Saint Joseph
Advent 4 Matthew 1:18-29
The Bible never tells us about Joseph's thoughts, what went into the final decision he made not to abandon Mary but to marry her. How did he know that his dream was a real message from God and not just a nightmare or delusion? After all, God was not asking him to do some little, secret, inner religious kind of thing about which no one would ever know but himself. He lived in a very small community and everyone would know that Mary was pregnant when he married her. No one had ever heard of a virgin birth before, so the scandal was likely to be considerable. Joseph knew perfectly well that he was being asked to do something public; he was asked to marry his pregnant fiancée and adopt her son, and we don´t have the faintest idea of what he thought about it. Oddly enough, not a single word that St Joseph ever said has been recorded. We only know the bare facts of what he did. We wonder if he could have had any clear idea of what he was doing, except that he was sure God was calling him to do it.
But Matthew, writing about it a generation after Jesus' resurrection, did understand what was going on and gave us a link between the prophet Isaiah and the angel who visited Joseph and Mary to explain it. It is not a simple link, however. You only have to read Isaiah 7, as we did this morning, to discover that the events of Jesus' conception and birth were not exactly what the prophet had in mind.
Isaiah was looking for a successor in David's line to king Ahaz, a successor who could free Israel from its enemies. Yet his vision of such a future was never realized in the way he saw it—in fact, the way he saw it did not really fit any ordinary davidic king at all. That is why Matthew and other Christians before him were able to see that what the prophet was really anticipating was beyond his ability to imagine. God-with-us, Emmanuel, was not just a human king particularly blessed by God, but really God himself in the person of his Son.
The real link between Isaiah and Jesus that Matthew sees is not a kind of detailed prediction and fulfillment, but a link of continuity in God's Providence. God was acting in Isaiah's day within his age-long plan to save his people. Isaiah caught a glimpse of what God was doing, but only a little glimpse. Yet that glimpse was enough for Matthew to see that Jesus was part of the same plan and purpose of God that Isaiah was caught up in. Indeed, in Jesus' birth, Matthew was able to see a fulfillment to Isaiah's predictions which answered to Isaiah's vision better than the particularities which made up that vision. Isaiah saw just enough so that Matthew could read in his vision an anticipation of Jesus' coming. Jesus was part of the same story—in fact, the most critical phase of it. Now all of God's plans and purposes were on the very brink of fulfillment. Jesus himself must have thought about it in the same way—it was probably He who taught Matthew—one wonders if He and Joseph ever talked about it.
Another link between Isaiah's day and Joseph's day was a conviction about the kind of God whose plan was taking shape and being revealed. Both Joseph and Isaiah—and Matthew, too—knew that the God of Israel's religion was a God who could act within the very substance and detail of human history. He actually can intervene in the historical process when it pleases him to do so and he sees that it is necessary. He chooses particular people and particular places to act and when he acts it is both expected and unexpected. God's actions are always manifestations of the kind of God he has revealed himself to be in the past, and yet are surprising as well: there is far more to Him than he has yet let us in on. So it was a surprise to Joseph, but not a shock, that God not only could intervene and send Jesus to be born of a virgin, but that by doing so God made himself known as the God who had acted in the past and yet now went far beyond anything he had done before.
And this is the point at which the Gospel lesson impinges, I think, on us: where the example of Joseph, and perhaps Isaiah, too, could lead us to a deeper walk with God. Do we really believe, like they did, that God can come to us and make us partners with him in his saving plans and purposes? Can we imagine that He might want to interfere in the ordinary details of our workaday lives so as to make us his own agents in the places we live and work? God is not confined to the purely religious realm, the realm of church and worship and devotions. The whole point of worship and prayer and devotions is that we can take God with us into the rest of our lives, or, rather, so that we can discover God already at work in the rest of our lives, and cooperate with him in what he is doing to carry on his plan to save the world through Jesus Christ.
Is your faith large enough for you to believe that God wants to carry on his saving work through you? Joseph was a man like most of us: down to earth, practical, and sober—obviously, a man of few words. Most carpenters I have met are not visionaries and mystics. Yet, Joseph was chosen by God for a specific work: to adopt Jesus as his son and model human fatherhood for the Son of God the Father, being a faithful husband as well to Mary, the Mother of God. And he was willing to do it without a lot of explanation—quietly, unobtrusively, obediently, humbly.
God's call comes to each of us in our own particular way. I cannot say what God might lead you to do for him and with him. All I can say to you is that we all are involved with a God who comes to us personally and gives us some particular opportunities in which we can cooperate with him. He wants to be the center of our desires and of our lives so that he can direct us along a path that connects to his great plans for this world—and along the way, suits our own deepest needs. Are we up to it? Probably not. Yet we don't have to worry about that either. He has more than enough grace to overcome our inadequacies. He is only looking for our willingness to be used by him.
Prayer. O God, whose faithful servant Joseph overcame his fears and reached out in faith to obey your call to him; help us to overcome our fears of your lordship in our lives. Open our hearts to your indwelling, make us eager to cooperate with you for your purposes and for your glory alone. Amen.