Advent 4
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Readings: Isaiah 7: 10-16 and Matthew 1: 18-25
A couple of weeks ago I was helping with a school visit at Worcester Cathedral, as I sometimes do. 75 Year 6s – that’s 10- and 11-year olds, were coming for a tour of the cathedral, and to hear the Christmas story. A ‘Christmas Carousel’ was set up, where we volunteers would take the part of one of the characters in the Christmas story. The children, in small groups, would circulate the room and visit each of the characters in turn. My task was to recite the story of Joseph, in his words. I sat at my carpenter’s bench with appropriate dress and headgear, while the children sat on benches in front of me. Of course, with 75 children taking part, there were eleven different groups circulating, so I had to tell my story eleven times. And this morning, I have the story of Joseph to relate again!
The text I was given to base my character on stated that Joseph was about five years older than Mary – a detail I had never come across before. Talking this over with Canon Kimberley we agreed that Joseph’s age was unknown, and that maybe this detail had been included so as not to make it look – to 10 and 11 year-olds – as if there was a great age gap between Joseph and Mary, something one doesn’t really want to discuss with primary school children. I reminded Canon Kimberley of the carol – ‘Joseph was an old man / And an old man was he / When he married Mary / In the land of Galilee.’ I saw Kimberley later and she said she’d been singing that carol to herself all day.
Of course, there is much detail we don’t know about Jesus’ birth. It’s been pointed out that Matthew begins his chapter saying “Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way”- but then says very little about the birth itself, though quite a lot about the circumstances that led up to it. But from the details he gives us we can deduce, according to Paula Gooder, a respected biblical scholar, that Mary was somewhere between the age of 11 and 12. We’re told that Mary and Joseph were engaged, or ‘betrothed’ in older versions. At the time, a girl was normally married by the age of twelve and a half, and the boy would be fourteen or older. Marriage was constituted by the drawing up of a deed and the exchange of money and sexual intercourse. Betrothal involved the first two of these but not the third, and the girl would not live with the boy at that stage. Betrothal was as binding as marriage.
So the details Matthew gives us seem to reflect fairly accurately what is known about engagement or betrothal at the time. It would therefore have been very distressing for Joseph to learn that Mary was pregnant. I had to choose my words carefully when I was with the Year 6s, and said that I wondered if Mary had been unfaithful.
Matthew is keen to show Joseph in a good light. He describes him as a ‘righteous’ or ‘just’ man. Within Judaism, ‘righteousness’ was demonstrated by fulfilling the requirements of the law, and in this situation those requirements dictated that Joseph should divorce Mary. There is discussion amongst scholars about the tiny Greek word kai normally translated ‘and’ between the two statements of Joseph’s character – ‘a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace.’ It would be better translated ‘but’; ‘a righteous man but unwilling to expose her to public disgrace.’ Had he followed the letter of the law, he would have shamed her.
An angel of the Lord appears to Joseph to reassure him and give him the stunning news that the child has been conceived through the Holy Spirit, and that Joseph is to give the child the name Jesus, ‘for he will save his people from their sins.’ We have become familiar with this concept, but it would have been more surprising to Joseph, since forgiveness of sins could only come from God and was tied up with temple worship and sacrifice.
Matthew then tells us that all this was in fulfilment of what the Lord had spoken through the prophet, ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name Emmanuel.’ And we heard the self-same prophecy in its original context in the first reading, from Isaiah chapter 7. You will have heard me say many times before that Matthew, of all the gospel writers, was very keen to marry-up the events of Jesus’ life with old testament prophecies in a way that might seem strange to us. It wouldn’t matter if the original saying had already been fulfilled in history, because God’s word would also be capable of re-interpretation in the future.
A quick look at the context of Isaiah 7 reveals that King Ahaz of Judah was fearful of an attack by two neighbouring kings – Rezin of Aram and Pekah of Remaliah. But God assures Ahaz that he should stand firm and trust in God. Ask for a sign of favour, says God. Ahaz replies that he doesn’t want to put the Lord to the test, but God gives him a sign anyway. “The young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” – that is, as we know, God with us. The subsequent verses do not tell us who the young woman is, or what happened to the child. The prophecy is meant to be for the present, because Ahaz is told that before the child grows up and knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the two kings he’s afraid of will have gone.
Another puzzle in all this is the word translated as ‘virgin’. In Hebrew is it almah – better translated ‘a young woman’; the word betulah would have the stronger resonance of ‘virgin.’ When the Septuagint was written – that’s the Greek version of the Old Testament- the word parthenos was used, which could mean either ‘young woman’ or ‘virgin.’
With all this in mind, can we say it is legitimate to use a prophecy from the 8th-century before Jesus to refer to his own conception and birth? Paula Gooder helps us here. “If the history of salvation is marked by God’s dramatic intervention time and again in similar terms but in different contexts, then it is not hard to see Isaiah’s prophecy fulfilled both at the time of Ahaz and again at the time of Jesus. In its original context the prophecy was to a man gripped by fear about what the future would hold. The same is true of Joseph. In both contexts reassurance was needed of God’s intervention in the world to save his people.
We’ve strayed a bit from the account of Joseph’s part in the birth of Jesus. In all the events of the Christmas story, we see two elements at work: firstly – God’s big plan for saving humankind, often described with supernatural events, or by angels and through dreams. And then we have the human story – the response to God’s activity and calling. So in the coming days we shall ponder the faithfulness and devotion of Mary and Joseph, of the shepherds and the kings, of the aged Simeon and Anna in the Temple. We will reflect that God calls ordinary people like us to play a particular part in his unfolding purposes for the world, and that part may at times be unexpected, or uncomfortable, or exposed. May we use these last days of Advent to watch and wait so that we are ready to hear and respond to that call.