With
Matthew 1:18-25
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I think it’s safe to say that this wasn’t Joseph’s plan. We don’t know. As storytelling goes, the bible can be a little spare on the details sometimes, or at least spare on the details that we might be interested in. If I had to guess, I’d say that Joseph’s plans likely ran something along the lines of, “meet a nice girl, get married, have a family, live a good life.” Pretty standard stuff. Although in first century Palestine it might have been a little more like, “arrange engagement to a nice girl with her family, wait for her to come of age, then get married and all the rest etc.” All that Matthew tells us is that Mary was engaged to Joseph but they had yet to live together as husband and wife. Then she found out she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit, however that works. Like I said, spare on details, but certainly not according to anyone’s plan. There is no expository visit by the angel Gabriel first to explain to Mary and the rest of us the plan to have her carry this immaculately conceived child before it happens, and to give her some kind of say in the matter. There is just this bombshell, “she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of questions about that sentence. Like, did anyone know that this unfortunate pregnancy was of divine origin? Or did it just become obvious to her and then everyone else that she was pregnant, and we’re the only ones clued in to the fact that it is by the Holy Spirit? Mary had to have suspected that something was up. Physiologically speaking, women don’t just become spontaneously pregnant. It isn’t a condition that a person just randomly develops, like eczema. Still, these things happen. They might not be ideal. They might not be part of anyone’s plan. But what’s done is done and the only thing for Joseph to do now is to come up with a new plan.
Because we’re so used to telling this story from Luke’s perspective, it’s become a kind of foregone conclusion that the choice of Jesus’ parents is driven by who his mother will be. After all, mothers are the ones that do the hardest work of carrying, bearing and feeding the new life they bring into this world. In Luke’s telling, it’s Mary who finds the favor with God that lands her the job of bearing God. But that isn’t how Matthew tells the story. Matthew starts with a lengthy genealogy that stretches from Abraham to David to… Joseph? Wait a minute. That can’t be right. Why take up valuable space detailing generation after generation only to end up with someone who is decidedly NOT the child’s father. Maybe in our reverie at the profound role that Mary has in bringing Jesus into the world, we’ve neglected to point to what Matthew seems to be saying with this genealogy; that Joseph too is chosen by God for his role in how we will come to know Jesus.
It used to be that when it was time for a baby to be born, the mother was whisked away to someplace private for the delivery, while the father was made to wait somewhere else- pacing the floor of a waiting room, smoking a cigarette back when that used to be a thing, looking up every time the door would open for some kind of news. Things have changed in that respect. Fathers are frequently present at the birth of their children these days. But there is still a gendered bias to the way we regard what it means to be a parent. One of the things that the genealogy leads us to conclude in this story is that biology may be the least important thing that a father has to offer. Far more important is what comes next.
What comes next for Joseph is a plan for dealing with the embarrassment of being engaged to a woman whose pregnancy suggests that she has been unfaithful. But Joseph isn’t a jerk. Even though he might be hurt, or angry, or sad at the apparent infidelity of this young woman he was supposed to marry. He doesn’t go looking to hurt her in return by making a big deal of ending their engagement. He isn’t looking to publicly shame her for this indiscretion. He knows that nothing good comes from compounding the pain of the world by bringing more pain to others. But he clearly can’t marry her now. His plans have been disappointed and the new plan is to put a discreet end to the matter and simply move on.
And that is all the opening that God needs. Usually we’re so busy working our own plan and planning our work that we have little time or attention to give to what it is that God has in mind, what God is up to in our lives. But it is precisely in those moments when our plans go awry, when things don’t go our way and we are at a loss for what will come next that we are perfectly positioned to see and receive the new thing that God is bringing forth for us and for the world. Just as Joseph is ready to give up on Mary and this whole plan of getting married and settling down together, God let’s Joseph in on God’s plan. Mary isn’t carrying some random person’s child. This baby is from the Holy Spirit. And he will have two names, one from God and the other from his human family. First, he will be named Jesus- which literally means Yahweh is salvation. It is a name that announces who he is and what he has come to do- save us. Second, he will take the name his father, Joseph, will give him- the name that places him in the house and line of David, as a descendent of Abraham and the fulfillment of God’s promise to a people.
This is what it means that God is not just for us in Jesus, but with us. It means that the one who adopts us into the household of God in his coming is himself adopted into the household of humanity through his father, Joseph who raises Jesus as one of his own. Just as we are made God’s own in Jesus, he is made one of our own through the faithfulness of Joseph who trusts the angel’s words and comes to love a plan and a life that he would never have chosen for himself. This is how God is with us, this is where God is with us. God is with us when it all falls apart. God is with us when the people we love, the people we look to for our future let us down in ways both big and small. God is with us when we ourselves fail and find that we are willing to make it all go away quietly so no one has to know our shame. God is with us to show us what we can’t see and what we didn’t know, the wrinkles in the story that elude us, but point to some much larger purpose that God is bringing about even in our disappointment. God is with us to open our hearts to possibilities undreamt of with divine dreams that speak of impossible things that we’re willing to trust and move toward nonetheless. And God is with us to save us from condemnation- both the condemnation that would have us dismiss another without all the facts, and the condemnation that we direct at ourselves for doing just that.
But most of all God is with us in the imperfection of all of it. In families that don’t always look like we thought they would. In the mothers who give us life, and the ones who give us their love. In fathers who may give us the color of our eyes, and the ones who come along and give us everything but their DNA. God is with us to remind us that what God will bring about isn’t in spite of all our broken plans, our broken lives. No, what God will bring about take place precisely through all that is broken, all that isn’t as we think it should be. It isn’t so much that God has other plans, but that what God has in mind includes our pain, our disappointment, our anger and sadness, so that those things might be redeemed as well, pointing to God’s transformational presence with us, through it all. It is this promise, this presence that we anticipate, dream of and look forward to in the season of Advent when we sing O Come, O Come Emmanuel. We seek always the coming of the one is made one of us, the one who makes us one with God, the one who transforms it all in his coming to save us.