Whenever we read
about Joseph (the father of Jesus) in the Bible, which admittedly is not often
because he only appears in first two chapters of Matthew and even less in Luke,
I am reminded of a quote from the 1998 movie, Simon Birch, where one of the boys, Eddie, gloats after being cast
as Joseph in the Christmas pageant. He’s pretty full of himself until Simon,
the little misfit title character, says, “It's the Virgin Mary, Eddie. What does Joseph have to do with anything?”
Right. What does Joseph have to do with anything?
This really is the
question. Joseph is just along for the ride; in fact, it’s his fault they need
to make this journey to Bethlehem
in the first place. What does Joseph have to do with anything? I mean, how many
lines does he get in the Christmas pageant? How many songs are written about
him? Nobody cares! And I suppose that’s natural and it’s even kind of funny…
until we consider that perhaps Joseph
does have a role to play, that, in fact, this story of Jesus’ birth hinges
on adoption… and it centers around naming… both of which are incredibly
powerful and both of which are Joseph’s job.
I bet most people
would say that these verses in Matthew are about the Virgin birth, which is
true in part, but I would hazard to guess that we say that primarily because that’s
controversial, and our eyes tend to focus on sex if it’s to be found anywhere
in the text. If there’s one verse out of one hundred that has to do with sex
we’ll pick it out as the most important, because it tends to be one of our big
hang-ups. For example, I can all but guarantee that even though this sermon has
nothing to do with sex and I’m not going to mention it again after this moment
it will show up in a couple of sermon notes. We get so hung up on Virgin birth
stuff that we tend to miss the rest of what’s going on altogether. This is a
story about Joseph staying in the picture, being the adoptive father of the Son
of God, and it’s about the power of naming. It’s Joseph to whom the name of
Emmanuel is given, not Mary, though, being the typical guy that he is, he
apparently wasn’t listening to the angel very closely because instead of
Emmanuel he went with “Jesus.”
Joseph is also
important because of his lineage. The first reading today with that overly long
list of descendents connects Jesus with the heroes of biblical history. That
lineage runs through Joseph. None of
those connections exist without Joseph, which is kind of funny if you stop and
think about it because it means that Jesus was not actually a flesh and blood
descendant of David or Abraham or any of the others. He is only an adoptive
descendant of that line. If Joseph goes, so does Jesus’ primary connection with
the Old Testament. Jesus’ flesh and blood lineage is through the more-anonymous
Mary.
Well, tradition
tends to forget Joseph. The Bible certainly doesn’t dwell on him much, but, on
the other hand, Matthew spends the better part of his first chapter making
certain that people know that Jesus’ long lineage of royal blood is dependent
on him. Then, Matthew goes out of his way again to demonstrate that Joseph, in
spite of the cultural pariah he would be for marrying a girl who was already
pregnant, sticks with it. In all the veneration that we do of Mary in this
season it was always her child; there was no doubt about that. For Joseph,
however, that was in question, and still he stayed.
That simple act
might not seem like much to us today—we could assume that Jesus was going to be
Jesus no matter the earthly father he was given—but the truth is that we simply
don’t know. All we know is that without Joseph he doesn’t even get the name.
There is no “Jesus”—no “God saves”; no Emmanuel—no “God with us.” When God
created in Genesis he did it by speaking a name. He spoke stars and there were
stars; he spoke trees and there were trees… water, sun, moon, he spoke it all
into being. And so the angels give to Joseph sign that he, too, is part of the
creation of this Christ-child. He gets to give him a name, which is the nearest
thing he could do to being his true father.
While it’s
certainly true that Mary knew Jesus in a way that Joseph could not, it’s also
true that Joseph’s commitment to stay meant that Jesus had opportunities he
never would have had with only a mother. Of course we can play the
God-preordained-all-this-from-the-beginning-of-time card. We can play the game
of minimizing human volition in favor of God moving the pawns, but if our lives
matter at all—if our wills matter at all today—then scripture begs us to
consider Joseph as a hero, because Joseph had the freedom to go this way or
that and yet he stuck it out, changing the course of human history.
With
that said, I hesitate to make Joseph’s decision out to have any wider implications
for our morality today. I am pretty certain that most of us will not have to
decide whether to stay with a wife impregnated by God. This is clearly a unique
situation. But I do think the mere fact that we relegate Joseph to a footnote
in the stories of Jesus’ birth shows something about us: we tend to undervalue
those who do an astoundingly good job of showing up. Joseph’s ministry to Mary
was simply to be there, and that matters.
Being there at the birth of the child mattered. It always matters.
We
are consistently under-aware of how important it is that individuals in our
lives are just there until the moment
of crisis when we need them—not to make it right, not even to say a word, just
to be there. If you think that the Immaculate Conception was not a moment of
crisis in Mary’s life you are oblivious. She needed Joseph. As much as we like
to imagine the angels coming down and being her primary source of comfort nothing
in scripture suggests that angels have anything like that effect on people.
Pretty much every example we have of angels coming down in the Bible is
accompanied by people going all, “Holy sweet Jesus, Hallelujah!” and averting
their eyes for fear of the fiery brimstone and the laser eyes that they imagine
that they have. In spite of the utter cuteness we parade before you each year
at the Christmas pageant, angels are fearsome, terrifying, overwhelming
creatures. None of them were singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” let alone
“Silent Night.” Mary had about as much chance of being comforted by the angels
as your grandmother has of being comforted by death metal. That’s not how any of this works!
Mary
didn’t need angels to scare the bejesus out of her, and she didn’t need barn
animals to keep her warm and cozy. We romanticize the heck out of Jesus’ birth
when the truth is that none of it was comfortable. What Mary needed was Joseph.
Of all possible people in the world she needed Joseph.
I’m
not suggesting that Mary needed Joseph because she wasn’t strong enough to do
it on her own—please, please don’t hear this as suggesting that women need men
to be strong for them (or if you do hear it that way definitely don’t tell my
wife)—and neither am I suggesting that Joseph’s role was more important or even
somewhat equivalent with Mary’s. Instead, I’m merely saying that we tend to
undervalue how important it is to just be there—at births, at deaths, at big
events in peoples’ lives, and even just day-to-day. The Lutheran pastor and
writer, Nadia Bolz-Weber, claims that Mary Magdalene is the “patron saint of
just showing up” and I want to suggest that Joseph is her male equivalent.
Nobody shows up as importantly as Joseph.
If
there’s a wider lesson here I think it is that: just show up. We place so much
importance as a society on being an expert, on knowing everything, on having
our act together, but none of that really matters. Not when a person needs you.
They need you to just be there. You don’t need to fix it. You’re not God.
Joseph couldn’t undo the pregnancy; he couldn’t assure Mary that they wouldn’t
be shunned or rejected by their families. All he could do was to be there. And
it was enough. So it is for most of us. Just show up. It will make a world of
difference.
Amen.
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