TITLE - Jesus: The One Who Can Empathize With Our Hurts
SERIES - Matthew’s Portrait of Jesus As The Fulfillment of God’s Promises
(Sermon #3)
TEXT - Matthew 2:19–23
DATE PREACHED - February 8, 2009
COPYRIGHT © JOE LA RUE, 2009
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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INTRODUCTION
A. Hook: Have you ever been abused, or mistreated?
1. Perhaps you have felt the sting of an insult thrown at you for something you could not change. Maybe it was how you looked, or how you talked, or how smart you were (or weren’t), or the fact that you were poor (or rich), or where you grew up (or didn’t grow up). But whatever it was, you couldn’t change it or do anything about it. And you were insulted because of it. People made fun of you and called you names. You were the butt of their jokes. And there was nothing you could do to make it stop, because they were cruel and you could not change who you were or where you came from. If it has ever happened to you, you can probably still feel the sting of their insults and mocking.
2. Maybe you were not insulted as much as you were just left out. You were excluded by the very people that you wanted to be accepted by. Maybe you were the last one picked for the team. Or, maybe you were the one who was not invited to the party. Or maybe you felt unwanted and unloved by your family, or maybe by your spouse. You were rejected, when all you wanted was to be accepted and loved. But you never received that, at least not from the people that really mattered. If it has ever happened to you, you most likely still carry some scars from that. You still feel the tremendous pain that comes from being excluded and unwanted.
3. Or, maybe you were overlooked. Maybe you accomplished something important at work, or in your family, or even in your church, but someone else got the credit. Maybe you felt like you were kind of invisible, and no one really saw you what you had accomplished and could accomplish. Other people got accolades while you just kept getting the job done, but with no recognition.
4. Or, maybe you were not overlooked, but rather you were focused upon in hateful, unfair ways, like what happened to Billy Wolfe. No one knows for sure why Billy became the victim of school bullying, as opposed to someone else. But for whatever reason, Billy became the target. He got beat up for the first time in middle school, and the bullying continued throughout junior high and on into high school. He has been made fun of, insulted, and physically attacked, over and over. He’s been assaulted so badly that medical treatment was required to fix the damage. He’s been attacked on the school bus, in the bathroom, and in the classroom. His classmates even started a group on Facebook, a popular internet site, called “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.” They posted a picture of him on the web page and called him perverse and unflattering names, posting them on the Internet for all the world to see. And when one asks the obvious question, “Why?,” there is simply no answer. No one knows. Billy is simply hated, and treated viciously.
(Dan Berry, A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly, New York Times (March 24, 2008), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/us/24land.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq=bullying&st=cse&scp=2 (last visited February 3, 2009)).
Hopefully you’ve never been treated like Billy. But, if you have ever been hated, I imagine it was an experience that you will never forget.
B. Perhaps there are people here this morning for whom the types of experiences I have been describing are not a thing of the past. Perhaps they are ongoing events of your present. Maybe right now you are being left out and rejected by those you want to accept you. Or, maybe right now you feel the pain that comes from being insulted or made fun of. Or perhaps right now you know what it is to be hated. Maybe your present is filled with mistreatment and abuse.
C. If you have felt this way or do feel this way, or if you love someone who does, I have good news for you this morning. Jesus understands. He has been there, too. He has been mistreated and abused. He has been insulted and ostracized for things he could not change. He has been rejected by those he desperately wanted to be close to. And he has been hated for no reason. He understands. He knows what it feels like. He can empathize with our emotional pain.
D. We are continuing this week with our study in which we are looking at the Gospel of Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promises. Open your Bibles to Matthew, chapter 2. As I have previously explained, on a number of occasions Matthew tells us about something Jesus did or something Jesus said, and then explains how that action or those words fulfilled something God had promised long ago. Matthew does this to underscore for us that Jesus really is the hero that God promised to send into our world to save us. Let’s look at the second of those promises this morning. It is found in the second chapter of Matthew, beginning in the nineteenth verse. Look at it with me. Matt 2:19–23. The Bible says,
19After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20and 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.” 21So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22But 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, 23and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarene.” (Matt 2:19–23, New International Version).
E. So there you have it. Matthew says that Jesus grew up in Nazareth in order to fulfill what was said through the prophets. There is only one problem with that: None of the prophets ever said that Jesus would grow up in Nazareth or be called a Nazarene! You can search the Old Testament books of Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Daniel and Ezekiel, and all the other prophets from cover to cover. You will not find this statement. It is simply not in there.
