[Fellowship of the Ring - Extended Version 29:54-32:05]
An unsuspecting, everyday person, drawn – almost against his will – into events too great for him to even imagine, and entrusted with the safekeeping of something precious; something that could change the course of history.
We’ve been looking at the events of Christmas from the point of view of different characters in the narrative. We’ve looked at it from the point of view of the angels, and we reflected on how God the Son emptied himself to come and live among us. Tracy led us through the story from the point of view of Mary – a teenage girl who is told by an angel that she’s going to have a baby, even though she’s a virgin – and we saw how God’s call can really make a mess of our own plans. But we also saw how there is always a blessing associated with following God’s call. That was Luke’s telling of the story.
In the first two chapters of his gospel, Matthew tells the same story, only he tells it from the point of view of Joseph.
18 This is how the
birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to
Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through
the Holy Spirit. 19 Because Joseph her husband was a
righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind
to divorce her quietly.
What a nightmare!
A couple of weeks ago the news media
reported that a man in
She could have kept it secret. She could have run away; but apparently she didn’t. When the angel came to Joseph he already knew that Mary was pregnant. She must have told him. At this stage, how else would he know?
So Joseph is faced with a dilemma. His fiancée has come and told him she’s pregnant. The law requires that Mary be stoned to death for adultery. That was what the crowd demanded in John 8 when they brought the woman caught in adultery to Jesus. But the text here says, Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
It says that Joseph was “a righteous man.” What does that mean? It means he was a tsaddiyq, someone devoted to following the Old Testament rules for living, someone that everyone else in the village looked up to, someone whose reputation was absolutely impeccable. And now his fiancée is pregnant. What would that do to his reputation, to his honour? He’s a respectable man. In many parts of the world today that would be due cause for him, or Mary’s family, to kill her. And the police wouldn’t press charges because they would “understand” that this would be the 'righteous' thing to do… But that is precisely not what Joseph does.
It says that he was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace.
He’s torn between his concern for his reputation and his concern for Mary.
The two are tied up together anyway. If this gets out, even if he presses charges, his name will still be mud. Even if people believe that he isn’t the father; guys will still whisper about him, “Oh yes, that’s Joseph. He used to be such a tsaddiyq, but either he jumped the gun with Mary, or someone cut in in front of him. Either way, his reputation is trash now.”
And he can’t just walk away.
So he decides to deal with it out of the public eye, for both their sakes, and divorce her quietly.
Now here’s an interesting thing. The word “divorce” comes up three times in Matthew’s gospel. Once is here. The other two times are in chapter 5 and chapter 19 where Jesus condemns easy “quiet” divorces.
The only way Joseph could have gotten a quiet divorce would have been for it to be an “any matter” divorce, a no-fault divorce. That is exactly the kind of divorce that Jesus speaks against so strongly in chapters 5 and 19. We don’t have time to go into it here, but if you want to hear my understanding of Jesus’ teaching on divorce you can find it on the church website in the sermon archives. However, I do find it fascinating that Jesus obviously had some pretty strong opinions against no-fault divorces like the one that Joseph was planning… I wonder if the family had told the stories about his birth and the events around it.
[Most of us have these “family stories”… my kids and the 'who would marry him' story
Did Joseph tell the story of how he almost divorced Mary, until an angel told him not to?]
There was another option open to Joseph in this nightmare situation, besides stoning and divorce, an option that isn’t mentioned here. In the Old Testament there is a precedent for a righteous man marrying a woman whose reputation is questionable. That is exactly what God told Hosea to do. But apparently that option never occurred to Joseph. It was just too much of a stretch.
That’s Joseph’s nightmare; a pregnant fiancée and no way out.
Then the dreams start…
Dreaming about something that’s on your mind is perfectly normal. That’s especially true when it’s something troubling.
[I remember waking up in a sweat because I dreamt that I had turned up at the wrong time for an exam. I woke up every hour for the rest of night to make sure I didn’t sleep in and I ended up so tired that I didn’t do well on the real exam.]
Then there’s the subconscious side of dreams. Sometimes our dreams reveal things to us that we’ve tried to push down into the dark corners of our memories; perhaps because we’re ashamed of them, perhaps because we’re afraid of them, perhaps because our conscious mind just can’t make sense of them.
Those are aspects of dreams that we’re comfortable with because we can explain them in scientific terms of our subconscious and things like that. But there’s another aspect of dreams that is very prominent in scripture; the fact that God can use our dreams to speak to us. We may find the idea of God speaking in dreams a little far-fetched, but most of the Afghan and Pakistani Christians I know can testify that a dream or dreams were crucial in their coming to faith. We may find this passage a little strange, almost as strange as Mary seeing an angel, but the majority of our brothers and sisters around the world would find it perfectly normal.
