Advent IV
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
We usually think of Mary’s story when
we talk at Christmastime about faithfulness and obedience to God. We imagine
the courage and deep faith that it must have required for Mary to bow her head at
the Annunciation and say to God, “let it be with me according to your will.” We
have centuries of Christian art to portray her reward, as we see her holding
the radiant baby close to her breast, as creation bows down before her. Joseph
doesn’t usually occupy our Christian imaginations in the same way, except in
Matthew’s Gospel that we read today. Only Matthew makes Joseph’s faith and
obedience the doorway to the Incarnation, and we would do well to join him and
to consider Joseph carefully today.
My own
sympathy for Joseph has grown ever since I saw him portrayed in a marvelous
fresco in the crypt of Basel Cathedral, in Switzerland. In this tiny painting
from the Middle Ages, the Holy Family is seated underneath the rickety shelter
of the stable. In the center of the scene, swathed in long blue robes and crowned
with a huge halo, Mary is holding the baby Jesus, and although she is gazing
with some trepidation into his sleepy baby-eyes, she is clearly the center of
the painting. Beside her, a cute donkey and a cow are smiling and contentedly
munching on something green in the manger. Way out to the left, our eyes
finally fall upon Joseph, a forlorn caricature of every expectant father’s
worst nightmare. Head on one hand, elbow to knee, he is staring down mournfully
at the floor, clearly pouting at his lack of a role in this drama and obviously
worried about what the future will bring. Imagine the mocking words of the
chorus from W. H. Auden’s Christmas
Oratorio swirling around in his head:
“Joseph, you have heard/ What Mary
says occurred;/ Yes, it may be so. Is it likely? No. …Mary may be pure,/ But
Joseph, are you sure?/ How is one to tell?/ …Maybe, maybe not./ But Joseph, you
know what/ Your world, of course will say/ About you anyway.”
Or perhaps you
have heard the Appalachian “Cherry Tree Carol?” It is a wonderful ballad that
tells the story of Mary and Joseph walking along one day during Mary’s
pregnancy and finding a cherry tree full of fruit. Mary, in typical high-maintenance,
pregnant-wife fashion, asks Joseph to climb up into the tree and to pick some
cherries for her, since she is craving them. That was the last straw for
Joseph, who, as the carol says, “flew in angry,/ In angry he flew:/ [Crying]
‘Let the father of the baby/ Gather cherries for you.’” All of a sudden, Jesus’
voice comes down from heaven and the cherry tree actually bows down to the
ground, so that Mary can pick her own cherries, (quote)“while Joseph stood
around.”
Poor Joseph. He must feel
superfluous, mocked, confused. Matthew describes him as a “righteous man.” In Judaism,
to be “righteous” was to live a life of right relationship with God and with
other people. It meant living with integrity, caring for others, following
God’s teaching, obeying the Torah. Job is called the most righteous man in the
Old Testament, and that is why Satan wanted to tempt him, to see if his
integrity and obedience to God could stand the test of unmerited suffering.
Joseph might have felt like Job, as he was placed in the position of either having
to believe a wild tale concerning the purity of his future wife or having to
accuse her of adultery, a charge for which Scripture prescribed stoning. Wouldn’t
a righteous man like Joseph choose to follow the Law, separating himself and
his family from scandal, upholding God’s decrees, doing what the Scriptures
said to do? Luckily for us, Joseph does not do the expected thing. He does not
follow the Law and quietly set aside his betrothed; he does not listen to
Scripture and have her and her unborn child stoned to death. He listens instead
to a dream, to the strange whisperings of the Holy Spirit, and he adopts this
mysterious baby.
