00:00:00:34 – 00:00:23:58
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody! If you’ve found us or are finding us, we are grateful and sorry about the little hiccup on our end. Our network is acting up a little bit, and we will, hopefully that will get resolved. We today are continuing through a look at the biblical narrative of Christmas. And today, kind of an overview.

00:00:24:03 – 00:00:51:52
Clint Loveall
We’re just going to take a look at the characters in the two stories of Matthew and Luke, their Christmas narratives, and perhaps some brief thoughts on each character and why the particular author may have included them. I think we’ve been saying a version of this, Michael, during this study. I think in many ways. Christmas, biblically speaking, is smaller than we think of it.

00:00:51:54 – 00:01:31:45
Clint Loveall
We we have you know, an experience with a holiday that is huge economically and culturally, even chronologically, that takes up most of the month of December. And yet, as we turn our thoughts to the Scripture, there really? You could say seven, eight, nine. Less than ten characters spread throughout both of the stories, and, we will we’ll take a look and we’ll kind of try to maybe chunk it in order of Matthew and then Luke and end with Matthew.

00:01:31:46 – 00:01:46:00
Clint Loveall
One of the first sets of characters we meet. Zechariah and Elizabeth. Zechariah and Elizabeth are the parents of John the Baptist. Zechariah is in. I’m sorry.

00:01:46:04 – 00:01:46:55
Michael Gewecke
Looking in. Luke.

00:01:47:09 – 00:02:20:45
Clint Loveall
Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m starting in Luke. Yeah. Zechariah is working in the temple and, they have hoped for a child. Have not had a child. Elizabeth is now old enough that that’s beyond her ability. And yet the angel comes and instructs them that they will have a child. Zechariah asked some questions about that, and then the angel, tells him that he won’t be able to speak again until this thing has happened.

00:02:20:45 – 00:02:54:51
Clint Loveall
Sort of. How dare you question me when I’m telling you what God is about to do? I suppose we’d say, Michael. And because it’s in Luke, if if Zechariah and Elizabeth were in Matthew, I think it’d be a more obvious connection to, you know, the Old Testament and the priesthood. Luke has a sensitivity to the temple. I think it certainly picks up those themes of barrenness, of the in small.

00:02:54:55 – 00:03:27:34
Clint Loveall
What is going to be the thrust of the story written large is the fulfillment of promise, even beyond hope. The people have hope for a messiah. The Israel itself feels barren and feels unable to recognize or, receive that promise. And yet here it is. And I think, you know, also this functions to in Luke to help us know that John the Baptist and Jesus are related, that John the Baptist is a forerunner.

00:03:27:39 – 00:03:51:14
Clint Loveall
John the Baptist has an incredibly important role in the gospel, and this helps Luke get there. But, typical of Luke, but not insignificant, but humble family, a priest, his wife needing something. Luke, we’ve said this. Luke loves broken people, struggling people. And here he certainly finds a couple in that category.

00:03:51:25 – 00:04:23:11
Michael Gewecke
I have two things to contribute here to this part of the conversation. I think the first is one thing that you need to remember. Is that what we have as our new Testament has a substantial time gap between the end of what we call our Old Testament. There’s this long period where there’s a rich selection of writings, but not the things that we have included in our Bible and the force of that.

00:04:23:11 – 00:05:01:37
Michael Gewecke
Is that what Luke tells us here of this angel coming and a prophetic word, even this idea of the Zechariah being made mute, claim that that God is taking action in really, interruption of a long period of time of silence in which the the prophets had spoken all of the things written and done. And then there’s this long period in which the people of Israel had this experience of God being silent, the prophets not speaking the not the kind of texts that we see at the end of what we call our Old Testament.

00:05:01:42 – 00:05:24:25
Michael Gewecke
And so what Luke is doing here in quite powerful way, is he’s connecting to what God had been doing and showing that God is doing it again, that God is speaking, and that here, when Zachariah engages with this revelation, you know you have a miraculous event occur. He becomes speechless. He becomes mute. We have stories like this in the Old Testament.

00:05:24:25 – 00:05:50:45
Michael Gewecke
So there’s a connective tissue that Luke is drawing back on here. And I see your point completely. I think that that would be natural to us if it was Matthew, which is both the book that adjoins the Old Testament, but also with the themes of Matthew. But I think we might miss, and this is my second point, what we might miss, Clint, as modern 21st century Christians is we might miss understand the importance of John the Baptist.

