The Preacher's Lectionary Notebook - Thematic Connections
The First Sunday after Christmas (Year A)
I have decided to publish an additional post each week to “The Preacher’s Lectionary Notebook,”— making thematic connections between each week’s readings. For those who like to draw out the interrelatedness of the passages, I hope this is helpful. I will also be publishing this post and the post on the Gospel lesson on Monday of each week, and the Old Testament and Epistle readings on Tuesday, so that my reflections will be available earlier in the week.
Isaiah 63:7-9; Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23
These three texts circle around the notion of a God who does not save from a safe distance, but enters fully into the vulnerability, suffering, and danger of human life. Isaiah looks backward, rehearsing the story of Israel with gratitude and wonder. The prophet recalls the “steadfast love” and “great goodness” of the Lord, insisting that God was not a detached rescuer but one who shared Israel’s pain. “In all their distress, he too was distressed,” Isaiah says, describing a God who accompanies the people through affliction and personally carries them. Salvation, in this vision, is relational and participatory. God redeems not by issuing commands or decrees, but by being present, bearing burdens, and walking with the people through the long memory of suffering.
Hebrews 2 picks up that same conviction and pushes it to its deepest expression. The writer insists that God’s saving purpose required full identification with humanity. The Son does not hover above human experience but shares “flesh and blood,” entering mortality, weakness, and fear. Suffering is not an unfortunate side effect of salvation; it is the means by which redemption is accomplished. Jesus is made “perfect through sufferings,” not in a moral sense, but in the sense of being fully fitted to stand in solidarity with those being saved. Because he suffers, he becomes a merciful and faithful high priest, able to help those who are tested. Hebrews emphasizes that salvation is not abstract or symbolic. It is embodied, costly, and grounded in lived human experience, including fear of death and exposure to harm.
Matthew’s account of the flight into Egypt shows what this solidarity looks like on the ground. The child who will save his people does not begin life in safety or stability. He becomes a refugee, hunted by political violence, dependent on the obedience and courage of others, and displaced from his homeland. Herod’s brutality echoes Pharaoh’s violence, and Matthew intentionally frames Jesus’ story within Israel’s story of exile and deliverance. The Messiah enters the world not as a protected figure insulated from danger, but as a vulnerable child caught in the crosshairs of empire. Even geography participates in salvation history as Jesus retraces Israel’s path through Egypt, exile, and return.
These passages tell a unified story of a God whose compassion is inseparable from presence. Isaiah declares that God shares the distress of the people. Hebrews explains how that sharing becomes flesh in Jesus, who suffers alongside and for humanity. Matthew shows the concrete shape of that suffering in displacement, fear, and survival. The same God who once carried Israel now enters history as one who must be carried, hidden, and protected. Salvation emerges not through avoidance of pain but through faithful endurance within it. These texts insist that divine love is not proven by escape from suffering, but by God’s willingness to inhabit it fully and transform it from the inside out.
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
If salvation in these texts is accomplished through divine participation in suffering rather than deliverance from it, how should this reshape Christian expectations about God’s presence in ongoing pain, injustice, and unanswered prayer?
Based on these Scriptures, what does faithful endurance reveal about the way God works within history rather than above or outside of it?
In what ways do these texts deepen the church’s understanding of solidarity with those who live under fear, displacement, or oppression today?