When I read the story of God’s interaction with his people I always have to keep in mind that God doesn’t always do things the way I think they should be done. My decidedly INTJ personality thinks in orderly ways and is most satisfied when everything is just so. I define in my own mind what I will consider “order” and expect to accomplish that. Everything (except my office) is in perfect order.
Matthew’s account of the birth narrative upsets my sense of expected order. It begins, “The birth of Jesus the Christ, the anointed one, happened this way . . .” This after Matthew goes to painstaking trouble to establish the royal connection. Joseph is directly descended from King David and would be sitting on the throne but for the Roman domination and 400 years of bitterly disappointing history.
Jesus is a coming king. You’d expect a proper way to introduce the coming king, the anointed of God, to the world. With a coming king, I think everything should go in a prescribed order, with proper attention to detail and decorum. Jesus is the King of kings, the Christ, the Anointed of God. Anointed ones, prophets, priests, and kings, are set apart and consecrated in a very special public ceremony that everyone witnesses.
Not so with Matthew’s story. After introducing the birth narrative Matthew describes a messy social situation full of scandal, shame, and disappointment. Joseph, the man who would be king, descendant of David, is betrothed to a pretty young girl named Mary. They are in the period between betrothal and actual marriage, when Joseph is preparing a home and Mary is preparing herself for marriage. Before them both are dreams of a bright future together. Dreams that become one great nightmare when Joseph hears Mary is found to be with child.
What should he do? Being a just man, Joseph decides at first he cannot marry her. She is with child, and the child is not his. Through bitter disappointment and feelings of betrayal he decides that he does not want to further humilate her. A bill of divorcement, with the minimum number of witnesses, will be sufficient. He will go on with his life, and leave her to go on with hers. He will forego charging her with adultery.
As for Mary, she bears a stigma she never outlives.
- In Mark chapter 6 Jesus returns home to preach in his home-town synagogue. Upon hearing his wisdom and seeing his miracles the people respond, “Where did he get these things? Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary . . .?” This designation, son of Mary, is an accusation of her supposed promiscuity and his presumed illegitimacy.
- In John chapter 8 the Sadducees respond to Jesus’ assertion that they are children of the devil by charging, “We are not children of fornication!’, leading some scholars to believe this is a slur against the alleged unsavory circumstances surrounding Jesus’ parentage and birth.
A nocturnal visit from an angel set Joseph’s thinking straight. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.” He goes on to explain from prophetic Scripture this child is the anointed one of God. But even Joseph’s positive response is messy, because he intentionally soils his name in the process of marrying Mary, thereby adopting her child as his own. Essentially he says, “I’m the one who did it.” That is what gives Jesus legal standing as an heir to David’s throne. Now both of them will live a life of public humilation, presumed guilty of something for which they are totally innocent and even favored of God.
My sense of order and decorum is upset by the way God used scandal and disappointment to bring the anointed one, the King of kings into our world. But at the same time I am also relieved, because it reminds me that God can also use the messiness of my life, with all its failures and disappointments, to bring grace into this grace-starved world.
God chose the messy social situation of out-of-wedlock conception, with all the social scandal and finger-pointing, to unveil the mystery of the incarnation. To materialize himself to us. As John the apostle writes, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Thanks be to God for challenging our sense of order to bring us the divine order of the anointed one, only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. We need all the grace and truth we can get.
4 Advent A 2010
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ReplyDeletes a person who is not very organized nor structured by nature, I can appreciate God's ability to shake things up. Messy, as long at it has God's purpose at heart, is great. It just requires God's people to be flexible... which sometimes we are not.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I really like the name of this blog