We need to remember that the writer
of Matthew’s Gospel is interested in Joseph because of Matthew’s desire to show
his community of Jewish Christians that Jesus is a true successor to the likes
of Moses, Joshua, and King David. Joseph’s acceptance of the baby is the way to
bring him into the line of David and thereby refigure Salvation History. Our
lectionary skips over the first 17 verses of Matthew’s Gospel, in which the
Evangelist carefully places Jesus into the history of Joseph’s people, the
history that becomes Jesus’ own through adoption. What is interesting in this
long list of “begats,” is that, interspersed with the generations of fathers
and sons, beginning with Abraham, four women are included. And who are these
women? The great Matriarchs of Israel, virtuous women like Sarah, Rebekah, and
Rachel? No, indeed! Instead, Matthew gives us Tamar, the Canaanite
daughter-in-law of Judah who dresses like a prostitute in order to trick her
father-in-law into getting her pregnant; it includes Ruth, the Moabite foreigner,
who has to seduce her kinsman Boaz so that he will redeem her and Naomi from
the poverty of widowhood; it even includes the infamous Bathsheba, the wife of
poor Uriah the Hittite, whom David has killed in order to cover up his adultery
with Bathsheba; and it ends with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, whose fiancé Joseph
must decide whether to reject her or to adopt her son. Do you see a pattern
here? Foreigners, sinful women, people who break the rules, people whom we
would least expect God to choose as examples of faith: from this lineage God
brings his Son, our Savior, into the world.
When I first read about these verses,
I thought that I had figured out God’s little trick. “Sure, I know,” I thought to myself, “God
works through all kinds of us sinners. God asks us to do all kinds of crazy,
risky things. I can deal with God coming to me and asking me to do what I least
expect. God does that all the time anyway, right? I can almost understand Mary’s capitulation
before the majestic angel Gabriel. Trust in our upside-down God, that’s what
we’re supposed to do.
But there is more. When Mary is asked
to trust in God, she puts herself at terrible risk of rejection, but she is not
asked to trust any human being but herself. Joseph, however, must trust both
God and Mary. I would have trouble if I were Joseph, asked to overlook the
possible betrayal by a loved one, asked to withhold judging someone else’s
revelation. Growing up, I was taught that people show their righteousness by
living by the rules, by doing what church and society expect of us. I don’t
find fuzzy lines helpful, and I definitely have a tendency to choose the
“rules” over what somebody else claims that God has revealed to them. I’m not
even sure that I would have trusted my dream like Joseph did. I might have felt
as if I needed to hold the hard line against any possible wishful thinking,
against any slipping of standards, against any chance of misunderstanding God
and losing my precious righteousness. Righteousness is a hard-won treasure,
easily tarnished by shame and guilt. It takes a lot of wall-building to keep it
safe. Yes, it’s a good thing that I wasn’t Joseph, for look what we would have
missed.
These days, as “rules” seem to get
slipperier, it seems to me as if it is getting harder and harder to get a “yes”
out of us Christian Josephs. Especially when holding the hard line has to do
with sex. In a recent article on the “Duck Dynasty” fiasco, the author made an
interesting point. For the fundamentalist, he wrote, “all sin—when it comes
down to it—starts with sex. This sexual obsession, as the Pope has rightly
diagnosed it, is a mark of neurotic fundamentalism in Islam and Judaism as well
as Christianity.”[1]
Even for those of us who are not fundamentalists, when we think of sin, our
minds go straight to sexual sins, don’t they? Adultery is much more interesting
than greed or pride or the failure to love one’s neighbor, right?
For Matthew, however, that was
clearly not the case, as we see in this list of scurrilous men and women who
are the forebears of our Lord. We tend to be like Thomas, our namesake, whose
feast day we celebrate today. We want our truths to come in neat packages and
with clear checklists. We want to see and understand before we can trust. We
feel that it is better to know than to love. But today’s Gospel asks us to be
like Joseph, unafraid to bind ourselves to what we do not know, more concerned
with Love than sex. As the holidays approach and we are given choices,
difficult choices, about how to deal with complicated relationships in our families,
choices about where to give and when to save, choices about when to trust and
when to condemn, can we trust God enough to replace a rule with forgiveness? To
replace a grudge with grace? To open our arms in Love, even if it means risking
ridicule or suffering or even the taint of sin? Perhaps poor Joseph is pouting
in the corner of the stable not over his lack of a role in God’s story but in
ours?
The Cherry Tree Carol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYaFGSG_x80
The Cherry Tree Carol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYaFGSG_x80
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