Fearlessly walking with God

A recoding of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 1: 18-24) relates the circumstances in which Joseph considered “putting Mary away” when he discovered she was with child. His motives are made at least partially clear: he was a just man and unwilling to put her to shame. Then, we hear the first of Joseph’s dreams in the gospel that guides his steps when no human counsel can help him: do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. The gospel ends with this simple remark, underlining Joseph’s obedience to God: when Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.

We may reflect on this last fact first: when Joseph obeyed the command of the angel in his dream, he was following a long tradition of obedience to God’s messengers. He could not, like Mary, reverse the disobedience of our first parents by his simple consent to God’s plan. That was Mary’s privilege: to offer her fiat, being perfectly attuned to the desire of the Blessed Trinity. Joseph in contrast needed to do something in order to offer his fiat; he needed to take action. He was a child of disobedience, as we all are, but the angel’s command was a decisive moment in which he could walk with God in a new and deeper way. And so, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, as Abraham did when he stayed his hand and did not take Isaac’s life, as Gideon did when he went to offer sacrifice, and – perhaps most significantly - as Manoah did when he heard the angelic guidance to consecrate his son Samson to the Lord. Blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it, Joseph’s son will later say when a woman in the crowd acclaims his own Mother who bore him and suckled him. But Jesus’ answer – blessed are they – is a celebration not only of Mary but of Joseph also. Blessed is Joseph too who also heard the word of God, communicated through an angel, and kept it.

The other mystery in this gospel concerns Joseph’s intention to send Mary away. One reading of this episode sees Joseph as an agent of mercy, a man deeply disappointed in his imperfect bride but unwilling to expose her to the stoning that she risked as an adulterous woman. If such an interpretation honours Joseph for his mercy, it dishonours him by making him guilty of humanly rash judgement. Personally, I prefer another interpretation: that Joseph knew Mary’s greatness so well, understood and perceived her holiness so acutely, that he could only think of withdrawing himself from her when he saw signs of her miraculous pregnancy – for surely such a phenomenon was no sign of her having fallen but of the realisation of Isaiah’s prophecy, as St Matthew points out. The words of the angel then make more direct sense: do not fear to take Mary as your wife. Here, Joseph also joins another venerable Old Testament tradition, like St Peter when he says: depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. Like Moses hiding his face before the burning bush, like Isaiah realising his sinfulness after his vision of the King of Hosts, or indeed like Manoah who declares to his wife:  We shall surely die because we have seen God.

In this way, Joseph and Mary are then the first human beings to help to begin dismantling the great taboo that is built around the presence of God in the temple, which protected the sacredness and holiness of God precisely through excluding the human presence. After all the High Priest could only enter the Holy of Holies once a year. Now, Joseph and Mary are called not only to face God but to have God live with them familiarly, to hold His incarnate self in their arms, to see and hear his human voice, to witness His self-emptying in pursuit of the reconciliation of his people. All these things Joseph witnessed and only because he took courage and obeyed the command of the angel…

… which anticipated the constant command of Jesus throughout the gospel. Joseph and Mary – both of whom are told not to fear – stand, therefore, at the beginning of a new tradition of those who must show courage in the presence of the Lord: the apostles in the storm-tossed boat, Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration, the women who greet Jesus after the resurrection. God is still the thrice holy God of Isaiah’s vision before whom the Seraphim sing, but now He is also God with us, Emmanuel, who lies in the arms of a human mother and father, who submits to an education and apprenticeship in ancient Palestine, whose physical appearance, manners and ticks must have recalled his wider family and older human relatives, merely a man of this earth who was, moreover, only the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, born of the Father before all ages.

All of this mystery is found in Joseph’s humility before Mary’s pregnancy. Like Elizabeth, Joseph might have said: who am I that the mother of my Saviour should come to me? But who is any one of us? And that is the point. It is not that we pleased God and then He decided to come to us. Our action is part of a bigger story in which, as St John tells us, God loved us first, loved us despite our disobedience, loved the unlovely that they might lovely be, loved us so much that, as with our first parents, He sought to walk beside us in the afternoon air, beginning in the garden of Mary and Joseph.