The Birth of Jesus the Messiah
18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. 19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. 20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 “Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” 24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife 25 but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus”
Matthew 1:18-25.
Telling my children the story of when they were born is a great joy. All of the details, all of the seemingly insignificant things and the important things build toward the big moment — the moment all three appeared, one at a time in just 60 seconds.
“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way” — this is how Matthew begins the story of the birth of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. And Matthew’s phrasing of it makes us believe, perhaps, that we’re about to hear a detailed telling of Jesus’s birth in the way that Luke might tell it. But Matthew, we discover, is a different kind of writer than the other three. Matthew wants to tell us about Joseph, a man whose goodness and righteousness take him far, but not all the way, as he prepares for the coming of something completely new: Emmanuel, “God with us.”
But I get ahead of myself. Matthew was probably a Jewish Christian, possibly a scribe. The historical evidence suggests that he wrote between 80 and 90 AD and addressed his work to a community in conflict: Jewish Christians who were being pushed out of larger Jewish communities. These larger Jewish communities were led by Pharisees, Rabbis who assumed leadership of the Jewish people in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem.
And so Matthew is at pains to place his own religious community squarely within its Jewish heritage and to portray a Jesus whose Jewish identity is beyond doubt. He therefore begins his gospel by tracing Jesus’s genealogy. He could have gotten away with tracing Jesus back to King David, but Matthew takes no chances and traces Jesus’s lineage all the way back to Abraham. For Matthew, Jesus is a Jew.
It’s within this context, then, that the focus on Joseph appears in Matthew’s story of Jesus’s birth. Joseph embodies the best parts of the Jewish tradition, a tradition that was all about keeping the law as a way to live with God. The law was a tried-and-true pattern of actions that expressed a Jew’s closeness to God and right relationship with others.
In Matthew 1:18–25 we read that during the time of his engagement to Mary, Joseph discovers that she is pregnant. Joseph knows the baby is not his, and he knows that Jewish law would find Mary guilty of adultery, an act that can be punished with death and that is always punishable by shame. The law mandated that Joseph divorce her. However, because Joseph is a righteous man, he also understands another part of his Jewish heritage: he understands that the law is to be tempered with mercy. And so instead of exposing Mary to a public divorce, as the reading says, he decides to dismiss her quietly, in a way that would reduce public inquiry into what has happened.
But as we see, an angel appears to Joseph and speaks the same words that we will hear on Christmas in Luke’s gospel: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid. Do not be afraid to do something outrageous in order to bring to fruition something that the law and the prophets have yearned for, do not be afraid to do something that pitches you past any mercy you can imagine— do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife” (Matt. 1:19, paraphrase). This is a striking moment in Joseph’s life; all of what he knows — his life, his religion, his ethics — is being questioned by an angel in a dream, and that angel is inviting him to forsake all that knowledge and understanding to participate in a larger story.
I believe that we’re all a little like Joseph; we all limit ourselves by our tried-and-true ways of doing things. We each have our own ways of dealing with personal, spiritual, and professional matters, our own ways of moving through this demanding season of the year. Perhaps there is a voice we’re already dimly aware of from a dark, subterranean, and mysterious place. Perhaps it’s a voice we’re trying to avoid, a voice that is asking us to go beyond those tried-and-true ways in order to surrender more fully to God and to assist in the coming of Emmanuel “God with us” in our own lives and in the life of the world.
But it seems that throughout the Bible God is always to trying to tell us this— “Do not be afraid, Abraham, when I ask you to leave your homeland and to travel to a new place that will be your own. Do not be afraid, Moses, for I will be with you when you, a slave, speak to Pharaoh, the king of the Egyptians. Do not be afraid of any evil, David, for the Lord will be your shepherd no matter where you are. Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found grace with God” (Luke 1:28, paraphrase). Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid to act.
And this brings us back to Joseph. In Matthew’s story of Jesus’s birth, Joseph is asked to make a leap, to take an action that goes beyond how he would normally understand the law, and in listening to the angel and taking this leap of action, he is doing what some see as quintessentially Jewish.
A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to surpass his deeds, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does.
In these last days of Advent, a season of the mysterious, a season when we need to retrace the stories of new birth and the return of light, may you and I hear a word that banishes all fear and encourages us to take one tiny leap of action to draw nearer to something we do not fully understand. Emmanuel is God with us: do not be afraid.
So today in your prayer, pray that God may draw you nearer to Himself.
And remember, that is exactly what God wants to do.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.
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