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“Surprising Obedience”
Introduction to Scripture As we read the nativity accounts as passed down to us by the evangelists Luke and Matthew, we would do well to remember that these stories, like all the stories recorded in the gospels, are seen and interpreted from the narrator’s post-Easter perspective. In other words, Matthew’s starting point is not a virgin named Mary or a man named Joseph to whom she has been engaged -- no, Matthew’s starting point is an experience of the risen Christ. What he is trying to get across to us in his writing is the meaning of the whole Christ event. He wants us to know who Jesus is; he wants to convey how God is involved; he wants to show how God acts, how God works through the ordinary lives of ordinary people to bring into being the people of Israel, to bring into being a savior by name of Jesus, and to bring us to a point where we might be players, not just spectators or beneficiaries, in God’s drama of salvation for the world.Viewed this way, the birth narratives are not just recountings of historical events – they have everything to do with who God is, what God has done for us, and how we ought to respond. So put yourselves into the story; today, for just a while, you are Joseph.
Headlines can be deceptive. The tabloids that line the supermarket check-out lines take this to an art form – for instance, a headline will blare in four-inch block letters that “Tom and Kate Have Honeymoon Spat”, and then you open to page three and find out not that their marriage is on the rocks but that they had a verbal disagreement with a hotel clerk. But this often happens with their more respected cousins – you will read the headline, then read the story, and see that they just don’t quite match up. (I am told that this is often because in many newspapers one person writes the article and another writes the headline). And the funny thing is, you often remember the headline more that the facts in the article. I ran into the same sort of thing this week. In one of the commentaries I was using to research this sermon the headline on today’s passage, Matthew 1:18-25, read “Joseph’s Obedience.” And the funny thing is, the headline matched my recollection of the facts of this story, which, in short, were this: man is engaged to be married; man finds out fiancée is carrying someone else’s child; man opts for quiet divorce, but then changes mind when God intervenes and tells him to stick it out. Or, to be very short, man is obedient. But then I re-read the article, I mean the passage, and it turns out that it seems that if this is a story about obedience, it is a very different sort of obedience than we might think. Let’s take a look at it. Matthew wastes no time in setting up the plot. Mary, before she has lived with Joseph, is found to be pregnant by another. Joseph, to whom she has been engaged, is, we are told, a “righteous man”, and being unwilling to expose Mary to public disgrace, decides to dismiss her quietly. The first and only thing we are told about Joseph’s character is that he is “righteous”, a word that can also be translated as “just.” In this gospel, to be righteous is to live by God’s revealed will. To be obedient to God’s will. God’s revealed will in the case of unfaithfulness between engaged persons was set out in the Law of Moses (Deut. 22:23-27) – capital punishment. Rabbinic practice had mitigated the severity of the law in practice, but the penalty was still severe and humiliating. And yet, in the same sentence as we are told that Joseph is a righteous man, an obedient man, we discover that Joseph decides to disregard both the codified law and the accepted religious practice. Even before Joseph has an encounter with the living God through the angel that comes to him in his dream, Joseph – a righteous man – believes that the situation which confronts him demands something else of him. One might be tempted to say that the story, at this point, is about Joseph’s disobedience. God’s revealed word, as set out in the Bible, says “x”, but Joseph does “y”; God’s revealed word as interpreted by the religious establishment over the centuries says do this, but Joseph does that. And yet if we are to take Matthew at his word that Joseph is righteous, is obedient to God, then perhaps we could look at Joseph and his decision in another way. We might conclude that compassion tempers his judgement – that in his eyes, and in Matthew’s as well, obedience, living by God’s will, means more than sticking to the letter of the law, more than doing something “because we have always done it that way.” In this case, in this real-world situation which has arrived on his doorstep, Joseph’s unwillingness to expose Mary to public disgrace is evidence of his compassion, a compassion which here overrides the black-letter law, which trumps the way things have always been done, which calls for Joseph to risk a different path. Perhaps Mathew is telling us that Joseph is living the heart of the law, if not its letter. And in so doing, Joseph is previewing for us Jesus’ own obedience, the ultimate pattern for our obedience as well. For Jesus was the one who grew up to say, “You have heard that it was said … but I say to you.” Immediately after Joseph’s obedience calls him to dismiss Mary quietly, an angel of the Lord comes to him in a dream, telling him to take Mary as his wife, for the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Poor Joseph, one imagines that he is getting a little tired of all these surprises, and yet once again he demonstrates his obedience, taking Mary as his wife and eventually naming the child Jesus. I wonder if this time was easier or harder than the time before – easier, because puzzling out God’s will was so much easier – it is not everyday, of course, that an angel spells it out for you in a dream – but harder, perhaps, because while Joseph probably had some idea about the job description for husband and father, no one had ever run by him a description of how one handles being parent of a savior, of God-With-Us. Like Joseph, we yearn to live faithfully, we want to live our lives in accordance with more than fleeting cultural norms, with more depth and integrity than dancing to the consumerist tune called by advertisers, with a deeper sense of value than a shallow pursuit of personal happiness to the exclusion of caring about family, friends, neighbors, and indeed other members of the human race. And like Joseph before that visit from the angel, we struggle with real-life dilemmas, and in those struggles we look to find a yardstick by which to measure the alternatives and choose wisely. We want to “do the right thing”, and we sense that somehow this is revealed in the Bible. Matthew was writing for such a church, for a people with just such questions. His congregation was composed of Jewish Christians – Jews who, because they had come to believe that Jesus was indeed the long-awaited Messiah, had been split off from the Judaism embraced by the Pharisees. As Jews who had always reverenced the Law, they at times found themselves torn between strict adherence to the Law and the supreme demand of love which their new faith called them to. (You remember the Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind [and] You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matt. 22:37-39). If they neglected the Law, they risked being accused of rejecting Bible and tradition, of being “unrighteous.” And yet Matthew depicts Joseph as being righteous – as one who weaves together law, tradition, and the over-riding commandment to love. In so doing, Matthew depict Joseph as living out the new and higher righteousness of the kingdom of God. Like Matthew’s church, we struggle with real-life decisions, we struggle with difficult moral situations. We struggle with the use of our money, the implications of how our choice of an automobile purchase impacts global warming, decisions about unwanted pregnancies, whether to support the use of our tax dollars to fund foreign wars, the availability of civil marriage to consenting adults, whether medical care is a privilege or a right, how we should respond to illegal immigration, and on and on. The answers, Matthew tells us, may involve more than blind adherence to an ancient text, more than unthinking compliance with time-worn tradition – and yet they will include reference to both. The answers, Matthew tells us, will have something to do with blending Scripture and tradition together with Jesus’ commandment that we love God and one another -- all the while waiting for a new word from the living and saving God. The good news for us in this season of Advent – the headline, if you will -- is that in these struggles for answers we are not alone – for unto us has been born a savior, Emmanuel, God-With-Us, Jesus Christ, who will save his people from their sins, bid envy, strife and quarrel cease, and fill the whole world with heaven’s peace. --------
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