Ordinary History

Besides the fulfillment of Scripture, a secondary theme that weaves throughout Matthew 2:13-23 is the ordinary way in which the early life of Jesus unfolds. Especially when Luke’s birth narrative is considered alongside Matthew’s telling, we have no doubt that this child of Mary is expected to be someone great. But when the page is turned from the visit of the magi to the events in Matt 2:13-23, one may wonder why things seem to fall out in such an ordinary way. To be sure, there is nothing ordinary about the dream revelations that Joseph receives throughout the text, but there is something very ordinary about a threatened family fleeing for safety. We may wonder why God did not simply surround Bethlehem with legions of angels to guard the Christ child. We may wonder why The Son of David had to be carried away into exile, as it were, under the cover of darkness until Herod the Great should die. If Jesus is so extraordinary, why is his early history so ordinary?

In the first place, and as I make note in my sermon, the ordinariness of Jesus’ early history fits well with the final fulfillment formula in Matt 2:23 that Jesus would be called a Nazarene. D. A. Carson makes a compelling argument that this fulfillment refers to the suffering servant motif in the OT.[1] To be a Nazarene is to be despised and rejected, as Nathanael suggests prior to meeting Jesus (John 1:46). In addition, the narration of Jesus’ early history as a whole emphasizes his solidarity with those he came to save. By working within the parameters of ordinary history, including the natural passage of time, God underscores for us the priestly sympathy that Jesus can express for us. In many important respects, he lived an ordinary life so that he might sympathize with our ordinary lives.

More generally, both the context and content of the gospels underscore the value of ordinariness. Christopher Watkin summarizes this well when he writes,

The very language of the gospel accounts reinforces this interest in the “ordinary person.” The New Testament is written in Koine Greek, the street Greek of the marketplace and the city gate, not the posh Greek of Plato and Sophocles, and it is not written to be admitted as an artifact or drooled over by learned scholars but to meet normal people where they are and speak to them in their own language. In a culture in which rhetorical dexterity was a mark of rising above the great unwashed, the Koine Greek of the New Testament cannot but be read as a political statement subversive of social one-upmanship and as an extension of the incarnational principle by which God the Son sets aside his splendor in becoming Jesus the carpenter’s son. The everydayness of the Gospels is further reinforced by the content of Jesus’s teaching. In his parables he does not choose scenarios from the lives of the rich and privileged but predominantly from fishing, farming, shepherding, and day laboring: the “working class” occupations of the day.[2]

It is fitting that Jesus’ own life would not be untouched by the reality of ordinary life. To be the representative of a new humanity, it was fitting for him to live through ordinary history.

A useful extension of this idea for ourselves is the reminder that the history of salvation continues beyond the narration of the Gospels and Acts. While there is significant culture and historical distance between what we read about Jesus and his disciples, there is also unbroken continuity between those events and our lives. That is to say, what we read about in the Bible is not an abstraction of everyday life presented as inspiring stories but concrete events in ordinary history that is organically connected to the ordinary history of our lives. To be sure, much has happened between the days of Jesus and our own day, and that unfolding of history has to be taken into consideration when we reflect on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, but also every event that has happened between the days of Jesus and our own day is part of God’s plan to bring all his people to saving faith in the promised Messiah. Just as Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the OT because God has always had one plan of redemption, so the events of ordinary history continue to unfold according to that same plan of redemption. We can thus take great comfort in the knowledge that the history of the gospels is our history, that Jesus has been given all authority and power, and that he will come again one day to make all things new, precisely because Jesus entered into and continues to guide ordinary history.

[1] D. A. Carson, Matthew, Rev., The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, ed. Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland (Zondervan, 2010).

[2] Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 375.