20
But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a
dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home
as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son,
and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from
their sins."
Jesus is another form of the name Joshua, which means “The Lord Saves.” Jesus’ mission was to save his people, and not only his own ethnic community but the whole world. But for that to happen, he first had to be born. And for that to happen, Mary had to be taken care of.
It’s hard enough for a single mother these days, even with family support. Without it, in a society where she would be an outcast as soon as she started to show, Jesus’ future would have been really shaky.
But God had a plan. You might not think it was much of a plan. It didn’t involve an angel bodyguard, or some kind of cloaking field that made Jesus disappear, or any other kind of extravagant protection system. God’s plan for the safety of his Son was simply to place him in a family.
Each one of us that is a parent should reflect on this. None of us are caring for the messiah – that was a one time deal for Joseph and Mary – but each one of our children is a sacred trust from God. They may grow up to be any one of a million things, but for the first years of their lives they are our responsibility to safeguard and protect.
That was Joseph’s mission, to make sure Jesus had a safe start in life by giving him a family to grow up in. It wasn’t a perfect family. In fact, it got off to a pretty rough start. Mary pregnant out of wedlock. Joseph planning to abandon her. But this was God’s plan to keep Jesus safe.
This was Joseph’s mission from God. “Keep him secret. Keep him safe.”
24 When Joseph woke
up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as
his wife.
It’s such a simple, matter-of-fact statement. He did what God told him to do. Against all that his community and family expected, he took Mary home to be his wife. Mother Theresa once said, "None of us can do anything great on our own, but we can all do a small thing with great love." That was what Joseph was called to do. Nothing extravagant. Nothing great. Just this small thing; take Mary home to be his wife. But here is the lesson we learn from Joseph. God’s great plans are carried out through his people, one small step of obedience at a time.
The story continues. Joseph and Mary go to
Then Joseph starts having dreams again. 2:13 When they [the wise men] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get
up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to
When Mary discovered that she was pregnant
the danger was that she, and her unborn child, would be abandoned. The danger
this time is much more active and aggressive. Herod is actively seeking to kill
Jesus. Thirty odd years later another member of the Herod family would conspire
with the Romans and Jewish religious authorities and succeed in killing Jesus.
It was what he came to do, to die in our place for our sins, so that we can be
at peace with God. But that was for later. Not here. Not now. God had to get
this precious cargo out of
“Get up, take the child and his mother and escape
to
And Joseph’s response was…
14 So he got up, took the child and
his mother during the night and left for
Are you beginning to see a pattern here?
God said (verse 20), “take Mary home as your wife” and Joseph
(verse 24) “took Mary home as his wife.”
God said (verse 13), “take the child and his mother and escape to
This is the pattern of discipleship. God says it. I do it.
[Two weeks ago Youth With A Mission was in
the headlines when two staffers at the
“So what,” you ask? “Everybody does that.” Except that this was in 1964, and nobody had ever done this before. Loren’s folks would often say to him, “Either this is God’s idea, or you’re crazy.” Loren’s 72 now, and he’s still going out on limbs and doing things that are either God’s idea, or he’s crazy.]
I don’t know what Joseph’s parents said to him when he told them he was going to marry Mary early. Or what they said to him when they found out why. I don’t know if he told them that it was God’s idea. I suspect that they probably thought he had lost his mind and called him a fool. But as a wise man once said, “If I heard God right and didn’t obey, that’s when I’d be the fool.”
Either way, he seems to have learned the lesson that all God calls us to do, is obey him in the next step. Because the next – and last – time we hear about Joseph, he’s doing the same thing again.
19 After Herod died, an angel of the
Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in
And, judging by his past performance, it’s not surprising that the next words in the text are…
21 So he got up, took the child and
his mother and went to the
1. God’s great plans are carried out through seemingly insignificant people, one simple step of obedience at a time. Joseph had only the vaguest idea of what it meant that Jesus would “save his people from their sins,” but he did as God told him.
2. Being obedient to God’s call is costly. Joseph gave up a secure job and a good reputation for a life on the run, keeping Jesus safe.
What is God calling you to do? It doesn’t have to be anything “great.” It could be he’s calling you to befriend a neighbour, or speak to a workmate. Or it could be something larger. He could be asking you to change direction in your life, pursue a different course from the one you have planned. – We never know the potential consequences of any of our choices. Only God does. Trust him with your future.
3. We don’t often think of Joseph as a hero. He’s almost a bit player in comparison to Mary. But what he did was heroic. If he hadn’t obeyed God, Jesus would have been out in the cold – literally. Guys, sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is fulfil your responsibility to care for those that God has entrusted to your care.