This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her.” (Matthew 1.18-20)
Clearly, Joseph’s five-year-plan did not go as he had hoped. In fact, in terms of his plans, pretty much everything went south, resulting in his planner getting tossed in the trash, and his calendar reminders turned off on his phone. These days, he’s known as the patron saint of carpenters. A good argument could be made for his being the patron saint of people who have to fly blind.
Here’s what Joseph had planned before his life became a roller coaster ride. Having learned enough skills to get work as a carpenter, he was ready to settle down and to start a family. His eyes—and his heart–were set on a local girl, a pretty girl who was quiet, more serious than the other girls her age who struck him as silly.
Now able to support her, he asked her to marry him and she agreed. Following the custom of the times, she became his betrothed, the first stage of marriage, a legally binding agreement to become husband and wife at a later time. However, they did not live together. That would follow in time, initiating the second stage of the marriage. But everybody in town knew they belonged to one another.
And then Joseph’s carefully laid-out plans got hit by a twelve wheeler. Tearful and distraught, Mary tells him that she’s going to have a child in a matter of months. Stunned and silent, Joseph knows he’s not the father, a hundred questions lodged in his throat. And Mary, for her part, seems as shocked as he is. There’s nothing to do but to break the betrothal, but he wants to do it quietly, since there were repercussions for Mary if word got around town.
Tossing and turning in his bed that night, at a loss as to how things could have gone so haywire, finally dozing off, he falls into a dream state, a dream so real he hears a voice telling him not to divorce Mary, but to take her into his house as his wife. The voice, which he assumes comes from an angel, because who else would know everything that’s going on, assures him that Mary is innocent of any wrongdoing, her pregnancy a plan of God, not caused by any human agent.
“Joseph, son of David,” the angel says, “do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
A lesser man may have awoken in the morning, shook the sleep from his fuzzy brain, and decided that it was a doozy of a dream. But Joseph, described by the evangelist as a righteous man, meaning a good and a decent person, believed in his heart that God was directing him on a different path than the one he had planned for himself.
And so, without too much second-guessing or self-doubts, he did exactly what the voice in the dream had told him to do. With a paucity of words, the evangelist describes for us Joseph’s next move. “When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.” And when the baby was born in due time, Joseph treated him as his own son, raising him to be a good and decent man after his own heart.
Of course, curious and maybe even nosey, we’d like more details about how Joseph rearranged his life, raising a son he knew really wasn’t his, and somehow making peace with a lot of unanswered questions. We’re not going to find much more information about Joseph, especially after Matthew ends the so-called infancy narrative at the start of his gospel, Joseph quietly disappearing from the text, his place in later pages obliquely pointed to only when Rabbi Jesus is called the “carpenter’s son.”
Even here at the start Joseph is silent. He does not say a single word in Matthew’s gospel, a key player on the stage, but one without any lines to speak. But, even so, we should not think he has nothing to tell us. It does not require words for something important to be said. And the lack of words on Joseph’s part may say more about him than if he spoke every other sentence in this section of the gospel.
For example, his silence tells us that Joseph put up no argument. Whereas many of us, if not all, put in the same circumstances, would have argued either with the angel or with ourselves, finding the change in plans too radical, too risky, too ridiculous. Instead, Joseph simply acquiesces, taking the angel at its word, and changes course. That is a man of faith, the likes of which we do not often see in scripture or, for that matter, in life.
Also, as we see, the angel offers little for Joseph to go by, simply stating that he should not be afraid to take his betrothed into his home. Apparently, Joseph took to heart that directive, not allowing his fears to get in the way of following the divine dictate. Again, few of us could put aside our fears when asked to move blindly ahead in a new direction. Abraham did it when told to leave his homeland for faraway Canaan; Joseph does it when told to leave behind his big plans, now wadded up on the floor of his house, for a different life.
Interestingly, the voice gives Joseph one other task. He is to name the child. “She will bear a son,” the angel tells him, “and you are to name him Jesus.” While this directive means little to us, since every child gets a name, it meant a great deal to people in Biblical times. The one who gives the name is the one who assumes the responsibility.
We see the same thing in the ancient text when Adam gives names to all the animals, becoming responsible for them. Here, in telling Joseph to name the child, the angel is telling him that he must take responsibility for the well-being of the child who would grow in time into the man of Galilee. Again, nowhere in his plans had Joseph anticipated raising a child who was not properly his, but does it.
Perhaps most importantly, the story that the evangelist tells us today about Joseph offers a lesson in maintaining a light hold on our own personal plans. However careful we plan and plot our days, mapping who and what we want to become, the Most High God may have other plans for us, plans nowhere near what we envisioned for ourselves and for our lives.
And when that happens, when our plans are irrevocably changed or stolen by events or by persons outside our control, as were Joseph’s, then there is a strong likelihood that the Almighty is asking us to let go of our desires and designs, pointing us in a new direction, asking us to move into the unknown with the same trust and the same unhesitancy as Joseph showed.
Granted, when we are called to make those cataclysmic changes–and they are cataclysmic because they, by their very nature, mean the demolition of our own plans–it may be a challenge unlike any other, upheavals of any sort always a testing of our resolve and resilience, one of this proportion requiring even more of us than we believe ourselves capable of giving.
If we have any of the mettle of Joseph, we will accept the changes and the challenges involved, holding fast to the words that the angel spoke to the humble Joseph, “Do not be afraid,” these words providing us the wherewithal to find our way through the darkness until the path becomes clear and our stumbling feet become steady again.
But if our plans are more sacred than God’s plans, then when the unexpected and the unwanted visit our doorsteps, we will find it difficult, if not impossible, to cope with the changes foist upon us, grasping onto the fragments of our plans, even as they fall to pieces on the hard floor of reality. Many of us–too many–become dejected, embittered, and disillusioned, stuck in the morass of broken dreams and the molasses of shattered hopes, unable to regain our footing, sinking into the depths of despair.
The ways that our plans can be suddenly stolen from us, ripped from our notebooks like a sheet of paper, are many. But each is the same in that they uproot us, rob us of something precious, and plant us in a foreign land where our footing is unsure and unsafe. A disease, a divorce, a death. A miscarriage of a pregnancy, a miscarriage of justice, a miscarriage of obligations. A brutal assault, a horrible accident, an unforgiving addiction. An ugly betrayal, a lost battle, a family breakup. The list is long because the ways our plans can be destroyed are too numerous to count.
Yet, Joseph stands before us, whatever the times or circumstances, to remind us that just because nothing goes according to plans does not spell the end for us, but instead provides a passageway to another place, at first unfamiliar, but in time a place that we can call our home, even if we never drew up house plans for it.
He reminds us that the ways of God are mysterious, often coming out of nowhere like a whirlwind, but so long as we hold fast to the hand of God, however high the winds, we will find ourselves deposited on solid ground, somewhere, somehow. So, as the twister lifts our feet off the ground and our neatly outlined plans fly to the four corners, we stay strongest when we hear the same voice say to us, “Do not be afraid.”
It was not the life that Joseph planned for himself. But it was the life that God asked him to live. And to his credit, Joseph lived it bravely and blamelessly, and, in this way, offers us a way forward when going backward is no longer possible.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 