Joseph Faces A Tough Question

I need to tell you, I’m always a little puzzled when I read the first chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. We read part of it today, but not the part that puzzles me. The difficult part is that genealogy – the passage right before the one we read. I didn’t make you sit through that, it’s just a list of names. It seems to be tracing the ancestry of Jesus. It starts with Abraham, and ends with these words “and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.” Now you see my problem. They trace through this whole lineage to get to Joseph, and yet Joseph has no biological connection to Jesus. Is he the father of Jesus, or isn’t he? I suspect the best we can say is, “Well, he is, and he isn’t.”

This is the way it worked: Joseph was engaged to a woman named Mary. Remember, engagement back then was a legal thing. You didn’t get engaged by sending a text message. Engagement was a serious business, and it could be broken only by going to the courts. In effect, it was the same as marriage and binding in nature. So Joseph was engaged – may have been engaged for years. Engagements lasted a long time. The two families came together, signed the papers, and when the young people came of age, they married.

So Joseph is engaged to Mary, but he discovers she’s pregnant. Now, what is he going to do? Joseph’s fiancée is pregnant. Joseph is a good man, a righteous man, a man who wants to do the right thing. That’s great, but how do you know what the right thing is? Here’s a carpenter in the community, engaged to a woman named Mary, and it becomes clear she is pregnant. What is the right thing to do? There are two options available to Joseph.

First, he could get the opinion of people in town. Somerset Maugham once said, “The most fundamental and strongest disposition of the human spirit in civilized society is to get the approval of the people around you.” Go to the coffee shop, “What do you think I ought to do?” Get on the phone, e-mail your friends, take your problem to work, talk about it over coffee, talk about it everywhere – tell everybody. “Did you hear about Mary? What do you think I ought to do?” Spread it everywhere. Spread it all over town. But Joseph will not go that route. He will not disgrace Mary. He will not expose her. He will not humiliate her. Then what is he going to do?

Maybe he has some friends just fresh from the synagogue who say, “Just do what the Bible says. You can’t go wrong if you do what the Bible says.” What about that for an answer? I’ve heard that all my life, “Just do what the Bible says!” Well, I will tell you what the Bible says: Deuteronomy chapter 22, “She is to be taken out and stoned to death in front of the people.” That is what the Bible says!

I get tired of people always thumping the Bible as though you can open it up and turn to a passage that clears everything up. You can quote the Bible before killing a person to justify the killing. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” the Bible says. Do you know what the Bible says? “Let the women keep their heads covered and their mouths shut!” Do you know what the Bible says? “It’s okay to have slaves, just don’t beat them too much.” It’s in the book. It’s in there! I run into so many people who carry around a forty-three pound Bible and say, “Just do what the book says!”

Joseph is a good man, and he rises to a point that is absolutely remarkable for his day and time. He knows his Bible, and he loves his Bible, and God bless him for that. But he reads the Bible through a certain kind of lens – the lens of the character and nature of a God who is loving and kind. Therefore he says, “I will not harm Mary, abuse her, expose her, shame her, ridicule her, or demean her value, her dignity or her worth. I will protect her!”

“Joseph! Where does it say you’re supposed to do that? It’s not in your Bible.” I’ll tell you where it says that. It says that in the very nature and character of God. I am absolutely amazed that Joseph is the first person in the New Testament who learned how to read scripture.

And like Joseph, we are to read scripture through the spectacles of the grace and goodness and the love of God. If in reading the Bible you find justification for abusing, humiliating, disgracing, harming or hurting, especially when it makes you feel better about yourself, you are absolutely wrong! The Bible is to be read in the light of the character of God. And as one old Presbyterian used to say to me over and over again, “Well, Denyer, I know one thing. God is just as good a Christian as we are.” That’s not a bad theology, not bad at all.

You know, I’m feeling good about Christmas. The baby is not born yet – Mary is not even in labour, but it’s Christmas already, because of Joseph. Through an angel, God said to Joseph in a dream, “I want you to marry Mary. I want you to go ahead and marry her. I want you to take care of her. I have chosen you to raise her boy.” So please do not forget Joseph, even though he has no biological connection to Jesus, and is not really his father - but he is the one who will raise the baby, and care for the baby’s mother.

Christmas for me has already started because I know when Jesus is born, the man who will teach him, raise him, care for him, show him how to be a carpenter, take him to the synagogue, tell him stories from the Bible, and teach him his lessons – the man who is going to do all of that, is a good man. When you have somebody like that, it is already Christmas, and Christmas will last as long as God can find, in every community, one person who says, “I will do what is right.” What is right, is to read scripture and to read the human condition in the light of the love and grace and kindness of God. As long as there is one such person in every community, it will be Christmas.

The question, of course, is whether or not you will be that person. Will you be that person - to read scripture and to read the human condition in the light of the love and grace and kindness of God?