You start to push the
wooden block, gently, appropriately nervously, but basically confidently. Then, the moment springs itself upon you, the
moment when the realization hits you, before the physical tottering quite
materializes: you’ve just lost at Jenga.
Imagine if that cascade of decaying bragging rights was not just a game:
imagine if that was your life about to fall down, brick by brick. Everything had looked to be in place, all your
bricks were carefully arranged in the wall.
You had found a wonderful young woman to get betrothed to. Finally, after months of negotiations, you’d
agreed terms with her father and you’d cemented the deal. Now, you were just waiting until she was old
enough and you’d take young Mary to live with you as your wife. The feasting would be just the tip of the
iceberg of the joy you’d feel at doing that, at finally starting your own
family. Your whole life now was viewed
in terms of the countdown that was fast drawing to a close when you could move
from betrothal to finally living together as husband and wife.
Then,
those blocks began to shudder. You could
feel it coming before the catastrophe of the collapse was evident to the whole
world: Mary was already pregnant. This
is the turmoil facing Joseph. His hopes
and dreams have suddenly proved fragile.
The home he had hoped to build was a house of cards. He’s confused, baffled, acting out of hurt
and instinct. He knows the law, he was a
just man (our translation picks ‘righteous’ for the word that also means
‘just,’ that is, legally observant). He
knows what the just desserts for Mary should be: public shame! She must have broken the legally binding
marriage agreement made at betrothal.
But, he couldn’t go
through with it. His mind told him what
was just, but his heart stirred on a deeper level than that. He couldn’t do that to Mary, he just
couldn’t. He knew what would happen if
he did what was just and as much as she had hurt him, in the sting of that hurt
was revealed the love that gave the cut its sting. And it was that sting that drove him to
virtue. Love does that. Love opens double gates on suffering, because
a slight inflicted by someone we love cuts us twice. But love simultaneously ennobles, schools us
in virtue, enables a new level of self-gift we never thought possible. Joseph had decided: he would send her away
quietly, accepting himself the financial loss of cancelling the contract. She’d have a hard life, keeping her
motherhood a secret, and he’d paid for it too, but it was better than the
alternative. Of the options he could
conceive of, it was the least bad way out of this mess.
God can
dream a more wonderful dream than any plan any of us might come up with. And He makes His dream known. God who is love will make known the supreme
demand of love. The baby who is causing
so much trouble now will grow to be a man who proclaims that the heart of the
Law is love, a man of love who will proclaim that he has come to fulfill that
Law. He will stand on a mountain, giving
Law as God once did on Sinai and say: “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” Joseph has responded to that call before the
son he would adopt has even been born.
You have heard it said, “if your wife commits adultery, expose her to
shame, but I say to you…” What?
Put her away quietly? Good start,
God might say, but I dream something more brilliant yet. I
say to you: take her into your home. Be
with her; be with her and the Christ child.
God says
to Joseph through the angel: do something radically new, something scandalously
loving, go above and beyond the calculus of justice you know well, live out the
love at the Law’s heart, the love God put in Joseph’s heart, the love He puts
in ours. Joseph doesn’t ask why, but the
angel tells him anyway. Joseph is asked
to do something radically new because God is doing something radically new for
us in Christ.
This
child is conceived of the Holy Spirit!
This child is God’s yes to us, the fulfillment of every half-abandoned
hope, of every longing of every human heart.
This child is God saying: I want to take you into my home. I know what you’ve done. I love you enough to let that hurt me. I love you enough to take you back. I want to be with you.
Friends,
God is with us. God came among us,
embracing the vulnerability of babyhood.
God came among us, to walk our roads as a homeless preacher. God came among us, to be close enough to us
to taste death at our hands, to be close enough to our pain that Jesus would
cry to his father: Eloi, eloi, lema
sabbachthani? “My God, my God, why
have you abandoned me?” And God raised this
Jesus, whom we crucified. And Our Lord
said to us, “Look! I am with you always,
until the end of the age.”
Imagine a
world where everyone responds to that invitation as profoundly as Joseph
did! Dream what that might look
like. Dream deeply, confident that God
dreams deeper still.
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