00:05:50:45 – 00:06:20:47
Michael Gewecke
There’s not just two characters in this. There’s the third. John the Baptist is an essential character in the Christ story because John the Baptist had an incredibly large reputation. He stood very, very tall. He was drawing crowds from all over. And so the gospel writers of all work, John the Baptist, into their stories, because he’s a person. You can’t tell the story of Jesus without we who are growing up on Jesus stories.

00:06:20:47 – 00:06:40:30
Michael Gewecke
I think we might know John the Baptist because ultimately he’s the one who we know baptizes Jesus. And so therefore, since he intersects with Jesus’s story, we know he’s important. But the early church seems to have had an awareness of and an importance for John the Baptist. So I think does extend beyond the awareness that we have today.

00:06:40:30 – 00:07:04:39
Michael Gewecke
Clint. And if that is the case, then I think the fact that John the Baptist story, even as the forerunner to Christ, precedes Jesus’s birth story, makes sense because Luke wants us to understand that though John the Baptist came first, he was not the ultimate revelation. He he was the penultimate revelation. He was the one who stood before the coming of the Christ.

00:07:04:39 – 00:07:14:51
Michael Gewecke
And that’s going to be literally first paragraphs of Luke’s telling. He wants us to know that the ordering here isn’t of importance, it’s of chronology.

00:07:14:56 – 00:08:03:10
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And all of the gospels include John the Baptist story. Luke goes an extra mile to the origin story that even his birth is intertwined with Jesus birth, not only his life and his ministry, but his very entering the world is a part of the larger story of the coming of the Christ. And that matters to Luke, because John calls out the rich and powerful, and John preaches repentance and all of the same things that make him attractive to the other gospel authors as well, only more so, I think, in some of those ways in Luke, then we go from those humble people, in Luke again, remember that Luke seems to have a heart

00:08:03:10 – 00:08:37:28
Clint Loveall
for the outsiders. And so Luke introduces us to the shepherds. I’m not counting angels as characters here, Michael. Maybe we should, because certainly they they announce and they proclaim, but I, I, I don’t think. I don’t know of and maybe there is, I can’t not even begin to think of an equivalent story, of a prominent birth that involves something like random shepherds showing up.

00:08:37:33 – 00:09:10:39
Clint Loveall
This is, I think we’re used to the Christmas story. So we don’t find this rattling. We don’t find this troubling. We don’t find this strange. Because, of course, shepherds married the. We know that the angels told them to. But if you could try to imagine yourself encountering this story for the first time, being told that this is the incarnate Son of God being born, and here comes shepherds, it it’s very strange.

00:09:10:44 – 00:09:25:28
Clint Loveall
I think it it fits. It’s completely at home with who Luke is and what Luke is doing. But I think we miss how unusual it is.

00:09:25:33 – 00:10:07:07
Michael Gewecke
Clint. An angelic choir singing to shepherds and the glory of the Lord. It is very difficult to dislodge the comfort that we have with these stories, because when you have even. We just recently had our own Christmas program, and you have a beautiful young child of God representing the angel and standing there, it’s wonderful and sweet. But when you think not just the birth of, a king or a prince, you’re thinking, this is the birth of the creator of the universe.

00:10:07:12 – 00:10:44:03
Michael Gewecke
Know what Luke is trying to tell us is the story of the man who bore the sinfulness of humanity, that we might be reunited with God, that the sin of creation could be turned, and that we could be reconnected, redeemed, and when you think of who the choir’s going, you show up to, and you recognize that it is the people who are the least expected, and every culture has jobs that are going to be the least expected jobs, whatever those are, these are not the headliners that the announcement gets made to.

00:10:44:07 – 00:11:12:34
Michael Gewecke
What’s so important in that telling, Clint, is that is that Luke wants to make it clear that the birth of Jesus was not some kind of competition to world power. When Jesus is born, there is in Matthew this sense that Herod and we’ll talk about Herod, that there’s this sense in which this is going to have immediate impact in the sociopolitical world in which Jesus was born into.

00:11:12:46 – 00:11:37:46
Michael Gewecke
But Luke here that Herod’s not upset in Luke. I mean, at this point, the shepherds find out these this young family goes, they offer the, the the provision for the poor family at the sacrifice in the temple. It really this is happening in so many ways off the radar of things that people would have considered important Christians.

00:11:37:51 – 00:11:59:38
Michael Gewecke
Christmas is important to us. And so therefore this is a big story. And so the fact that the shepherds go but really and I was just talking about this this morning with some folks that one of the astonishing parts of Luke’s telling of the shepherds, they are the first witnesses in Luke to who Jesus is and what God has done in the world.

