December 23, 2007
The Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year A)
Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7; Romans 1:1-7;Matthew 1:1-18
For the past three weeks the Advent readings have been pointing more to the spiritual reality and faithful hope that Christ will come again. But, as in all 4th Sundays in Advent, we turn this week to the last time Jesus came, and hear stories of his parents and their reactions to the news that they were going to be the ones responsible for caring for and raising the son of God, Emmanuel or Jesus. It is the one Sunday a year we speak of what it was like to be the parents of Jesus.
And two out of three years the fourth Sunday in Advent is dedicated to Mary, to her motherhood, but once every three years we hear about Joseph. And so today we are hearing about Joseph. We hear of him right at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew with the genealogy of Jesus which comes through Joseph’s family not Mary’s. Jesus is the great-grandson (many greats) of David and Solomon, and, of course, of Issac and Jacob, Uzziah and Ahaz, just to mention a few of the men. Interestingly in this one genealogy of Jesus we are also told of the foreign women who begat some of the grandfathers of Jesus: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and finally Mary, the wife of Joseph.
These are all interesting women and that they are included in this genealogy s more than profound and unusual. But this is not the time to speak of these women. Today is a time to speak of one of their progeny, Joseph. What we know of Joseph is limited of course. We know that he took Mary with him to Bethlehem to pay taxes. We know that he was with Mary when they took Jesus to the temple to be dedicated. We know he fled with them to Egypt. We know that he returned and settled in Nazareth, and that there he continued to care for the child. We know that when Jesus was twelve, Joseph and Mary took Jesus to the temple for Passover, and that when they returned to Nazareth, the child continued to be obedient to them. And that’s it. We do not know anything of the man Joseph except these minor facts drawn from the gospels, and certainly not in some nice, biographical order.
And frankly the most human glimpse we get of Joseph is in the gospel this morning, the human glimpse of an honorable man thinking he was betrayed by the woman that had been arranged for him to marry. I want to put that “honorable nature” at the forefront of our thoughts this morning. For Joseph and Mary lived in a time when marriages were arranged. The idea that one would love one’s spouse, would fall in love with them, would marry for passion, was simply NOT conceivable. Marriages for all people were arranged by families to insure all sorts of things: lineage, hence we get Jesus’ genealogy as the precursor of the gospel of Matthew. Or perhaps the marriage was to insure the solidarity of a family business or the continuance of lands and farms or grazing lands. The reasons for marriage were pragmatic and the alliances that were forged were the strength of marriage. Love and romance were not possible for creating marriages; responsibility, respect, honor and loyalty were.
So the honorable Joseph was dismayed to say the least when he found that Mary was pregnant, and he knew it was not his child. The punishment for her could have been stoning to death, a punishment custom that is still enforced in some parts of the middle east. There were headlines of such a stoning sentence just this past year. But he didn’t want such vengeance, only to put her aside quietly that she might be spared, her life intact although with not many possibilities for marriage or for a what could be understood in that day and time as a “normal” life.
But he chose to sleep on it before handing the news to her, and in that sleep he dreamt. How many of us would change the course of our lives because of a dream, a dream that God spoke to you through an angel or through some divine means and asked something of you? How many of us would just wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, right! Sure thing!” and then forget the dream as quickly as the sun rises?
And how many of us even remember our dreams; let alone act on them? How many of us have coherent enough dreams to get a message out of them?
Well, lucky for us, Joseph was not like most of us, just as Mary was willing to say, “Let it be unto me as you have said” when the angel spoke to her of her pregnancy so Joseph understood the truth because of his dream. I would say that like Mary he had to be a deeply spiritual and faithful man for him able to have that immediate trust of God’s messenger. He must have already had a deep and constant prayer life that allowed him to recognize God‘s voice when he heard it, wherever he heard it, even in a dream. Perhaps knowing God so intimately is what allowed him to be so honorable to Mary. No macho man he, bullying his fiancé for shaming him. No! He was an honorable man who felt for the woman who was in such a miserable place.
And that honor continued beyond accepting the fantastic tale that Mary had been impregnated by God. If anything, the impossibility of that was more laughable then than now with all our scientific folderol. For the biological necessities to create life were more blatantly evident even to the scientifically uninformed of first century Palestine. Their day to day existence in crowded cities and/or rural barnyards informed them without the benefit of science. The gospelers were not naive nor uneducated when they declared the virgin birth. They like Joseph could only have accepted the virginity of his betrothed by faith.
So this human picture of Joseph, accepting that Mary was to bear a special child sent by God, is a picture first and foremost of a man of faith. A man of deep faith informed by years of prayer. And that same faith made it easy to pull up stakes and go to Egypt; to pull them up again and return home; to raise Jesus, even name him as all fathers did in that day, as his own. He could do it by faith, not because he had some intense passionate desire for Mary, but because he had known intense passionate desire in his relationship with God. And he had found that desire through his prayers and visions and dreams. I would assume he came to love Mary and Jesus and all the brothers of Jesus, not out of lust, which is often how we find love in our day and time, but out of the holy and passionate constancy of honorable relationship, respect, and responsibility.
This is the human nature of the man who was the mortal father to Jesus: honorable, faithful, passionate, responsible, qualities that he passed on to the mortal Jesus, qualities that are the base out of which Jesus taught and our faith is founded. So Joseph may not have been a blood relative to Jesus, but he was certainly a parent. He was the one who gave Jesus the connection to the House of David, thus allowing him to fulfill the prophecies of the old prophets. Joseph was the one who taught Jesus the values that allowed him to grow into the man he needed to be to do that which God instructed him. And most of all, it is likely his father taught him to pray so that like Joseph, Jesus was able to hear and to understand what God required of him.
Joseph is usually on the sidelines at this time of year. Sometimes in a crèche we see him looking adoringly at the Christ child, but in truth he mostly has what would be conceived of as a “walk on part” in the life of Jesus. Yet it seems to me from this one lesson which we hear only once every three years, we learn a lot about how Jesus came to be the incredible person he was. His father may not have given him genetic material, DNA, but by emulating his father, his mortal father, his Daddy Joseph, Jesus learned to be the man who became Christ.
Today is not Father’s Day, of course. But it is a day when, because of this wonderful reading about fatherhood, we can give thanks for the men in our lives, blood relatives or not, who have given us life, and even more have given us the values that under gird our lives and have shown us how to live honorably, how to take responsibility for ourselves and others, who have taught us to value faith and love. I hope we can all take time this week, this week of Christmas, to say thank you to those men and to give thanks for the father who formed us as Joseph formed Jesus.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd