Texts: Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25
In most crèches, manger scenes, and children’s pageants performed at churches everywhere, there is one who stands at the back of the stage, usually given only the task of knocking on the door of an overcrowded wayside inn, and then standing mutely by while the action unfolds. His name is Joseph. My father’s name was Joseph, and that may explain some of my fascination with this story.
Perhaps Joseph stands for all the good and moral people who periodically acknowledge a hunger for some sense of holiness but who remain puzzled, mostly, by religion. Christmas can evoke an special sense of spiritual hunger, longing to know what the good life might be, and perhaps, to experience God. I believe it true to say that one of the human heart’s greatest hope, AND greatest fear, is that God will truly come to us. At the same time, there are lots of people who think of themselves as believers who just want a little inoculation of Christianity, or religion—just enough so that they don’t catch the real thing; and Christmas, more than Easter, serves as their annual booster shot. To be touched by the holy spirit, as was that good man Joseph, that could be a fearful thing, radically changing everything we ever thought or hoped for or on which we have based our lives.
Most of us, of course, have merged the two nativity stories, unaware of how vastly different they are. Luke focuses on Mary, but Matthew’s central character is Joseph.
In this season, we love the sentimental strains of “Away in the Manger” with the animals cooing theologically over the “little Lord Jesus.” But those are Luke’s stage scenery and characters.
Matthew, however, literally does “away WITH the manger”. There is no manger or stable in Matthew’s version. Jesus is pictured as living in a house when the magi arrive. What Matthew gives us is the heart-ache and head-ache of Joseph—his dilemma of what to do about Mary, his interrupted sleep, his demanding, insistent dreams. We get the fear of Herod. We are told of the terrible slaughter of the innocents. Matthew’s story is far from sweet.
Old Matthew was a scholar for sure: he knew his Bible. He knew his vocation: to set forth the message that would continually reform the life of the community around the one who, for him as a Jew, was surely the new Moses, giving a new law or Torah, preached from a new mountain, to a community who would constitute a new Israel.
Matthew opens his gospel with a genealogy of Jesus, but it really isn’t the genealogy of Jesus, but of Joseph. There are 42 generations listed, 6 blocks of 7 names. The 7th age was believed to be an age of completeness and wholeness.
Matthew likes to do things in fives. There are 5 sections of his Gospel, symbolic of the five books of Moses. There are 5 OT citations in Matthew’s Christmas story. There are 5 women in the genealogy—all women with a reputation: Tamar and Rahab are prostitutes; Ruth a seductress and foreigner, as was Rahab; Bathsheba an adultress.
Then there are these curious parallels of the Joseph of the Torah and this Joseph, who will be called the husband of Mary—one from the beginning of the people named Israel; the other whose story will begin the story of a new covenant. In Matthew’s telling of this story, it seems as if nothing is left to chance. He has carefully crafted his story so that the central character is an adoptive father of the one who would bring new community, and appropriately bears the name of the old Joseph—whose name means “God will add”—who was sold into slavery by his brothers and who became an adoptive son of Pharaoh, and who would become an interpreter of royal dreams and the one to save his family from famine.
Again, nothing is left to chance in Matthew’s gospel—except…except the way that God leaves so many things to real human beings whose capacity for wisdom has always proven chancy at best, over the centuries since the dawn of creation.
Babies are the ultimate in chanci-ness. “Babies are pot luck”, a doctor once told me when I was pregnant with my first child and my husband was about to undergo life-threatening surgery for a genetic disorder. When it comes to babies, and children, so much is chance, so much is uncertainty, so much has the potential to unseat our certainties from their thrones in our thinking, if not in our feelings.
Joseph knew that, surely. If he had been a biblical literalist, he would have had Mary stoned to death, or, short of that, as Matthew says: “being a righteous man (a word here that means not only “true” to his convictions, but “generous”) and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”
Matthew, in his few sparse words about a puzzled and confused man, a decent man, a quiet and generous man—touches all those aspects of human life that we know so well: fear, concern for what people will say and think; impatience with the interruptions of life plans and career paths. Matthew offers us, in Joseph’s very human dilemma, the reality we need in a season overwrought with sentimentality and saccharine sweetness.
Matthew’s story is testament, if nothing in the rest of what follows convinces us, that being a Christian is not going to protect us from ambiguity, from decision-making, from determining how we will re-act to life’s slings and arrows of outrageous fate.
Joseph’s dilemma with Mary and this child she is carrying is precisely the same as God’s dilemma with humankind: how to reconcile justice with mercy? Absolute justice requires consequences to misdeeds. Mary should not only be divorced but stoned to death, according to the law. Truth with grace? Absolute truth rarely enhances interpersonal relationships. The old saw that you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free, also says: “But first the truth will hurt.” Perhaps Matthew knew that. As we sense the tension that surely must have been in Joseph’s heart and mind in this regard, we can come close to seeing the scandalous love of God for us. Joseph doesn’t whine or argue. Joseph takes Mary’s situation upon himself. Joseph prefigures in his own sacrifice how the story Matthew has begun will end.
In some strange and mysterious ways, Joseph bears the stigma in Mary’s place. No wonder that he is the central person in Matthew’s account of the birth of our Lord.
So Joseph waits with a Mary that is not the Mary of whom he dreamed, and to whom he originally pledged his troth. They both wait, as we too must wait for God to come to birth in our lives.
Joseph is the realist, practical, and, remarkably, not one to substitute an idolatry of Scripture with his own discernment of God’s will for his life.
Through Matthew we hear again of God’s assurance to be with us, a promise to be born in fact, in time, in the material realm. Because of Joseph, this child he did not know what to do with, will become the messiah we do not expect and who will be enthroned as king in awful degradation, crowned with thorns and not the gold we would want. We know the story, that this one who was born will also die, die in agony such as the worst physical agony a human being can know, and with the deepest feelings of abandonment. We know the story—that death’s abyss is bridged at last by God’s sacred, and powerful love.
Joseph had room in his mind to accept that God might ask him to set aside all the rules and regulations of the Holy Law. Even if he was a “by-the-book” kind of fellow, he went beyond the letter of the law to act out of Grace—and all that before the angel came to him in the dream. And Joseph had room in his heart for God with us. Joseph did more than wait: he acted to take into his life, into his estate and care, an infant that was not his, much as God takes us on for life, and asks us, as well, to act as responsible agents for the weak and vulnerable among us.
He comes. He comes for all of us. “Neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female; neither old or young or white or black or brown or gay or straight—he simply comes for all…as a vulnerable, threatening embodiment of love. He asks us to love him and to allow ourselves to be used by him. To temper truth with grace. To add more mercy to justice than punishment and consequences. To bear, with Joseph of long ago, the stigma of being a Christian in a world that seems to prefer the multiple illusions that God is in charge of everything that happens and leaves nothing to us chancy, risky human beings; that God is a magical fixer-upper for those who adhere to some ancient set of taboos, or that the Bible contains the only truth there is.
No, we believe that the Word was made flesh, and it is him we follow—not what is written in the book. Joseph stands as the alternative to that illusion that the Bible has the only truth, with a keen and courageous eye for reality, and with grace and mercy.
I don’t know whether any of Matthew’s story is true in the historical or factual sense of truth. But I do know that Joseph’s story is among the most true stories I’ve ever heard. And I thank God for Matthew’s telling of Joseph’s truth.
