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Sermon:
Today, on the last Sunday of Advent, we come very close to the birth of Jesus with Matthew’s story of how Joseph responded to the news that Mary, his betrothed, was expecting a child that wasn’t his. It’s a very human story that puts us into the middle of a messy family situation, and reminds us that God works his purposes through ordinary people with ordinary thoughts, feelings and responses.
Unlike Luke, Matthew does not give us the story of the angelic annunciation to Mary, but puts us straight into a messy problem for Joseph. He is engaged to Mary but before they can be married she is found to be pregnant. We, the readers, are told that this is due to the Holy Spirit, but Joseph does not know this, and this puts him into a real dilemma.
We know very little about Jospeh: he appears to be absent by the time Jesus was an adult, leading many commentators to assume that he was much older than Mary, but the Gospels do not tell us this. They do tell us that stories about Jesus’ birth were going the rounds even during his lifetime – in John’s Gospel the Jewish leaders insult Jesus to his face by telling him “at least we know who our father is”. Those kinds of gossip sting, and Joseph would not have been immune.
Popular retellings of the Christmas story have traditionally made great play of Joseph’s feelings about Mary’s pregnancy. The medieval Coventry Mystery Plays have Joseph lambast Mary for her unfaithfulness with “some boy” until an angel corrects him, and the traditional Cherry Tree Carol” has Mary and Joseph passing through an orchard on the way to Bethlehem. Mary asks Joseph to pick her some cherries: he, rather crossly and not believing her story of angels and virgin conception, tells her to ask the father of her child instead, whereupon the tree itself bows down at the command of the unborn Jesus so she can eat her fill, at which Joseph repents.
Matthew tells us that Joseph is “a righteous man”, meaning that he is someone who takes the Jewish law very seriously, and the Jewish law was very clear that an engaged woman who had sex with another man should be killed. In Joseph’s day the penalty was often less severe, but it was still very public and very humiliating.
So Joseph, surprisingly, decides not to do what the law requires – instead of humiliating Mary publicly, he plans to annul their engagement privately. And here we discover that God chose the foster father for his Son very well indeed. Later in the Gospel Matthew presents Jesus as the great interpreter of the Law, who commands us to apply God’s call for justice through the filter of mercy and love. By not imposing the letter of the Law but interpreting it through his love of Mary, Joseph reveals himself to be a man after God’s own heart. And this is before he is visited by an angel who tells him that it is all going to be OK. Joseph shows his mercy when he has every right to feel hurt, betrayed, humiliated and vengeful.
In a society where blame and judgement sometimes feel very prevalent, where the hurts others do to us play large, and it is easy to point the finger at other people and think that they are the problem, Joseph sets an example for us to follow. The law was clear, Joseph was in the right, he was well within his rights to call for Mary to be literally, physically and permanently cancelled. But he didn’t. And because of that, there was a family in the stable at Bethlehem, a family we are all called to be part of. In that sense, maybe Joseph is a father figure to us all.