The other night at church we discussed Joseph, Jesus and Mary’s flight to Egypt. Herod had ordered the murder of every child two and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding area and an angel had appeared to Joseph 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’” (Matthew 2:13).
I can only imagine what was going through Joseph’s head. Yes, there was apparently a large colony of Jews in Egypt at the time, but Egypt really? Nobody has that short a memory. Of all the places to send His son, God chose Egypt, a place where the Jews had once been enslaved, a place that needed 10 plagues set upon it in order to bend it to God’s will.
Egypt.
And not only that, but the angel gives no timeline to Joseph. Go, leave your home, leave all that is familiar and go to this foreign place and “stay.”
Just stay.
What must Joseph have been thinking? We don’t know. What we do know is that he was a man of deep faith for he did as the angel told him.
When we think of Jesus and his life, we think of miracles. We think of how he healed the sick. We think of that first miracle in John, the turning of the water into wine. But for me, I think that miracles surrounded Jesus from the moment he was conceived.
That Mary, a child, a teenager would accept God’s calling, that Joseph would take Mary as his wife despite her pregnancy, that they would find shelter in a manger, that the shepherds and the wise men would find them, one group guided by angels, the other by a star. That Joseph would agree to take his family to Egypt … all of these things done by faith.
In my last post, I wrote about my new favorite Broadway star, Sutton Foster. At the Kennedy Center Honors a few months ago, she sang “Everybody Says Don’t,” a song from the musical Anyone Can Whistle as a tribute to Barbara Cook.
Anyone Can Whistle is a musical about miracles, about one miracle in particular that is faked in order to bring tourists to a dying town.
At the close of the second act, Hapgood sings to the town’s skeptic, Fay, the song “Everybody Says Don’t.”
Here are a few of the lyrics:
“I insist in miracles if you do them/miracles they might come true/Then I say/Don’t be afraid.”
It’s a song about the dangers of sitting back and waiting for things to happen. It’s about living and searching and longing. It’s about being afraid of failing and then going ahead and trying anyway. And it’s about miracles.
I love the use of the word “insist,” in the lines above. I insist on miracles.
Joseph and Mary did not practice passive parenting. They had no idea what awaited them in Egypt, but they went anyway.
They had faith.
And I do believe at every step of their journey they too insisted on miracles.
And were rewarded with such.
Insist on miracles.