F. So, what are we to make of this? Did Matthew get it wrong? No, Matthew did not mess up or misquote a prophet. As we will see shortly, he got it exactly right when he said that the prophets had said that Jesus would be called a Nazarene. But Matthew’s words are only understandable if we know something about Nazareth, and then notice the types of things that the Old Testament prophets said about Jesus. So, let me share with you first a little background information about this village called Nazareth.
I. NAZARETH WAS A BACKWATER, HICK TOWN FILLED WITH PEOPLE WHO WERE THOUGHT TO BE ’INSIGNIFICANT.’
A. Nazareth in Jesus’s time was a tiny agricultural village, made up of perhaps 500 or so residents. It was located in the part of the land known as Galilee, in the northern part of the country of Israel. Nazareth was near larger, important towns. But Nazareth itself was considered unimportant and insignificant. In the language of today, we would call it a “backwater town,” or a “hick town.”
B. And those from Nazareth were looked down upon by everyone else.
1. For instance, in John’s Gospel we read about how one of Jesus’s apostles, Philip, invited a friend of his named Nathanael to come meet Jesus. Nathanael would eventually become one of Jesus’s apostles, too, but when Philip first talked to him about Jesus he was quite the skeptic. He didn’t think that Jesus could possibly be important. And the reason why he felt that way is what I want us to notice. Look at John 1:45–46 with me. In verse 45 of John chapter one, Philip says to Nathanael, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” (John 1:45, NIV). And Nathanael scoffed at the suggestion that the Messiah could come from Nazareth. Look at what he said in verse 46: “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46, NIV). Can anything good come from Nazareth?
2. Or, look at John 7:52 with me. Here we read about how a member of the Jewish ruling council named Nicodemus stuck up for Jesus when he was being verbally slandered by other members of the council. Nicodemus was the one who had come to Jesus in the middle of the night and had asked Jesus to explain some of his teaching (John 2). Now, some time later, when Jesus was being criticized by the ruling council, Nicodemus spoke up. He asked his fellow councilors, “Does our law condemn anyone without first hearing him to find out what he is doing?” Now, look at verse 52: “They replied, ‘Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.’” (John 7:52, NIV).
a. They were wrong about this. Seven hundred years earlier, the Old Testament prophet Jonah had come from the village of Gath Hepher, which was in Galilee (2 Kings 14:25).
b. So, they were wrong when they said that no prophet comes from Galilee. And, of course, they overlooked the fact that God can choose whomever from wherever he wants. But their mistakes are not the point. The really important thing that I want you to see is that by the time of Jesus, the entire region of Galilee was held in pretty low esteem. The leaders of the people would go so far as to say that no prophet could come from there. Not from Galilee. And, certainly not from Nazareth.
3. So it is not surprising that, after Jesus’s Resurrection, when the Jewish leaders wanted to marginalize the early Christians and make them seem insignificant, they referred to them in Acts chapter 24 verse 5 as “the Nazarene sect” (Acts 24:5).
4. And, in the Talmud—a non-biblical book recording the teachings of different ancient Jewish rabbis, or teachers—we find this same use of the word, Nazarene, to smear Jesus. (Sanhedrin 43a (M)).
C. Nazarene was a term of derision, because Nazareth was thought to be unimportant and insignificant. Important people came from Jerusalem. They did not come from Nazareth. To come from Nazareth said something about you, and it wasn’t good. To be a Nazarene was to be looked down upon by everybody else. And so Nathanael asked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” He was simply repeating the popular view of the time.
D. Trans: Now, with that as background, let’s consider some of the things that the Old Testament prophets had said would be true about the Messiah, the hero that God would send to save us.
II. THE PROPHETS FORETOLD THAT MOST PEOPLE WOULD NOT RECOGNIZE THE MESSIAH WHEN HE CAME, BUT WOULD INSTEAD REJECT HIM.
A. First, the prophets had foretold that the Messiah would not be recognized. He would not be what they were expecting.
1. For instance, Isaiah wrote in Isa 53 that the Messiah would have “no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, [and] nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” (Isa 53:2, NIV). In other words, he would be insignificant. There would not be any of the usual kingly trappings or characteristics associated with the Messiah. Instead, he would appear common, and unrecognized.
2. By the time of Jesus, the people expected that the Messiah would be an earthly king who would lead an army to deliver them from the power of the Romans. They had failed to understand that the Messiah would instead be a spiritual king who would die on a cross to save them from the power of Satan. They expected the Messiah to come from some ‘kingly place,’ like Jerusalem. They did not anticipate that he would grow up in a hicksville like Nazareth.