00:11:59:52 – 00:12:27:22
Michael Gewecke
And they are the most surprising witnesses that you would have ever picked. And yet this is who God picks. And so it’s astonishing how all of our years of telling the story might in some ways inoculate us to seeing the, the, the brashness of what this is portraying. And yet there is beauty in that brashness. There’s a wonderful kind of openness to God’s intention that we see happening with the shepherds.

00:12:27:27 – 00:13:00:25
Clint Loveall
Or just compare the two narratives in one. You have relatively esteemed men, priests or kings or whatever we would call them, showing up with extravagant gifts and saying, we found you by following the heavenly sign. And in the other story you have night shepherds saying, an angel told us there was a baby in Bethlehem, and go, look for some people in a stable, right?

00:13:00:25 – 00:13:21:50
Clint Loveall
It’s just that they’re laughably different. I mean, the the effect that they have, the force that they have is equal, but very opposite. And so, yeah, the shepherds are in some ways maybe the strangest addition. Well, to all of the characters.

00:13:21:50 – 00:13:41:27
Michael Gewecke
But Clint just I mean, I think we read past this, but I almost wonder if Luke is giving us a hint here in verse 19. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. I just wonder, I don’t know if Luke got a chance to sit down with Mary or not, but I can imagine Mary telling this story and trying to recount the craziness of that night.

00:13:41:40 – 00:13:52:48
Michael Gewecke
And Luke just wants us to know. Yeah. And Mary was trying to ponder and figure all that out because it was that crazy. It is an astonishing story if we’re able to hear it.

00:13:52:53 – 00:14:21:12
Clint Loveall
Well, and she has been before an angel at that point. I mean, the. Yeah, that it is it is wonderfully strange that that moves us to Matthew’s telling. And I suppose maybe we start with those wise men, Michael. They’re the kind of the first ones to show up on the scene. We covered them a little bit a couple of weeks ago.

00:14:21:23 – 00:14:49:05
Clint Loveall
We don’t know a great deal about what we call the Magi. Probably not kings. Certainly Matthew presents them as genuine as people who believe that they’ve seen a sign and they interpret what it means. In fact, they alone, outsiders from the East, interpret what it means. No one else has yet put that together. Presumably, they could also see it.

00:14:49:10 – 00:15:27:59
Clint Loveall
They have enough clout that they show up at Herod’s palace and are welcomed. Right. The they also seem to be naive enough that when Herod says, I’d like to worship him, too, they don’t ask questions of that there. It’s a bare bones writing. It would be nice to be able to fill in some of the gaps, but I suppose in some way this is more in tune with Matthew’s presentation of the celestial universal deity that is King of the kings, right?

00:15:27:59 – 00:15:48:41
Clint Loveall
That this is the kind of welcoming party you would expect for royalty, though. Not not everything about them is usual is normal, right? But certainly it’s more along the lines of what you would think of.

00:15:48:54 – 00:16:13:44
Michael Gewecke
There’s a universality of this text. Anyone could have seen that star in the sky there. There is, of course, a specialty. And these three particular or, these wise men. I just said three. The text doesn’t say three, that these wise men get access to that when they follow it. And then ultimately, it’s Herod who wants that exact detail.

00:16:13:44 – 00:16:17:49
Michael Gewecke
When exactly did you see it? But ostensibly that everyone could have known it?

00:16:17:51 – 00:16:44:54
Clint Loveall
Well, and that’s what I was going to say, Michael, there’s a sense in which this presentation of the story is a little bit more like unraveling a mystery. We saw a star. We think it means this where would he be born? And they go to the scriptures and they come back and they say, Bethlehem. There’s a little bit more of a puzzle aspect to this text, whereas in Luke you just have the pronouncement, you have angels telling people things and people trying to figure out what those things mean here.

00:16:44:54 – 00:16:56:39
Clint Loveall
There’s a little bit of decoding that that needs to happen, which is Matthew’s way we think of helping his Jewish audience take the journey with him.

00:16:56:43 – 00:17:19:18
Michael Gewecke
And I think what’s fascinating, too, is that we, at least as it relates to the wise men, I think we often think all the way up to the point where they land at our nativity scenes, which, by the way, I don’t think synchronized with Luke in the way that we like to think that it does. But so they come, they give these gifts right?

