Consider Joseph

We usually think of Mary’s story when we talk at Christmas about faithfulness and obedience to God. We imagine the courage and deep faith that it must have required for Mary to bow her head and say to God, “Let it be with me according to your will.” We have centuries of Christian art to portray her reward: 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 the verses of Matthew’s Gospel that we read today. Only Matthew makes Joseph’s faith and obedience the doorway to the Incarnation. 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 small painting from the Middle Ages, the Holy Family is seated underneath the rickety shelter of the stable. In the center of the scene, cloaked in long blue robes and crowned with a huge halo, Mary is holding the baby Jesus. Although she's gazing with some trepidation into his sleepy baby-eyes, she's 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 the new father. Head on one hand, elbow to knee, he's staring down mournfully at the floor. It's clear from the look on his face that he's pouting at his lack of a role in this drama. He's obviously worried, too, 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?” Don's going to sing it for us today at the offertory. This old ballad tells the story of Mary and Joseph walking along one day during Mary’s pregnancy. They come across a cherry tree full of fruit. Mary, in 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. Joseph, clearly upset, cries out: ‘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 its limbs 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, the Law. Job is actually referred to as the most righteous man in the Old Testament. That's 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 strange tale about 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, to separate himself and his family from scandal, to uphold God’s decrees, to do what the Scriptures clearly said to do? Luckily for us, Joseph doesn't do the expected thing. He doesn't follow the Law and quietly set aside his betrothed; he doesn't 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.

When Mary's asked to trust in God, she puts herself at terrible risk of rejection. She, however, isn't asked to trust any human being but herself. Joseph, however, must trust both God and Mary. I'd 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 always 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 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.

Our lectionary skips over the first seventeen verses of Matthew’s Gospel. They contain a long genealogy, in which the Evangelist carefully places Jesus into the history of Joseph’s people, the history that becomes Jesus’ own through adoption. What's interesting in this long list of “begats,” is that, interspersed with the generations of fathers and sons, beginning with Abraham, just four women are included. And who are these women? Are they 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. She dresses like a prostitute in order to trick her father-in-law into getting her pregnant. Matthew includes Ruth, the Moabite foreigner.  She has to seduce her kinsman Boaz so that he'll redeem her and her mother-in-law Naomi from the poverty of widowhood. Matthew even includes the infamous Bathsheba, the wife of poor Uriah the Hittite. Remember that King David had Uriah killed in order to take Bathsheba as his own. Finally, Matthew 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, people who break the rules, people whom we would least expect God to choose as examples of faith .... from this lineage God brings God's Son, our Savior, into the world.

 

These days, it seems to me as if it is getting harder and harder to get a “yes” out of us Christian Josephs. So many Christians seem more concerned with holding the hard line against change, or against a loss of privilege, or against what they deem as immorality, than they are with loving others. 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's 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 anything. As the holidays approach, we too might be 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 for us to replace rules 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?