3. Trans: And so, when Jesus the Messiah came, they did not recognize him, just as the prophets had foretold.
B. Second, the prophets had foretold that the Messiah would not only go unrecognized, but he would be despised and rejected.
1. In Isa 49:7 we read that the Messiah would be “despised and abhored by the nation,” and in Isa 53:3 we see that he would be “despised and rejected by men,” and Isaiah concludes that verse by saying that his nation of Israel would not “esteem” the Messiah—in other words, they would not recognize him and accord him the honor that he deserved.
2. King David, writing as a prophet in Psalm 22:6, similarly says that the Messiah would be “scorned by men, and despised by the people.” Similarly, Daniel foretold in Dan 9:26 that the Messiah would be “cut off” and would “have nothing,” referring to how nearly everyone would reject him by the time he was crucified, and how it would appear that he was a complete and utter failure.
3. A despised, rejected failure. Sounds like somebody who might come from Nazareth, doesn’t it?
C. Had Jesus grown up in a more kingly place like, say, Jerusalem, things might have been different. Had he grown up in Bethlehem, where he was born, things would have definitely been different.
1. The Jewish teachers at least knew that the Messiah was suppose to come from Bethlehem. When the magi visited King Herod and told him that they had seen a star signifying the coming of a new king, Herod hurriedly sent for the priests and teachers and asked them where the Messiah was to be born. Without hesitation, they replied, “In Bethlehem,” because the Old Testament prophet Micah had said so (Matt 2:1–6).
2. Had Jesus grown up in Bethlehem, they might have recognized him. They might not have rejected him. They might even have responded to him. But that means that they also would not have sought to remove him by having him killed. That means that there might not have been a cross, which means that Jesus would not have died as a sacrifice for us. Which means that we would have no chance for forgiveness of our sins.
a. That’s why it was so important that the Messiah not be recognized, but rather that he be rejected! That was the only way that he could die in our place.
b. Without rejection, there would not have been a cross.
D. And so the prophets foretold that the Messiah would go unrecognized, and be rejected. I suspect that even as they wrote those words, they did not understand how that would possibly be the case. Yet, they wrote what God told them to write, and believed that God would bring it about, even if they did not fully understand it all.
III. THE PROMISE FULFILLED: JESUS IS THE REJECTED AND DESPISED ONE!
A. And, hundreds of years later, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. But he did not grow up there. God arranged events so that his family first fled to Egypt in order to escape from Herod, who was trying to kill Jesus. Then, when Herod died, God arranged it so that Jesus grew up in obscurity in Nazareth, a village that was sure to lead to him being unrecognized, despised, and rejected, just as the prophets had said.
B. Look at our text again with me. Matt 2:19–23. The Bible says,
19After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20and 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.” 21So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22But 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, 23and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarene.” (Matt 2:19–23, New International Version).
1. And indeed he was. During the course of his life, and even after his death, Jesus was referred to by his enemies as ‘the Nazarene.’ It was a term of insult and rejection. Even people like Nathanael, who were not necessarily his enemies, looked down on him and called him that. Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
2. Just as the prophets had said, Jesus went unrecognized and suffered rejection by those he loved. In one especially moving moment, shortly before his crucifixion, Jesus spoke about his countrymen and said, “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, but you were not willing.” (Matt 23:37, NIV). And you know how his story ends. His rejection led to the cross.
C. Matthew, right here in the beginning of his Gospel, reminds us that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah would be despised, rejected, and unrecognized.
1. Now, it’s important that we understand that in the original Greek text that Matthew wrote, there are no quotation marks around what people say. The Greek language at that time did not use them. So, where English translations of the Bible like the New International Version from which I have been reading put ‘he shall be called a Nazarene’ in quotes, they are making an assumption that Matthew was quoting the prophets.
a. But, we have already said that this so-called ‘quote’ is not found in any of the prophets.
b. So, the NIV has this wrong. There should not be quotation marks around this phrase. Matthew is not directly quoting the prophets. Rather, he is summarizing the teaching of the prophets.
(1) The prophets had taught that the Messiah would be rejected and despised, and would go unrecognized.
(2) And Matthew summarizes that truth by saying that the prophets had taught that Jesus would be called a Nazarene. Back in Matthew’s day, to call someone a Nazarene meant that they were despised and rejected. No one would recognize them even if they were someone important. They were from Nazareth, and that made them insignificant.
