{"id":34347,"date":"2000-11-29T13:24:07","date_gmt":"2000-11-29T18:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=34347"},"modified":"2017-08-09T14:13:27","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T18:13:27","slug":"advent-meditation-matthew-213-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2000\/advent-meditation-matthew-213-23\/","title":{"rendered":"Advent meditation on Matthew 2:13-23"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eastern Mennonite Seminary provides this reflection by professor <\/span>Dorothy Jean Weaver<\/span><\/a>, written while she was in Bethlehem in Nov. 2000,<\/span>\u00a0for use in public settings such as worship, Bible studies or Sunday school. Please give credit to the author when using this work.<\/em><\/p>\n

It was not an especially pretty world, the world into which Jesus was born. The Palestine of Jesus\u2019 day was a world of grinding poverty for the masses, hard labor for a daily pittance, wealthy tax collectors who made their fortunes by extorting money from the impoverished, and brutal military occupiers whose preferred method of crowd control was crucifixion for all those who dared to rise up and resist the occupation. Nor was the town of Jesus \u2019 birth an especially peaceful place, and hardly the idyllic Bethlehem of our beloved Christmas carol, lying \u201cstill\u201d under the \u201csilent stars\u201d in \u201cdeep and dreamless sleep.\u201d The Bethlehem into which Jesus was born was one which was soon to know the terrifying clank of military steel, the blood-curdling shrieks of terrified children ruthlessly slashed to death by Roman soldiers \u201cjust doing their job,\u201d and the heart-rending cries of anguished mothers inconsolable over the brutal massacre of their innocent infants.<\/p>\n

Two thousand years later the picture looks strangely similar. The Palestine of Christmas 2000 is a world of massive unemployment and growing poverty. And the Bethlehem of Christmas 2000, with its sister cities Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, knows only too well the terrifying sounds and scenes of war: the menacing drone of helicopter gunships, operated by soldiers \u201cjust doing their duty\u201d and raining down death and destruction from the skies; the rapid-fire report of machine guns aiming live ammunition at live human beings in deadly confrontations on the ground; the heavy and horrifying boom of tanks which send shells smashing through the stone walls of ordinary houses, fill children\u2019s beds with glass shards, and turn defenseless civilians into refugees without a home; the screaming of Palestinian children, too frightened to go to bed; and the voiced and unvoiced anguish of Palestinian parents, incapable of protecting their little ones from the ongoing terror and the ever-growing destruction all around them.<\/p>\n

This is the world and this is the hometown of Jesus Emmanuel, \u201cGod with us.\u201d When God comes to be with God\u2019s people, it is not to an idyllic, fairy-tale world of beauty and peace and \u201cdreamless sleep.\u201d There would in fact be no need for \u201cGod with us\u201d in that \u201cnever never\u201d world. The world that Jesus Emmanuel comes to is rather the real world that all of us know somewhere, somehow, at some time: the world of poverty, extortion, callous cruelty, unrelenting terror, and inconsolable grief. It is this world, and none other, into which God comes to be with us in the person of Jesus, the defenseless child and the crucified Messiah. The God who comes to be \u201cwith us\u201d in Jesus, born in Bethlehem, is a God who walks our streets, experiences our daily struggles, shares our pain, weeps our tears, suffers our humiliations, and dies the most agonizing of human deaths at the hands of his enemies. This is our God, the one who \u201ccomforts those who mourn,\u201d claims \u201cpeacemakers\u201d as \u201cchildren of God,\u201d and grants inheritance in the kingdom of heaven to those who \u201chunger and thirst for justice.\u201d This is Jesus Emmanuel, God with us. And this is the \u201cgood news of the kingdom.” Thanks be to God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eastern Mennonite Seminary provides this reflection by professor Dorothy Jean Weaver, written while she was in Bethlehem in Nov. 2000,\u00a0for use in public settings such as worship, Bible studies or ... read more about Advent meditation on Matthew 2:13-23<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[265],"tags":[6809],"feature":[],"class_list":["post-34347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seminary","tag-dorothy-jean-weaver"],"yoast_head":"\nAdvent meditation on Matthew 2:13-23 - EMU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2000\/advent-meditation-matthew-213-23\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Advent meditation on Matthew 2:13-23 - 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