Advent 4 : Joseph's choice

Isaiah 7.10-16,  Matthew 1.18-25

 

“And he named him Jesus”. That moment, at the end of our Gospel reading, is a crucial moment, a moment which its first hearers would have been very struck by. It’s not just the name itself, it is who is doing the naming that they would have noticed. It’s Joseph, that often overlooked and side-lined character in the story of Christ’s birth.

 

Matthew doesn’t tell us how Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant, only that she “was found” to be so. Did she tell Joseph herself, or was it blurted out by a meddling sister or aunt or friend who noticed the signs and thought Joseph ought to know? However it happened, though, it wasn’t going to be something that could be hidden and Joseph had a dilemma, because he knew this child wasn’t his. He needed to do some damage limitation. He seems to have cared about Mary. He didn’t want to expose her to public disgrace. She could even have been stoned for adultery. But if he didn’t denounce her it would either look as if the child was his, and they weren’t supposed to be sleeping together yet, or that he knew it was someone else’s, which would have demeaned him in the eyes of his society. We might not – I hope we wouldn’t – think of it this way today, but that was how it was at the time. Joseph couldn’t win.

 

He weighed up his options. We can imagine him agonising in the small hours of the night, flipping between plans, desperately trying to find some way of squaring the circle, so that everyone came out of this ok. In the end, he made his choice. He worked out a solution he could live with. The least worst option seemed to be to send Mary away quietly. Least said, soonest mended. Call the wedding off, and hope against hope that people would forget about the whole sad business. That way Mary wouldn’t suffer too badly, and Joseph would save as much face as possible. Perhaps that was the moment he fell asleep, finally having made up his mind.

 

But then he had a dream, and in his dream an angel came to him, and dropped the bombshell that the child was “from the Holy Spirit” – whatever that meant – Matthew doesn’t explain it. The message was clear, though. This child wasn’t a mistake or a sign of shame, as it would have been seen at the time, but a child through whom God was going to do something new, something vital, saving people from their sins. That’s what the name Jesus means. It means God saves. It was the same as the name Joshua – the great leader who had led the people of Israel into the Promised Land after they’d been freed from slavery in Egypt.  Jesus had been chosen to lead people into a new sort of freedom. And Joseph was called to be part of God’s plan too. Mary needed his protection. This child needed his protection.

 

We often focus at Christmas on the price Mary paid, on her faithfulness and courage in saying “Yes” to God, but Joseph paid a high price too. Who was going to believe him if he said that the child was “from the Holy Spirit”? He’d be, at the very least, a laughing stock. But Joseph, like Mary, was a person of courage – a righteous man – one of those people who decide what to do on the basis of whether it is right or wrong, rather than on whether it will bring them advantage. And so, when he woke up, we’re told, “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him”. That’s a small statement, but a huge act of commitment.  Joseph threw his own carefully laid plans out of the window and chose God’s plan instead. “He took Mary as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

 

Naming children has always been the prerogative of their parents. Grandma might or might not like their choice. Uncle Bill might have hoped they’d name it after him. But no one would seriously argue that it was anyone else’s right to name a child except the parents. In naming Jesus, Joseph takes on parental responsibility for this child. He is saying that he’ll be the one who will protect him, provide for him, teach him a trade, worry about him, do what any good father at the time would have done.   

 

But we also know, because we have heard about his dream, that in choosing the name he does, he is also committing himself to God’s plan for this child, because he chooses the name the angel told him to. Maybe, left to his own devices, he’d have called him Joseph, but he doesn’t. He takes on the responsibility of fatherhood, but he also recognises the greater fatherhood of God, who has a purpose for this child which is beyond Joseph’s understanding. He calls him Jesus – God saves.

 

How is this tiny child going to bring about any sort of salvation? Joseph doesn’t know, but Matthew gives us a hint when he quotes from a rather obscure story from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it’s worth us taking a small detour to find out a bit more about that.

 

King Ahaz, the king of Israel, was being attacked by neighbouring kings. Things weren’t going well.  Just before the passage we heard we are told that “The heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.” (Isaiah 7.2)

 

But in the face of Ahaz’ fear, God declares that he will act. He will defeat the attackers himself, and it will happen soon, by the time that a child who is soon to be born has grown up enough to know right from wrong, he says in the passage we heard. It is actually Isaiah’s own child God is referring to, a child he has with a Israelite prophetess, if you are interested. But, like Jesus, this child is named by God. He will be called Immanuel. “God with us”. His name will be a message, a reminder of the presence of God in these difficult times.

Isaiah’s words aren’t intended to be a prophecy of a child born in a stable six hundred years or so later, but Matthew sees an echo of this old story in the birth of Jesus, because he knows that salvation, God’s gracious reshaping of our lives, always begins when we realise that God is with us, beside us, within us, around us, close to us, caring about us. Matthew is telling us that Jesus will save people by being God’s presence among them. They will start finding the new life God wants to give them as they find God in him, healing, teaching, welcoming, loving.

