Preparing a Mansion
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.
Isaiah 7:10-17 Matthew 1:18-25
Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that what might seem like a small
matter to us carries great importance in the Kingdom of God. What
we think, what we say, what we do – all create consequences far beyond
our limited view of time and space.
While Joseph of Nazareth is one of the lesser characters of the Bible,
he is revealed as a man of dreams and action if not of words.
Matthew’s account of Jesus’ nativity uses Joseph’s story in several
ways – this simple story reveals several layers of meaning – each of
which is important if we are to connect his story with our own.
The Gospel opens with the statement that Jesus is the Messiah and
offers a somewhat stylized genealogy, crucial to this claim. The
evangelist then builds his argument in today’s reading that Jesus
fulfills the prophet’s expectations from long ago. But in a
subtle way, the action in this story plays out as a reversal of the
ancient story of human disobedience. On yet one more level, this
is a quintessential love story.
The facts are readily believable even if it is hard for us to fully
grasp the pressure under which Joseph must have been placed by Mary’s
pregnancy during their betrothal. Joseph is described as a
righteous man, a just man – a man who kept the law and observed the
laws that hedged the sacred law. But beyond righteousness, Joseph
understood compassion in relation to the law. Not always an easy
path to walk – this balance between justice and mercy, righteousness
and compassion, truth and love and it was no easy decision then.
Consider the cultural pressures on this blue-collar worker from
Galilee. To flaunt the laws of Judaism was to endanger the future
of an entire people. Pressure to ‘defend the truth’ was
tremendous yet Joseph’s inclination was to remedy a difficult situation
with the least ill effect on any of the parties involved. That is
the sort of thing many of us were taught as children. But more
about that in a moment.
Matthew, ever anxious to demonstrate that Jesus is the fulfillment of
Biblical prophecy and clearly the son of God, introduces Joseph as a
direct descendent of David and in the opening words of the Gospel, uses
a balanced and numerologically significant genealogy to portray Jesus
as standing at the pinnacle of the generations from Abraham to David to
the exile in Babylon to the birth of the Messiah. In Jewish
expectation, messiahs – deliverers - were anticipated in the royal
(political), priestly (religious), and prophetic (righteousness)
realms. Hence we have Jesus described as Prophet, Priest, and
King.
The Romans rule Judea with an iron fist, the Temple is under the
control of Herod’s priests, and there has been only silence from God
for over 400 years; these are the conditions in the Palestine as
Augustus’ reign enters its third decade.
And it is into these conditions that Mary and Joseph are chosen to host
the precious gift of God’s own Son, offered as the complete Messiah,
the one who will save the people.
However it comes with uncertainty and in a problematic situation.
Mary and Joseph’s marriage is in the betrothal stage and a pregnancy
would be culturally and ritually unacceptable. What to do?
Sometimes it is a great struggle to know how to resolve a dilemma such
as this. When something has gone wrong, people will be hurt –
what is the right thing to do? There have certainly been those
times in my life when a problem was turning over in my mind for days
and weeks with no easy resolution. At night, sleep would bring
but brief respite as dreams tangentially worked on the unresolved
problem. There is an element of truth in the old saw, “The
darkest hour is just before the dawn.” Often it is the crisis,
the problem, which moves us to new levels of understanding and opens us
to a larger view of God at work in our lives.
And in my own experience, I can affirm the existence of a powerful and
clear voice coming in a dream and offering a solution to a quandary – a
solution which should have been obvious all along but was hidden from
my conscious, waking thought because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It cost me more than I wanted, it hurt, it demanded that I give up my own sense of what was right for me
that a greater purpose would be served. Perhaps Joseph wrestled
with similar thoughts before resolving to “dismiss Mary quietly.”
Matthew uses Joseph as an important if silent character as the drama of
ancient prophecy fulfilled begins to unfold. Consider, for
example, Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God’s command to refrain from
eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In a
world where the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil,
sometimes becomes blurred, we need the Holy Spirit, the living word of
God, to guide us.
As Adam and Eve rejected dependency on God’s guidance in favor of
having an independent knowledge too powerful for their being, so Mary
at the Annunciation and now Joseph reverse that. Joseph listens
to the messenger from God speak peace into his fear, direction into his
uncertainty. Surely, walking in obedience to God may result in
humiliation and disgrace before our peers but when we listen to the
Spirit, when we obey God, even in the face of adversity, deflated ego,
and public shame, we can be confident that the Spirit leads and guides
us. Let the one who has ears hear.
But perhaps the highest layer of understanding gleaned from Joseph’s
story is that of the power of love revealed. Because we live on
the other side of Joseph’s decision, we know the importance that it
carried but Joseph likely imagined that it was only a private matter, a
detail that directly affected two families. While a principle was
involved, it would likely not draw attention beyond their circle of
closest friends and a few busybodies. How was he to know that
what he was being asked to do that night was to reflect the immensity
of God’s love for a humanity gone astray.
“…Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife…” The righteousness of God
called for a response of wrath. This is not some subject anger
toward us but rather the consequences of the outworking of our inner
disobedience. Just as the heat from the pan on the burner
blisters the skin when we grab the pot, so the angry heat of sin
creates fear, injury, and hurt. In turn, we so often pass that
injury on to others with our readiness to judge righteously.
But, like Joseph, we rarely have all the information – the facts are
not always as we think them to be. Even should we have the facts
straight, the power of mercy and love still triumphs over judgment and
enmity. Joseph could have acted severely toward Mary's apparent
indiscretion, but he chose to offer love, even when he thought he had
been wronged. And in so doing, he gives shelter to the gift of
God’s love incarnate.
On the eve of Christmas Eve, at this hour before the dawn of the
Dayspring, let us hear Joseph’s story as a call to examine our own
openness to mercy and compassion, our willingness to let God work in
our lives. It is never easy to lay aside our own wishes, our own
sense of what is right and just – but perhaps, just perhaps, God has
something bigger and of far more importance to accomplish than we can
see or imagine. Listen for the voice of God who by his daily
visitation is preparing in your deepest being, a mansion for
himself. Amen.
John Dryden Burton
23 December 2007
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