“And he named him Jesus”. That moment, at the end of our Gospel reading, is a
crucial moment, a moment which its first hearers would have been very struck
by. It’s not the name itself – though it is significant, and we will come back
to it - it is who is doing the naming that they would have noticed. It’s
Joseph, that often overlooked and side-lined character in the story of Christ’s
birth.
In the ancient world, even more
than in ours, paternity really mattered. It’s still very important to people
now, but for fathers in the ancient world, a deeply patriarchal world, knowing
that your children really were your children was considered to be serious
matter. There was no DNA testing, of course, so the only way to be confident of
this was to make very sure that women didn’t have any opportunity to consort
with men who weren’t related to them. In many cultures, respectable women were
basically confined to the house, veiled and escorted when they did go out – as
they still are in some societies - so that there could be no grounds for
suspicion. Until very recently, one of the worst and most shaming things a man
could be called was a cuckold, derived of course from the word “cuckoo”, the
bird which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest . Genetically speaking, it’s
understandable that animals want to be sure that the offspring they are spending
vital resources on are their own, but in human societies, that biological
impulse has become tangled up with male pride, and it’s usually women and
children who suffer most because of it.
That’s what was going to
happen to Mary. We don’t know how Joseph came to know that she was expecting a
child. Matthew doesn’t tell us, only that she “was found” to be pregnant. Did she tell Joseph herself, or was it
blurted out by a meddling sister or aunt or friend who noticed the signs and
thought Joseph ought to know. However it happened, though, it wasn’t going to
be something that could be hidden for long. Joseph had a dilemma. He needed to
do some damage limitation. He obviously cared about Mary. He didn’t want to
expose her to public disgrace. She could even have been stoned for adultery. But
if he didn’t denounce her it would either look as if the child was his, and
they weren’t supposed to be sleeping together yet, or that he knew she’d been
unfaithful and had put up with it, which would make him seem weak in the eyes
of those around him. He couldn’t win.
He weighed up his options. We
can imagine him agonising in the wee small hours of the night , flipping
between plans, desperately trying to find some way of squaring the circle, so
that everyone came out of this ok. In the end, he made his choice. He worked
out a solution he could live with. The least worst option seemed to be to send Mary
away quietly. Least said, soonest mended. Call the wedding off, and hope
against hope that people would forget about the whole sad business. That way Mary
wouldn’t suffer too badly, and Joseph would save as much face as possible. Perhaps
that was the moment he fell asleep, finally having made up his mind.
But then he had a dream, and
in his dream an angel came to him, and dropped the bombshell that the child was
“from the Holy Spirit” – whatever
that meant – Matthew doesn’t explain it. But the message was clear; this child
wasn’t a mistake or a sign of shame, but a child through whom God was going to
do something new, something vital, saving people from their sins. That’s what
the name Jesus means – God saves. It was the same as the name
Joshua – the great leader who had led the people of Israel into the Promised
Land after they’d been freed from slavery in Egypt. Jesus had been chosen to lead people into a
new sort of freedom. And Joseph was called to be part of God’s plan too. Mary
needed his protection. This child needed his protection.
We often focus at Christmas
on the price Mary paid, on her faithfulness and courage in saying “Yes” to God,
but Joseph paid a high price too, because doing what God asked was going to
result in a lifetime of humiliation, which he couldn’t defend himself against. Who
was going to be believe him if he said that the child was “from the Holy Spirit”? He’d be a laughing stock. But Joseph, like
Mary, was a person of courage – a righteous man – one of those people who decide
what to do on the basis of whether it is right or wrong, rather than on what
will bring them advantage. And so, when he awoke, we’re told, “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded
him”. That’s a small statement, but a huge act of commitment. Joseph threw his own carefully laid plans out
of the window and chose God’s plan instead. “He took Mary as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until
she had borne a son.”
That sentence, by the way, is
the sum total of Matthew’s account of the actual birth of Jesus. There are no
inns, no mangers, no shepherds keeping watch over their flocks in his version.
