Matthew 1: 18-25
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
We spend a lot of time celebrating and remembering Mary’s role at Christmas. What about Joseph?
Joseph’s role was simple but powerful. He was supposed to accept responsibility for one of God’s children who was not his own child.
Not his own child. Jesus was God’s child, not his. But of course, all children are God’s children, but that has been cold comfort to other men down through history who’ve discovered that they are supposed to play father to somebody else’s child. Joseph would have been more than justified, by any standard, in walking away. In Matthew, we’re told he very nearly does. He is ready to “let her go quietly,” which meant that he intended to break his engagement to Mary in a way that would not cause her public shame for the illegitimate baby she was about to have.
But then he is visited by an angel who tells him that the child is a miracle child and that he should stay with Mary. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary for your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” You get the impression from the story, in Matthew chapter 1, that the angel was just telling Joseph to do what he wanted to do anyway. Joseph apparently loved her and didn’t want to leave her, and the angel gave him a reason not to be ashamed, not to feel like he’d been betrayed by his young bride.
Scholars have speculated that it would have been hard to keep the outward trappings of Jesus’ birth a secret in their small Galilean village. People would have whispered, laughed at Joseph behind his back, called him what Shakespeare would have called “a cuckold,” Cuckold means someone whose wife or girlfriend has stepped out on him, but he’s just too unmanly to stand up for himself.
But Joseph was willing to endure the shame and the snide comments. Because he knew he was doing what was right. He knew he was serving God. Perhaps it was Joseph Jesus was thinking of when he taught, “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of things against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you (Matt. 5: 11).”
It’s not easy being Joseph. And there are a lot of Josephs in the world today—men who’ve taken on the responsibility to raise someone else’s children, whether through adoption, or marriage, or because of some other obligation; even men whose wives or girlfriends stepped out on them, but the men were men of honor, and they chose to raise and love the child of someone else.
These are people who are stepping out of the natural order of things. Evolution and society and culture all extol fatherhood—up to a point. Both evolution and society prefer that men produce and love their own children, not somebody else’s.
But Joseph is someone who lives up to an extraordinary ethic. He loves beyond what culture and biology expect of him. He loves Jesus because He is the child of Mary, certainly—but even more because he is a child of God.
Mary likewise lives into an extraordinary ethic. Biology and evolution and culture have all taught her that she should be afraid and ashamed of giving birth to this illegitimate child. Perversely, she is not. She is pleased and overjoyed. She gives the glory to God.
It is an extraordinary ethic. It’s an extraordinary ethic to love someone that isn’t biologically related to us simply because he or she is a child of God. For that matter, the adult Jesus continues to call us to the same extraordinary ethic that his adoptive father Joseph taught him—to love you neighbor, to love the stranger, even to love an enemy, simply because that neighbor, stranger, or enemy is a child of God. Simply that.
In a wonderful NPR radio commentary, Scott Simon reimagined the birth of Jesus. Mary and Joseph are a couple escaping from Hurricane Katrina. And Joseph, who is trying to understand where Mary’s baby has come from, has a revelation: “I think I finally understand,” he said, “Why we’ve been given the gift of this child. It doesn’t matter who the father is, does it? Every child cries for our love and deserves our care. Every child who is hungry in Sudan, or cold in Cleveland. Every little girl who is abandoned by a roadside in China. Every little boy in Congo who‘s dragged into someone’s army and forced to carry a gun that’s bigger than he is. Every little boy and girl anywhere who is threatened by an epidemic, an explosion, or indifference—I must love them as a father loves his child.”
That’s Joseph’s extraordinary Gospel ethic. We could add to it: Any child who is born inAmericaof illegal immigrant parents. Any child who is disabled or lonely or mentally ill or sexually abused, nearby or far away. Any child who cuts up in church or lives next door to me and throws wild parties; any child gunned down another child in a gang-related shootout… we are to love that child because that child is a child of God.
We have a hard time living up to such an extraordinary ethic. We have a hard time being Joseph. But it was never meant to be easy. Every aspect of discipleship is a call to be extraordinary. Every aspect of discipleship is a call to do something that doesn’t come naturally.
We can use the fact that these things don’t come naturally as an excuse not to do it. But let me suggest that the reason that Joseph and Mary and everyone around them experience wonder and joy and awe and a sense that the heavens have opened up for them is precisely because they’ve been willing to do the extraordinary. They’ve been willing to step out on the limb of faith, and in doing so they’ve acknowledged that there is more to the world than what we see and hear and taste and smell, more than our evolutionary instinct to love only our own and to fear what’s alien, more than our racial or ethnic or cultural instinct to believe that only people like us are people we can trust, more than putting ourselves first and foremost, more than the ordinary to life. There’s something extraordinary, something amazing, and it’s just around the corner, if only we’re willing to be open to it. If we’re willing to be humble and accept what we cannot explain or defend, take the risk of being vulnerable and loving and hopeful instead of strong and suspicious and self-involved—if we’re willing to put our lives and the lives of those we love in the hands of God—we open ourselves to miracles, to the thin place between heaven and earth opening and angels singing and God among us, as God has ever been, if we’d only believe.
If we’d live by that extraordinary ethic, then extraordinary things happen. We see the Kingdom of God. Others see the Kingdom of God. We are the Kingdom of God.
It’s not easy to be Joseph—but it’s worth it.