Isaiah 7:10-18, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25
Joseph had a dream. His dream resolved a dilemma, but added complications. Let’s consider what was at stake for him. Remember that in those days a marriage was a deal between two men: for the right of one to take the daughter of the other, and it was the father’s job to deliver her as a virgin. And now Joseph’s fiancé is pregnant, and not by him, so that’s over. He is a righteous man and could demand his compensation, but he’s also kindly and wants to minimize the shame on Mary.
Then he has the dream, that he should take her anyway. That forces a new dilemma. If he takes her anyway, well, people can count, they can count months, and then he loses his righteous reputation for having taken advantage of the girl before he had the right to her, or else he is the cuckold, and people will gossip and whisper who the father really is. Joseph will have his own shame to add to Mary’s shame. And in fact the people did whisper that Jesus was illegitimate (John 8:41).
When you’re a facing a dilemma, do you look for a sign? A sign to tell you what to do? And if you get a sign, does it settle things, or add new complications? Joseph got a sign that settled one problem but added many more. The baby was just the beginning. It was born with complications.
Joseph was descended from the King Ahaz of our first reading, and St. Matthew wants us to know that, for he mentions it just nine verses earlier. King Ahaz was not a good kind, and he was in trouble. His capital city was under siege, and his people were starving. In this predicament the prophet Isaiah offered him a sign, but Ahaz would not take it. He thought that would make him look weak and irresolute, and he wanted to look strong. “I’m the decider! I don’t need your sign!”
“Well, Ahaz, you tiresome poser, I tell you what, I’m giving you a sign anyway, both to save you and to judge you. A child will be born, and before he knows how to behave he will be eating very nice food. The siege will be lifted, but not by you, but by God against you and without your help.”
The sign that Ahaz got was neither down in Sheol nor up in heaven, but right in the middle of human life, the sign of a childbirth in the midst of a siege, in spite of the siege. Such a sign is easily discounted by the skeptical and rational. One has to imagine an ordinary childbirth as the presence of God, Immanuel, God with us. One needs the imagination of belief to even see it as a sign!
The sign that Isaiah gave to Ahaz is quoted by St. Matthew for the case of Joseph. Not to somehow prove the Virgin Birth. That’s not the point of the quotation. The point is fulfillment, that what God did once God does again, and better, that what God begins God carries through on, and that the whole broad story of human history has another story working within it, the story of God-with-us. And though the story of God-with-us put Joseph in a predicament not of his choosing, it then required choosing of him, but God was with him in the making of his choices.
The sign he got was challenging. Do you take your dreams literally? Don’t assume that people back then were more gullible than we are today. His new dilemma is whether to believe his dream. And then, if he believes his dream, he has new complications besides taking the shame of Mary on himself.
On the plus side, he can trust Mary again, that she’s not been unfaithful, but that also entails the impossible, that she is still a virgin, even while pregnant. That was harder to believe back then than it is now. In their notions of biology the embryo was 100% the seed from the man. All the woman contributed was her womb, for a man to plant his seed, and if this did not happen, well, then Joseph was the first man to wrestle with the doctrine of the virgin birth, and right up close; and did he say to himself, “What am I nuts? The Holy Spirit did it? Who is the Holy Spirit anyway?”
If he believes his dream, how will he convince his friends and family? More challenges. He is a righteous man who will have to learn a new kind of righteousness, for he will have no code of laws and commandments to be observant of. His obedience will be what St. Paul called “the obedience of faith.” Not the possession of faith, but the obedience of faith.
Critics of religion say that religious faith is how we try to solve the hard complexities of life. I don’t think so. I find that my Christian faith increases my complexities. Don’t you? You welcome your challenges, you believe it’s all worth it, and your faith does give you comfort and security and it’s fulfilling and it expands your joy, but it also expands your unknowns and your uncertainties. The baby is just the beginning.
This obedience of faith calls you to address what you’d rather avoid and go where you fear. In the dream the angel said, “Joseph, fear not to take Mary as your wife.” The angel has to say it because Joseph will fear it. You know how shaken you feel when you wake up from a powerful dream. Imagine the poor guy sitting on his bed in the dark before the dawn, the dream all in his head, and he is facing all these new uncertainties—so much in his life outside of his control, that he now must take and name and raise a child who belongs to God, with a destiny beyond him for which he is now responsible. “Joseph, son of David, fear not!” We are right to admire this quiet man.
He did not know that we’d be talking about him 2000 years later. Could he imagine all that God was up to with him? That the baby was the beginning of a whole new order that no one had ever yet imagined? God did not tell him very much. God told him just enough, and then God depended upon his righteousness, for him to “refuse the evil and choose the good,” to estimate the right thing and do that whenever he faced his next uncertainty. His obedience was not to an instruction manual but an obedience of stepping out in faith and not by sight. “Now what’s the right thing I can do here, despite the complications in front of me and the unknown complications still to come?”
It’s remarkable in the great story of God how much God depends on the partnership of ordinary people precisely in our dilemmas and predicaments. A God who is all-knowing and omnipotent depends for God’s plan on you to make your choices right within your troubles and uncertainties. This God partners with us, God-with-us, depends on us, submits to your initiatives, and constructs a highway to Zion from the material of your fragile choices. God puts Godself into your hands. Joseph experienced the new way of God in the world, the baby was the beginning.
Well, not absolutely new, according to St. Paul, who says in our Epistle that the prophets promised it beforehand in the scriptures, but God was now fulfilling those promises in new ways beyond anyone’s expectations. Not just God-with-us, not just God along with us, but God as one of us. God submitting to childbirth. In the midst of us. In spite of us! The baby was the beginning of a new inhabitation of God with us, a new order of God’s investment in us, God invests Godself in us. “That’s who the Holy Spirit is, Joseph, who entered inside your fiancé when she said, ‘Yes, let it be to me,” and who now will come inside all of us as well.”
So your belief makes all the difference to God. You, Christian, sitting out there. God submits to your belief. You are God’s sign. When you face decisions and dilemmas, I know you might want to ask for a sign from God, and occasionally you might get one, but I’m warning you, that sign will just increase your complications, and that’s not God’s preferred practice now, anyway, because God is in you as the Holy Spirit, and you yourself are a sign from God. God says, “You choose! You estimate! I’m not going to tell you very much, just enough, but I trust your desire to choose the good. And precisely in your fragile choosing, my dear believer, is how I make myself active in the world.”
The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name, God-with-us. God saves the world through the soft inside and not from the top, and you must receive God in God’s chosen vulnerability. That’s the sign for your faith. As Joseph will receive Mary in her vulnerability. I’m wondering how it felt for Mary when Joseph somewhat shyly came up to her and said, “I take you, Mary, to be my wedded wife.” Not a typical love story, this one, is it, so full of complications, but a wonderful love story all the same, and a story that carries the love of God for people just like you.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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