There will be Magi, but not for some time – they don’t turn up until well after
the birth. “Until she had borne a son” is all we hear.
Those scene those words
invite us to imagine, though, wouldn’t be out of place in Eastenders. Imagine
we were there, standing in a corner of the room as Joseph meets Mary’s child
for the first time, newly arrived in the world, as he is faced with this child
that he knows isn’t his. What is he going to do? What is he going to say? In the
Roman world, when a child was born it was laid on the ground. If the man who
was supposed to be its father picked it up, that was the sign that he’d decided
to assume paternity, to acknowledge it as his own, whether it was or not,
giving it the rights and privileges that went with that decision. When Joseph
names Jesus, he’s doing something that is the Jewish equivalent of that, saying
that this child is his child in every way that matters.
Who gets to choose a baby’s
name? Who gets to declare it to the world? Their parents of course. Grandma might or might
not like their choice. Uncle Bill might have hoped they’d name it after him.
But no one would seriously argue that it was anyone else’s right to name
a child but the parents. In naming Jesus, Joseph takes on parental
responsibility for him. He is saying that he’ll be the one who will protect him,
provide for him, teach him a trade, worry about him. That’s a father’s job. When he publicly names
him, he lets everyone know that he is signing up for that job.
But we also know, because we
have heard about his dream, that in choosing the name he does, he’s also
committing himself to being part of God’s plan for this child, because the name
he announces is the one the angel told him to use. Maybe he’d have called him
Joseph, left to his own devices, but he doesn’t. He takes on the responsibility
of fatherhood, but he also recognises the greater fatherhood of God, who has a
purpose for this child which is beyond Joseph’s control and understanding. He
calls him Jesus – God saves – and trusts that God knows how that will work out.
Matthew does give us a hint,
though, about what that salvation will look like, in that little quote from
Isaiah, which gives us another of the names by which Jesus has sometimes been
known – Emmanuel, God is with us. Matthew is quoting from a rather obscure
story from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it’s worth us taking a small
detour to find out a bit more about that.
King Ahaz, the king of Israel,
was being attacked by neighbouring kings and things weren’t going well. “The heart of Ahaz and the heart of his
people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind,” says Isaiah
just before the passage we heard. (Isaiah 7.2)
But in the face of Ahaz’
fear, God declares that he will act. He will defeat these two kings himself,
and it will happen soon, by the time that a child who is soon to be born has
grown up enough to know right from wrong. It is Isaiah’s own child, by a Israelite
prophetess, if you are interested. And this child will be called Immanuel. “God
with us” He’ll be a reminder of the presence of God in these difficult times.
Matthew sees an echo of this in the birth of Jesus, because he knows that salvation, God’s gracious reshaping of our lives, begins when we realise that he is with us, beside us, within us, around us, close to us, caring about us. That’s what Ahaz had forgotten in that long-ago story. He thought that rescuing himself and his people was all down to him. Matthew is telling us that Jesus will save people by being God’s presence among them. They will start finding the new life God wants to give them as they recognise and acknowledge God in him, healing, teaching, welcoming, loving.
Joseph could have said, “this child is nothing to do with me”. He
could have turned his back on him and never given him a second thought. No one
would have blamed him for it. It wasn’t his child. But he didn’t do that. He
got involved. He picked him up and named him. He let this baby’s life become
tangled up with his own, so that there was no going back. The fact that he had
taken on the responsibility of a father to Jesus’ would affect the whole of the
rest of his life.
The story asks us to consider
what Jesus is to us? Is he just a theological idea, a long ago story, an image
in stained glass, paint or plaster? Or is he, in some sense, a living presence
– God with us - someone we can’t forget about, someone whose life, whose
ministry, whose priorities, impinge on us in a way we can’t ignore?
This story invites us into
the moment when Joseph looked down at Mary’s baby and was given a choice – to
pick him up and make him his own, or to leave him and walk away. Which will we
do?
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