God invites the Holy Family to join in doing a new thing.
For Sunday
Advent 4A
Collect
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Matthew 1:18-25
“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
Reflection
This week, we’re invited briefly into the mind of Joseph. A man who, finding out that his fiancé is pregnant, struggles with figuring out what the right thing to do is.
Perhaps we believe that the answer is obvious. We may be convinced the right thing for a man to do is to marry the woman and protect her.
Or, we may have a conviction toward the sanctity of human life, so there is no question that this baby should be born and he will take appropriate responsibility for all of it.
Underlying both of these ideas is a sense of a deeper law at work. Sometimes we refer to this as natural law. That regardless of what society says or even what the church teaches, there is a “right thing” that exists outside of these measures. This is a tempting conviction. And one to which I also usually subscribe.
This, however, isn’t what Joseph is thinking about. Not exactly.
Not just “right”
Joseph is weighing what his religious tradition teaches with what he thinks may be right. But there’s no way he would think it is more right. And further, it is complicated by this divine witness. An angel speaks to him and tells him to break the law.
The law, of course, would have Joseph stone his fiancé himself. Or hand her over to be stoned to death. He was already leaning toward the slightly more humane option of sending her back like an overcooked steak.
God’s intervention, to preserve Mary and the baby, and to encourage Joseph to participate in this birth, creates a different dynamic than the more comfortable territory of what is “right”. Joseph was already planning on doing the “right” thing in his context. God was giving him a new context.
Through this angel visitation (and others that follow), Joseph is invited into the transformation of the order of things: what constitutes “right,” just, and loving. Because God is doing a new thing and making Joseph and Mary instruments of that new thing.
It is important that we can put ourselves in their shoes. Or more importantly, be able to draw into our own material conditions, the humanness of the Holy Family. I think this is essential to our theology.
Let us do so through the lens of newness that God is offering them. An invitation to participate in a bigger project that requires their protection, love, and joy to complete. A project that we inherit, not naturally through birth, but through the grace of God.