poverty, danger, homelessness and hardship – seemed to indicate that God had abandoned him; that Jesus and his family were somehow under God’s punishment. Yet this is not the case at all.
The early life of Jesus teaches us a very important lesson. Favourable outward circumstances are not a sign of God’s blessing, and hardship is not a sign of his disfavour. Furthermore, being in the centre of God’s will does not guarantee a smooth and easy road. In fact, quite the opposite may sometimes be the case. The hardships of Jesus and his family repudiate the simplistic view of some Christians that links outward prosperity with God’s blessing and hardship with his disfavour. The early life of Jesus does not conform to this binary view. Indeed, his life reveals that it is possible to be highly favoured by God and be in the centre of his will, yet experience the most difficult and challenging of circumstances. If God did not protect Jesus from these trials and difficulties, neither should we expect to be enveloped in a magic bubble that keeps us safe from pain and hardship. Jesus indicated this very clearly when he said to his followers, “In this life you will have hardships”(John 16:33). Instead, he promises to indwell us and strengthen us from within. Thus the whole verse, just quoted, reads as follows:
“.. in me you will have peace. In this world you will have hardships. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
There is another lesson here for us as well. The life of Jesus offers us great encouragement, for we have a Saviour who has suffered just as we do and who understands all that we go through. Not only was he from a poor, marginalised and underprivileged background. Not only was he the victim of gossip and slander throughout his life. Not only was he persecuted, misunderstood and ridiculed throughout his ministry years. Not only did he experience the challenges and loneliness of an itinerant life. But also, in his earliest years he was a refugee who had to flee from his homeland because his life was in grave danger. He was exiled and homeless for several years because of the threat of that danger. And it was a danger that never entirely went away. It dogged him all his life, with Herod Antipas eventually taking up his father’s cause to have him put to death, followed soon after by the death plots of the Pharisees. And eventually, of course, their plots came to fruition. He was betrayed by a companion, abandoned by friends, spurned by the populace, wrongly imprisoned, falsely charged, tortured and, finally, brutally executed.
There is no hardship you have endured that Jesus hasn’t. There is no point you can reach in your life where you can say to Jesus, ‘But you don’t understand’. He does understand because he suffered just as you do – in fact, even more than you do. God the Father did not spare his Son from the sufferings of our world. In fact, it seems that God went out of his way to ensure that Jesus experienced the full gamut of human suffering. And he did this because of his great love for us.
This idea of God not ‘sparing’ or protecting his own Son because of his love for us is beautifully developed by Paul in Romans 8:
“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? … Who, then, shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? … No … neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:31-39)
Jesus, the persecuted and suffering refugee, now reaches into our world and offers hope to a world of refugees. He reaches out to a world full of suffering, to people who have strayed far from home and who long for something more. He offers to restore them to the God who made them and loves them. He offers to bring the suffering refugees home. And who better to do it than a refugee himself?
[1] Mark 6:14-29 and
[2] Matthew 26:73