 

Joseph could have said, “this child is nothing to do with me”. He could have turned his back on him and never given him a second thought. No one would have blamed him for it. It wasn’t his child. But he didn’t do that. He got involved. He named him. He cared for him. He loved him. He let this baby’s life become tangled up with his own, and in doing that he found that God was with him – Emmanuel  - in this child, and that changed everything.

 

The story asks us to consider what Jesus is to us? Is he just a theological idea, a long-ago story, an image in stained glass, paint or plaster? Or is he, in some sense, a living presence – God with us - someone we can’t forget about, someone whose life, whose ministry, whose priorities, impinge on us in a way we can’t ignore, change us too?

This story invites us into the moment when Joseph looked down at Mary’s baby and was given a choice – to take him as his own, or to leave him and walk away – and it asks us what we will do?

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advent 3: The desert rejoices

 Isaiah 35.1-10, Matthew 11.2-11

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad. The desert shall rejoice and blossom,” said Isaiah in our Old Testament Reading. 

Deserts do sometimes blossom, exactly as he describes. Flower seeds that have lain dormant in the dry dusty ground, sometimes for years, suddenly spring up and flower and set seed, all in a few weeks after a sudden rainstorm drenches them. It is a wonderful spectacle, and to ancient people it must have seemed like a miracle. How could so much life be hidden in such an apparently dead landscape? 

Stories of the saints often featured miraculous flowering too. Flowers were said to spring up in the footsteps of the Irish Saint Brigid, for example. According to legend Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury after the resurrection and was said to have stuck his wooden staff into the ground where it promptly burst into bloom.  I did much of my training for ministry based in the church in Glastonbury, and there are ancient varieties of hawthorn growing in the churchyard there which bloom in the winter. A sprig of those “holy thorn” trees is sent to grace the Royal Family’s Christmas dinner table to this day. 

The springs and wells which fed this unexpected flowering often litter the stories of saints too. Wells often spring up where saints are martyred, according to legends, and we find stories in the Bible too, like that of Moses, who struck a rock in the desert, as God commanded, and water poured from it. In Jewish legend, a well of water appeared wherever Miriam, Moses big sister, camped during the Exodus. The legend arose because when she died, the book of Numbers said that “the people had no water”. (Numbers 20.2)

Whether we put any credence in these stories or not, the message is obvious. There are times when we are confronted with situations that seem lifeless, hopeless, but what you see is not necessarily what you get. There is more to life than meets the eye. God can be at work even when we don’t see him. We can flourish and bear fruit in the most arid and unlikely situations, and the reason for that is that it isn’t down to us. It is the work of God, who is as much at home in a desert as he is in a fertile pasture.

In our Old Testament reading today, that’s what’s promised. The people of Israel are in exile in Babylon, and have been for many decades, long past the point where hope of return seemed sensible. And yet, says Isaiah, God would lead them home, and not only that, as they travel together with him, flowers would spring up in their path, pools of water would appear. It would be a journey full of hope for the future.  

In the Gospel reading Jesus doesn’t promise flowers in the desert in the future. He points to miraculous flowers that are appearing there and then. John the Baptist has been arrested by King Herod, and he knows he isn’t likely to get out of prison alive.  Has it all been worth it? Does his sacrifice mean anything? It’s easy to see how he might question himself, facing a squalid and terrible end, and want to know that his suffering hadn’t been in vain, so he sends messengers to Jesus. 

Jesus’ response is tender, consoling, but very, very definite. “Go and tell John what you hear and see; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them”. It’s almost as if each of these things is a flower from the desert, a miraculous bloom, which he is sending to John. “See! Here is God at work! Nothing you did, nothing that will happen to you is a waste, because love is never wasted.” 

All of us need to hear that at some point in our lives. We look back and wonder what we have achieved, what good we have done, what we will be remembered for. What is there to show for our lives? We look forward and wonder how we will cope with the future, how we will cross the trackless deserts that might confront us – illness, aging, the uncertainties that we all face. Most of us are not called to the sacrificial life of John the Baptist, but we are all called to share in God’s work of bringing healing to the sick, good news to the poor. We are all called to look for God at work and join in, to be part of a community of hope. 

God says to us “look! I have been at work, here, and here, and here, in the love you have given and received, and if I have been there in the past, why shouldn’t I be there in the future to bless and enrich you? It’s not about you, and your strength – you of the feeble knees and the fearful hearts – it is about me, the limitless creator of the universe. I spoke the light into being with a word. Flowers in the desert? Water in the wilderness?  Hope in despair? Love out of bitterness? Life out of death? Why should they be impossible for me? Watch, wait, and rejoice!”  

Amen