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
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