Faithful Expectations
At this time of the year, expectation is very nearly overcome by exhaustion. Whether that expectation is Christmas dinner and a pile of ill-afforded presents, or the Coming of the Son of Man, the lead up now seems interminable—like an overlong engagement.
The pressure to do the right thing by the right people seems overwhelming.
The Gospel for the fourth Sunday in Advent (Matthew 1.18-25) reminds us of another person whose anticipation may have been exhausting: Joseph.
Joseph is informed (by God's messenger) that his young fiancée is going to have a baby, and he is ordered to keep quiet!
He is not the father. Joseph could not help but be overwhelmed by this shocking and disturbing news. How he must have struggled with the question, ‘What was the right thing to do?”
The Law was clear on the matter—his fiancée was pregnant by someone else—the contract to marry was broken. Mary had violated the moral law and could be cast away or even stoned. And quite apart from the moral and legal issue, Joseph was faced with the practical matter of just how one hides a pregnancy, a teenage pregnancy at that.
And then there was the matter of Joseph's own feelings. It looks as if the pregnancy occurred after he became engaged to Mary. How could she do such a thing? And if the messenger was right, and he wasn't dreaming dreams, the child to be born had Yahweh, the God of Israel, as its father.
What on earth would such a child be like?
How do we, like Joseph, do right by Mary and the child she gives to us?
We, too, can react from the ground of the secular world in which we live. We can be equally cynical about what God was doing through Mary. Our feelings, our self absorptions may intrude. The demands of faith may be just too much, an optional extra for which we have no time: an investment of faith and action that has no room in our cluttered, busy lives.
Regarding Christmas as a story helps us push it to one side, to be picked up or laid aside, as time permits.
Yet the faithful Joseph was a Jew. He believed in a God who acted first and required a human response of obedience and awe.
He didn't believe in a God who waited around for human suggestions or obeyed human laws like the law of nature. This God didn't think much of those who thought that God was bound by what humans conceived as unbreakable laws.
The God of Abraham did as He thought fit.
While we rush around creating Christmas (and getting it all wrong), Joseph walked in faith, expecting God to get it right: to shield Mary from the censure of prying eyes, to heal his bewildered feeling, and to ensure that the child born, while truly God, was winsomely and engagingly human.
Humble Joseph calls us to that very same faith and commitment.
The problem for Joseph, (and perhaps for us) is that he expected God to act in power and might, as God did on Sinai after he brought Israel out of Egypt, when God intervened to rescue Israel.
This time there seemed to be a difference. God was intervening in vulnerability and weakness, in the form of a baby.
Such a version of God isn't much to our liking.
We like a bit of force from God, and we like a bit of muscle when we think we are representing God. We just can't get our minds around ‘loving-in-weakness’ being the solution.
Joseph probably wanted to lock Mary in her room, subjecting her to hours of criticism, and then, once the baby arrived, divorce her. He didn't. He looked after her. He loved her, and struggled down that road from Nazareth to Bethlehem with her.
Once the child is born and reaches maturity, Joseph just fades away and is mentioned no more. If Mary is extraordinarily faithful in accepting God's call to be Mother of the Eternal King, The Messiah, Joseph in his own way, shares in that faithfulness, to a remarkable degree!
It is not too late to get Christmas right this year: to stop, reflect, realize that all you have done since Thanksgiving has maybe been many things, but it isn't Christmas.
This year, perhaps in the next few days, you can stop thinking that it all depends on your presents and your cooking. It all depends on God's giving.
Like Joseph, you may expect but not control.
And when God acts by dwelling among us, and taking our humanity into himself, then keep Christmas joyfully during the twelve days. Stretch out the feast. Give thanks that we are saved, in and through the Child.
Norman+