00:17:19:22 – 00:17:55:08
Michael Gewecke
A really important part of this story is what happens at the end of that visit, right? It’s that ultimately, verse 12 and having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they, the wise men, left for their own country by another road. In other words, it’s not just that they follow the star, it’s also that they were receptive to divine guidance, to not go back and to equip Herod because of his evil desire to do away with a threat.

00:17:55:08 – 00:18:25:01
Michael Gewecke
And we’re going to see that in explicit detail. I just think it’s easy for us to think gold, frankincense, myrrh. That’s the wise men’s contribution. Well, in a way, the wise men are unwitting accomplices to some horrific violence committed by Herod because they let him in on this knowledge that would have been public. But he missed. And then in another way, they do demonstrate wisdom and getting that vision, that dream.

00:18:25:01 – 00:18:51:45
Michael Gewecke
And then they take a different road home. And that provides a moment where this young family can escape, and find safety. But, Clint, I just think, though we’ve said already that Luke’s telling of the Christmas story in the shepherds is is strange. There’s a way in which I think that Matthew’s telling is no less strange. I it embeds within it that idea of mystery.

00:18:51:45 – 00:19:15:10
Michael Gewecke
It embeds within it. This idea of characters making choices that are not just a simple set of yes and kind of choices. There’s a lot of complexity portrayed here from Joseph, who gets that, vision from an angel all the way up here to visions happening with the wise men. There’s so much sort of game time decisions being made.

00:19:15:10 – 00:19:17:51
Michael Gewecke
Excuse the analogy, but yeah.

00:19:17:56 – 00:19:47:06
Clint Loveall
So, I think while we could see in Luke’s version struggle. Right. There’s a couple they appear to maybe not have a lot of resources. They’re away from home and their support systems. Baby going in a manger, which sounds wonderful to us, but has to be very troubling for Mary and Joseph and their families when they hear those stories.

00:19:47:11 – 00:20:27:57
Clint Loveall
But there’s really no danger in the text. There’s struggle. There’s wonder. Yeah, there’s strangeness, but there’s not threat. That’s very different. In Matthew story, as soon as Herod enters, you know, imagine a play where you have the character walk on stage and you hear dunt, dunt, that that’s the idea here. As soon as the word Herod is written in this story, now there’s a shadow, now there’s a threat, because Herod is going to prove what he’s capable of in the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem in order to try and get to the Christ.

00:20:27:57 – 00:21:05:24
Clint Loveall
And so, again, this is the kind of territory that is known to Matthew’s readers, the story of the Pharaoh who throws the children in the river, or who passes a law to do so. This is this is unfortunately ground that they know and a threat that they’re aware of. And so whereas in Luke, we have some difficulties here, we have an existential threat to the child and what he is and what he will become.

00:21:05:29 – 00:21:12:21
Clint Loveall
We get there in Luke, but we don’t start there. And I think it’s interesting that we absolutely start there. In Matthew’s version.

00:21:12:21 – 00:21:28:01
Michael Gewecke
You also have of course, another major political kind of leader named in Luke, when you have the the census being named, or am I wrong in that? I might be wrong in that. I think.

00:21:28:06 – 00:21:31:32
Clint Loveall
You know, Quirinius was the governor of Syria. That’s.

00:21:31:37 – 00:22:03:47
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. So I’m thinking chapter two, verse one, Emperor Augustus that said that all should be registered and take away. Quirinius was governor of Syria. So, here Luke is portraying a very different orientation to the powers that be. To your point, Herod is immediately goaded into self-protection, whereas here Mary and Joseph are caught in the machinations of a world beyond their control, that they have to go do this thing because they were told they needed to do it.

00:22:03:52 – 00:22:46:59
Clint Loveall
But none of those people are coming to destroy their child. Absolutely. It’s a very, just a very different reality. I think that leaves us kind of maybe the three most major characters in the story, and I think we will have enough to say about them that we’ll give them their own episode. So if you want to join us tomorrow, as we look at that Mary at Joseph and Jesus and what we learn from them in this story, hope there’s been something in our rambling today that maybe helps with the Christmas story, helps place some things together, or at least gives us a little better appreciation for the two variants that give us the overall story.

00:22:47:04 – 00:23:01:17
Clint Loveall
Because I do think sometimes we are so familiar with the Big Picture Christmas that when we zoom in, we’re surprised by some of the details of what is and isn’t there in the text itself. So I hope there something that’s helpful.

00:23:01:26 – 00:23:07:46
Michael Gewecke
Like this video if there has been and certainly subscribe so you don’t miss this study and ones like it. See you tomorrow.