Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
The Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A - Sunday, December 22, 2019
Isaiah 7:10-16
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
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A few weeks ago, a friend posted a photo of a nativity scene picturing Mary sound asleep in the background and a young Joseph holding and delighting in the infant who was delighting in Joseph as well. Our Gospel today is about the annunciation to Joseph, not Mary. The image I described, and our Gospel challenge much of the legend that has grown up around Joseph. Christian tradition has never quite known what to make of him. He’s an extra in the drama which stars Mary and her child. He disappears from the gospels before Jesus is baptized and is never heard from again.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph is the main character. Gabriel speaks to him, not Mary, as he lies sleeping. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” The salutation is important. If the Messiah is to be born the son of David, then this is the man he must be born to. The prophet said so, and Matthew goes to great lengths in his long genealogy of Jesus at the beginning of his Gospel, and later, quoting prophets throughout his Gospel, to persuade us that what the prophets foretold had come to pass. According to Matthew, the whole experiment hangs on what happens with Joseph, not Mary. If Joseph believes the angel, everything is on. The story can continue. Mary will have a home and her child will be born the son of David. But if Joseph does not believe, then everything grinds to a halt. Then Mary is an outcast for disgracing her family and herself. She will be disowned and left to survive however she is able, with her illegitimate child.
Matthew tells us that Joseph was a righteous man, and I would add, a loving, compassionate, and hopeful one as well. He was not naïve but courageous in his choices. He believed that Mary had been unfaithful. Betrothal was equivalent to marriage; infidelity counted as adultery. We have so sanitized this feast, that we forget just what a scandal the Incarnation really was. Today’s text reminds us that the preparations for that first Christmas were anything but conventional and far from proper. To Joseph, the pregnancy was a violation of social convention and ethics, as well as an emotional and physical betrayal.
Confronted with Mary’s presumed adultery, he decides on the most humane of his legal options, divorce, and to do it quietly so as not to endanger her. Despite whatever emotions were raging, he wasn’t willing to shame her or trash her reputation to clear his own. What emotional turmoil it must have been for him. It’s just such times that conjure basic questions. Outside our familiar framework, meaning is challenged, decisions questioned, doubts unearthed. It’s alarming and exhausting. It drains joy out of the present moment. At those times we reach back into all those behaviors or things that we have used to give at least the illusion of stability and safety. In reality, the most it gives is a brief respite from consciousness.
Joseph would have been very familiar with our first reading from Isaiah, where the prophet comes to reassure King Ahaz that all is not lost. God gives a sign: a young woman pregnant with a child of promise, a child born of a woman, with all the bloody and fleshly reality of full humanity. The child’s name, Immanuel, (“God is with us”) reinforces the divine promise of faithfulness and deliverance.
Perhaps it is the memory of this sign spoken by Isaiah that arouses hope in Joseph. Even when our private little worlds go to dust, hope digs in the ruins of our heart for memory of God’s promise to bring good out of bad, joy out of sadness, life out of death. Hope is not optimism in the face of dire circumstances, nor is it founded on denial. My experience is that hope is made of memories which remind me that there is nothing in life I have not faced that I did not, through grace, though unrecognized at the time, survive. Hope is the recalling of the good in the past on which we base our expectation of good in the future, however bad the present. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something will make sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Joseph was on the verge of divorcing, when an angel of the Lord started whispering hope in his ear. Joseph’s sense of right and wrong got lost in the divine shuffle. His righteousness gave way to God’s; his faithfulness a response to God’s. Even if he never fully grasped or understood what the angel told him, it ignited hope in him.
Faithfulness rarely feels good because it calls on us to set aside our emotions and preferences. It’s work, and it’s a prerequisite to trust and intimacy. Did Joseph like the situation that was thrust upon him? Was trust in Mary immediately restored? You can be sure that what transpired between these two human beings did not resolve overnight. It was a mess that only got messier before it got better. I have no doubt that it did get better. The proof is seen in Jesus himself who learned the love, compassion, and courage that was modeled by this man.
Joseph surveyed this mess he had absolutely nothing to do with and decided to believe that God was present in it. With every reason to disown it all, to walk away from it, Joseph claimed the scandal and gave it his name. He became the child’s father the moment he said so. The issue was not a biological but a legal one. He owned and legitimized the mess and it became the place where the Messiah was born. Joseph’s belief was as critical as Mary’s womb. It took the two of them to give birth to this child: Mary to give him life, and Joseph to give him a name.
Joseph, no less than Mary, is the one in the story who is most like us, presented day by day with circumstances beyond our control, with lives we may never have chosen for ourselves, tempted to divorce ourselves from it all, when an angel whispers hope in our ears: “Do not be afraid, God is here. It may not be the life you had planned, but God may be born here too, if you will own it.”
God’s birth requires human partners willing to love, to hope, willing to claim the mess, to adopt it and give it our names. And not just each one of us alone, but the whole Church, surveying a world that seems to have run amok and proclaiming over and over again to anyone who will hear that God is still with us, that God is still being born in the mess and through it, within and among those who will still hope and believe what angels tell them in their dreams. +Amen.
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