Anonymous Asks (357)

“Was Jesus a refugee?”

The question arises out of Matthew 2, the only gospel that tells the story of how Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt on angelic instruction for some indeterminate period (scholarly estimates range from four months to a few years) after the birth of the Lord. Joseph’s objective was to protect his wife’s newborn child from King Herod’s attempt to kill off any potential competition for the throne. The flight to Egypt took place immediately after the visit of the wise men and lasted until after Herod died.

Had the family remained in Bethlehem, the four gospels may well have been a lot shorter. But God was at work, so Herod’s scheme was unsuccessful, and the Lord returned in good time in fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.

Adorning Doctrine

According to Wikipedia, homiletics is “the application of the general principles of rhetoric to the specific art of public preaching”. For those who have not studied rhetoric, its general principles are usually broken down as follows: ethos (the establishment of trust and credibility), pathos (appealing to the emotions) and logos (appealing to reason and logic). So then, homiletics has to do not so much with the content of the message, but rather with its composition and delivery. It is about taking a proposition and making it persuasive.

For Christian preachers, the starting point is the truth of God. Homiletics is about adorning it rather than veiling it, undermining it or otherwise sabotaging the attempt to communicate it.