There’s room in God’s true holy family.
This is our family
Advent 4A | Matthew 1:18-25
This week’s gospel is strangely relatable. While I doubt anyone here has been in Joseph’s exact situation (and if you have, please feel free to tell me all about it), I suspect we have been in a kind of no-win situation before.
Maybe it wasn’t about pregnancy or trust, but it is something in which we’ve felt stuck. And what we want more than anything is to do the right thing.
Doing the right thing is so central to our thinking, it’s probably the number one thing I’m asked. [Perhaps narrowly nudging out “can you come reach this tall thing” and “what is the wi-fi password”.] We all find ourselves in situations which don’t reveal an obvious or easy solution.
Most of these involve a choice between two painful possibilities.
In Joseph’s case, he has to weigh two very important ideas:
1. follow the law
2. protect his fiancé.
If he follows the law, she dies. If he wants to protect her, he’ll have to skirt the law.
While Wells Fargo executives don’t have qualms about skirting the law, most of us feel queasy in the idea of endorsing that. Who really thinks Henry VIII’s marriages could be annulled?
The Best We Can Do
We arrive then at the idea that this is the best we can do given the situation. And because of that, we usually feel comfortable calling it “the right thing.” Period.
This is a handy psychological tool, isn’t it? Because it helps us evaluate it, which satisfies our inner critique. Therefore, we feel comfortable letting it go and moving on.
For our brains, the difference between “the right thing” and “the best we can do” is not relevant. Precisely because the outcome is the same. We feel better after making the decision.
The thing about this story we’re reading is that it takes all of this—and upends it completely.
The thing we attach ourselves to: Joseph having to make a terrible decision, choosing to be a father, evaluating: all of that is not the point. In sports they call this color commentary. It’s not the action, but the extra that helps make sense of the action.
Joseph is wrestling between terrible choices and makes up his mind to protect Mary rather than just himself, when the angel appears in a dream and says that God is giving him another option. A new option. Don’t be afraid of it.
And Joseph decides to dive in.
What birth story?
How many noticed that the opening line of this story reads:
“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”
Matthew 1:18a
This is Jesus’s birth story. Not Joseph’s terrible no good decision day. And how does the evangelist describe the birth? In the past tense.
“until she had borne a son”
Matthew 1:25b
Matthew tells the birth of Jesus in a story about how Joseph handles his relationship with Mary.
Weird isn’t it?
There’s a reason we read Luke’s version on Christmas. This is not as likely to bring tears to our eyes. Can you imagine Linus reading this one in the Christmas pageant? What’s the meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown? Well, let’s establish the marital relations first…
Here’s the thing. This passive construction of the birth story sets up their relationship, Jesus’s relationship to them, and Jesus’s relationship to his kin. And that’s where things get really interesting.
Let’s talk Genealogy!
This is quite literally the only time I get excited about genealogies. When a Bible Study gets to a genealogy, we all drift away. We don’t care about who begat who. Summarize it, please! Tell me why it matters!
The thing about Matthew’s genealogy, however, is that it is so subversive. And the writer of this gospel starts the story by telling how we get from David to the baby who is about to be born by specifically highlighting two Not Safe For Work stories.
He names two women, Tamar and Bathsheba, who saved God’s people in spite of the terrible things the men were doing. Matthew goes out of his way to lift up these women’s stories in the middle of a patriarchal, constructed system of wealth preservation we call “the family line.”
And then Matthew concludes it by stating that Joseph, who can claim David as his ancestor, thus making him the rightful heir to the throne Herod is sitting on, is referred to as Mary’s husband.
“Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.”
Matthew 1:16
That’s what Matthew thinks of that whole system.
God hasn’t just provided Joseph a new option to save his fiancé. God has provided the people an illegitimate heir to the throne, legitimized through Mary and Joseph. Because God does new things for the blessing of creation.
The New Thing
The genealogy helps us see that Joseph’s struggle over trying to figure out the “right” thing is certainly commendable. It’s ordinary. What we do every single day of our lives.
But it isn’t the limit of God’s grace. Because God is doing new things. And God has always loved when we do new things for the grace of God. When we aren’t so wedded to tradition that we would metaphorically stone our fiancé rather than strive to find a new way.
This becomes even more explicit when we keep reading from here. How the Holy Family, these displaced royals, are hunted by a paranoid king; afraid of a baby’s threat to his power. How he’d commit genocide to preserve it. And Joseph protects his family, becoming refugees in Egypt. Then later, resettling in northern Judea, in hiding.
Displaced Royals beget the savior of the world.
This is our story!
And what Jesus reveals is that we are their children too.
He unspools a carefully threaded arrangement that preserves the power in the hands of the wealthy, the proud, the cruel, and vengeful. It unravels the machinations of generations of selfish hoarding, granting us all a place in the Kin-dom. Not by special birth or providence.
But simply by being human. And willing to join in this divine project of grace-filled love-spreading.
This is the deal God has the angel bring to Joseph. Not that he knew that. Not that he could even imagine such a responsibility.
He was simply invited to try something new. To not be afraid. And to just…jump.
And in so doing, he preserves the life of Mary, Jesus, and all of us.
So of course we’re tempted to evaluate that judgment. Call it “the right thing to do.” Catalog it and put it away. Phew! Good thing that’s over! And ignore why it is amazing!
These are our people.
Not because we’re born into it. Or we walked into church and said “this is fine.” But because we are drawn by God to be in a place of love, learning to love, becoming practitioners of love. Drawn to be with people who were also drawn.
And it does us no good to declare Joseph “right” and avoid the aching difficulty of doing right in the eyes of God. Of showing faith when we’d rather be frozen by fear. To face the challenge before us, not with the certainty that we will survive, but with the faith that we will live!
These are our people. Joseph, Mary, Jesus. Theirs is our lineage. Not by blood or royal birth. Not to the exclusion of our neighbors or the specialness of our circumstance. But in the grace of God to be a new thing in this old world.
To be grace here and now.
And to live with conviction and hope in God’s love for us, for this neighborhood, and for all of creation.