D. And Jesus fulfilled this promise of the prophets to the tee. He grew up in Nazareth.
E. Trans: Now what does this all mean for you and me?
IV. THE APPLICATION OF THE PROMISE: JESUS IS THE ONE WHO CAN EMPATHIZE WITH OUR HURTS.
A. First, it means that Jesus really understands what it feels like when we are hurting. We can never say, “God, you just don’t understand what it’s like,” because Jesus does. Whatever hurt we may feel, he has felt the same type of hurt.
1. If you are feeling the sting of insults, Jesus has felt that sting, too. He knows what it’s like to be put down and called names and made fun of. He understands.
2. Or, if you are hurting because you have been rejected by one you love or left out of a group you wanted to be part of, Jesus has felt that same hurt. He knows what it feels like and how badly it hurts. He understands.
3. Or, if you have been overlooked, or if you feel invisible, Jesus understands those feelings, too. He was the Messiah, the hero God had promised to send, yet by and large he went unrecognized during his lifetime. He understands.
4. Or, maybe you have been hated. Maybe people are unfairly out to get you. Jesus understands that, too. It happened to him.
5. Whatever hurt we may feel, for whatever reason, Jesus understands it. The Bible says in Heb 4:15 that Jesus is not someone who is “unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” No, he understands completely what it is like to be unrecognized, and despised, and rejected. He can empathize with us.
B. Second, not only can Jesus empathize with us, but we can also trust him to carry our hurt for us if we will let him. The Bible says in 1 Pet 5:7 that we should “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.” (1 Pet 5:7, New Living Translation). This means that no matter what we are going through, we can trust God to take care of us through it. And that includes the emotional pain we face in this life.
1. But the only reason I can fully trust God to help me with emotional pain is that Jesus himself experienced this type of pain.
2. ILL: Let me explain what I mean. If you are like me, making ends meet is hard sometimes. There are bills to pay, and things we need, and then things we want, and our money only goes so far. Sometimes we have to pick and choose what we can afford to buy, and what we cannot. And some folks even have to choose which bills they will pay this month, and which they will leave unpaid until next month. Those are hard decisions. Now, tell me: Do you think that somebody like Bill Gates or Donald Trump understands what it is like to have to choose between paying the heating bill or buying groceries? Most of us think, “No. They don’t understand. They can’t understand. Choices like that aren’t part of their world.” In the same way, had Jesus not suffered rejection and heartbreak and pain, we might well think that God could not really understand those emotions. And that would make it harder to believe that he will really help us and take care of us when we are hurting.
C. But Jesus understands. And that means that he can be trusted to help us through the pain and hurt we feel, and encourage us through it, if we will rely upon him. He knows what it’s like. He knows what you’re going through. And, he cares. He cares for you.
D. One more thing: Jesus cares for the person sitting next to you, too. And he cares for the people beyond these walls. He cares for everyone. And that means that if you are the one hurting someone else, or rejecting them or insulting them or hating them, you need to stop it. Jesus cares about them, and he knows what their hurt feels like. He doesn’t want you to hurt them. So, if you are the one doing the hurting, stop.
CONCLUSION
A. We’ve reached our time of decision, where we offer an opportunity for you to respond to this message. Maybe you are going through some type of emotional suffering this morning. Maybe you feel rejected, or hated, or ignored, or overlooked. Maybe you need to know that someone cares, and is on your side.
1. I want to assure you right now: you matter to God. That’s why Jesus came into our world and suffered what he suffered. He came because you matter, and because you are loved. You matter more, and are loved more, than you can possibly know or understand.
2. And, while people will hurt us and disappoint us and reject us, God never will. Jesus suffered rejection and died for us, so that we would never have to be rejected by God. He was rejected, so we can be eternally accepted.
3. The Bible says that if we want to accept God’s offer to forgive us and accept us and embrace us forever, we must trust Jesus to make us right with God, and start trying to live in right ways that please God, and be baptized. And, when we do those three things—when we trust Jesus, and repent, and are baptized, the Bible says that God forgives our sins, and places His presence inside us to help us and encourage us, and promises us that he will accept us forever and give us heaven.
B. Are you ready to make that decision for Jesus today? Or, would you like to have someone pray for you today, about whatever hurt you are feeling? Or, do you have another decision you need to make? Perhaps you want to officially place your membership with our church family, or maybe you want to rededicate your life to Christ’s service. If you are ready to do any of these things, please come forward as we sing our invitation hymn. I’ll meet you down front and talk with you quietly and help you take the steps you need to take to know for sure that you are accepted by God, because Jesus was rejected for us. Please, come forward as we sing.
