The Flight to Egypt
Readings:
Mtt 2:13-15
Hosea 11:1-4; 2:14-20
•Life often leads us to avoid vulnerability, fearing that it will only result in us feeling hurt, exploited, helpless, or betrayed. Yet it is in the midst of vulnerability that we are truly known, understood, and enjoyed. In what ways did your life experiences contribute to both value for and avoidance of vulnerability?
•Much like the leaders and people of Jerusalem living under Roman rule, feeling helpless and vulnerable easily leads us to put our hope in earthly sources of power for strength, safety, and security like they put theirs in King Herod. What sources of strength, safety, and security do we find ourselves and others prone too, today?
•The child Jesus models a life of vulnerability, in what ways do you see Jesus vulnerable in His humanity yet surrounded by strength, safety, and security in His Heavenly Father?
•In referencing Hosea 11:1 Matthew shows how Jesus fulfills God’s purpose for bringing Israel into and out of Egypt. What do the following verses reveal about what the nature and purpose of that time of Jesus’ life? Especially “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms... I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, …as one who eases the yoke…, and I bent down to them and fed them.”
•What does this reveal about how the Father plans, provides, and purposes to use our times of displacement, suffering, and wilderness?
•How should we view our vulnerability as with Christ and thus entrusted to a loving and perfect Father?
•How is our Jesus-fuelled vulnerability essential to our mission to spread the Gospel of Jesus to Oceanside?
