Matthew and Luke both begin their gospels with stories of Jesus’ birth. Matthew’s story focuses on the role of Joseph; Luke’s story focuses on Mary. In both gospels angels bring good news from God to the parents.
The angelic annunciation in Matthew’s gospel is to Joseph, calling him to take the pregnant Mary as his wife and name and claim her son. In the overall plan of the lectionary, this 4th Sunday of Advent is father’s day.
In Matthew’s story “of how the birth of Jesus Christ came about,” Joseph is engaged to Mary but has not yet brought her to his home—the action that seals the marriage. Mary must be a teenager, a girl who is marriageable age, perhaps 14 or 15. Joseph may be older; at least that’s one explanation for why he appears only in stories about Jesus’ birth and growing up.
According to the gospel story, betrothal is as binding a commitment as marriage, since it requires divorce to break it. As in marriage, infidelity provides grounds for dissolving the betrothal relationship. Bringing the bride from her family to the groom’s home seems to be the final step in marriage.
The gospel tells us Joseph, Mary’s husband, is just, dikaios, or as the New American Bible translates the word upright. For some today and probably in Jesus’ time, being just and upright means keeping the law—being a law-abiding person.
The law in Leviticus 20.10 makes death the punishment for adultery. We don’t know how often people carried out the punishment the law required.
When Joseph finds Mary pregnant with a child not his own, he knows he can bring the full force of the law upon her, but he makes a compassionate judgment to divorce her quietly.
We can’t be sure what might otherwise have happened to a very-pregnant girl in 1st-century Palestine or her illegitimate child. The upright Joseph does not want to shame or endanger his betrothed.
- l What characteristics does Joseph possess that you value in a husband? In a father?
His decision to divorce Mary secretly does not really satisfy Joseph. He can’t stop thinking about Mary. He can’t let go of this troubling pregnancy. Joseph knows this girl, whom the gospels elsewhere characterize as holy among women. Her pregnancy sideswipes and befuddles him. He wants a bigger, whole picture that explains what is going on with Mary. What can’t he see?
The gospel tells us Joseph sleeps on his decision. Joseph opens his unconscious self to nourishing rest; he opens himself to the nonrational, spiritual world and to the infinite, whole picture he seeks. He entrusts himself to Holy Mystery in going to sleep. In his sleep Joseph dreams the future of the child.
Matthew’s gospel is written some 80 years after Jesus’ birth and some 50 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. So the evangelist can put into the dream from hindsight the promise Mary’s child brings into the world.
The angel in Joseph’s dream tells him—
- The Spirit of God has conceived this child in his fiancé.
- Mary will have a son.
- Joseph is to name and claim the child as his own.
- The name reveals the child’s mission. The name Jesus means he saves.
- How is sleeping on a decision an act of prayer?
In our own lives we have to make the journey Joseph makes from the law and its requirements to compassionate judgment and action. This is conscience. Joseph’s story calls us to listen to the Spirit of God that lives within us in the deepest reaches of our psyches and never lets up on us, waking or sleeping, until we bring to life in our relationships what only we can do. Our baptisms call us to embody the promise of the Spirit in us, to become Emmanuel, and bring God among those we love and try to love.
Each of us is called like Joseph to dream a future for the children of promise born among us today. A hundred million children in the world need primary education. Refugees forced from their homes and immigrants seeking better lives include many children.
- Who are children of promise in your life?
- What can your parish or work group do to help children of promise in your area?
- What words do you use to tell your child or children what promise you see in them and what faithfulness they can expect from you?