Joseph and the dilemma
Joseph was a law-abiding righteous man, we are told. He had a fiancé, Mary. And he learns she is pregnant. Under the law, this was a bad, bad thing for Mary.
Some background information about early Jewish marriages helps the setting of this text. In the first place, engagement in this culture was a formal contractual matter, usually decided on by the two fathers in question (i.e., it was an arranged marriage), and was, in fact, the first stage of the marriage itself, to be complete some months hence by the formal wedding ceremony. The reason Matthew says that Joseph had resolved to “divorce” a woman he was only engaged to, is because engagement then was a legally binding contract, unlike engagement in the West today.
Secondly, we need to understand in that patriarchal culture, the birth of the first born son was all important and crucial to the family line and property transfer. The fact Joseph is prepared to give up the right to sire his own first-born son and accept and even name Jesus (Yeshua/Joshua means “Yahweh saves”) says a lot about the character of Joseph. It leads to the oddest genealogy ever in Matthew 1:1-17 in which Jesus is shoehorned into Joseph’s genealogy by putting Mary into that genealogy despite the fact that it is a patrilineal genealogy (x begat y…).
Unless he claimed the baby as his own, Mary (and Jesus) might die. He had to let Love overpower Law, and accept Mary’s baby as his own. This decision came to him in a dream. I myself have doubts about the whole angel part of the story, but I am ok with it, too.
Worth noting here are the Angel’s words “don’t be afraid”. Fear not. Because our best decisions are not made in fear, are they. Joseph’s decision changed our lives here, roughly 2000 years later. No giant discovery, just a very personal decision by Joseph, who was not anyone special. And today we tell this story. It seems like a good time to reflect where we could be kinder and more forgiving and make the world better in some small way. We cannot see the future that flows from our actions today, actions either done or not done.
I have a real problem with verse 22. This I think is a nod to contemporary Judaism and from our perspective seems strange. Joseph and Mary had a child and THAT was God’s purpose (in my mind). There is another often missed piece of this story. The name of the child. Jesus is a Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua, which means “the Lord saves”. The community would have known this. Yet Joseph raised his son to be a carpenter and not a spiritual leader. He did not appear to expect a Messiah.
But he took a chance, and we are forever grateful.
— Don Medal