New but Not Unique

On December 18, 2015, the force awakened. After a decade of Star Wars silence, the first installment of a new trilogy of films opened in the United States.

The Force Awakens was a smashing success. It became the highest grossing film of 2015, even though it released only a week before Christmas. It eventually became the fourth-highest grossing film of all time, earning well over $2 billion at the worldwide box office.

Both critics and fans loved it. It was certified “fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes and today remains the second-highest ranked movie in the Star Wars franchise, behind only The Empire Strikes Back.

What made The Force Awakens so successful? There’s a number of reasons we could list. For example, the film didn’t have anybody named Jar Jar Binks. But perhaps the most important reason was that the film was new but not unique.

If you were new to the Star Wars universe (as my children were when they watched it) you found a fast-paced space adventure that was fun to watch and easy to follow. You didn’t have to be a Star Wars nerd to find something in the movie to love.

But if you were a long-time Star Wars fan, the story had a richness and a depth that was inescapable. The plot, the characters, the dialogue, even some of the action sequences had unmistakable callbacks to earlier films.

It was new, but not unique. It was a new story that connected to an old story in an attempt to complete it. [1]

A similar thing happens in the Gospel of Matthew. The Apostle Matthew wants us to see the story of Jesus as new but not unique. It’s a new story that connects to an old story and completes it.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Matthew 2:13-23. Just after the visit from the magi, we see a young family forced to become refugees as they flee a bloodthirsty king. There are three scenes in this chapter, and in those three scenes we see three ways Jesus connects to and completes the Old Testament story.

Stay tuned this week as we examine those three ways together.  

[1] Credit for this illustration goes to Patrick Schreiner, Matthew, Disciple and Scribe: The First Gospel and Its Portrait of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2019), 54.