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