Joseph: When doing the right thing is not enough
Advent 4: 22 December 2019

This reflection grew out of listening to a thoughtful sermon preached by Roxanne Steyn at Bedordview Methodist Church on 22 December 2019. The inspiration came from the preacher, but don’t hold her responsible for the conclusions I drew from it!

There is a time when doing the right thing is not enough.

In the fourth Sunday in Advent we read about Joseph being faced with a choice between two options when he discovered that his fiance, Mary, was pregnant. Thank God he chose a third option.

He was faced with a choice either to expose her publicly and thus protect his standing in society, or quietly break off the engagement. The downside of exposing her would not be good for Mary, as she could be stoned – an unhappy ending for a teenager he had intended to be his wife.

So Joseph, described by St Matthew as a righteous man, decided to take the second option. This was quietly to break off the engagement, leaving her to escape any way she could into a life with no future. It was certainly the more loving option, although not a very happy one for either of them.

Well done, Joseph. You’ve added love to law. You’ve been kind and, in acting lovingly towards Mary, avoided the self-righteous legalism that would have shown the world how right you are in contrast to your sinful fiance. It’s an example to the rest of us of righteousness that goes beyond the mere letter of the law and embraces mercy.

Joseph slept on his decision, and in a dream heard God explain something to him that he had not thought of – that this pregancy came from God. And God wanted him to marry her. He hadn’t thought of it because it isn’t possible. We may be on shaky historical grounds in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, but it would be even more extraordinary if Joseph hadn’t believed the bit about where the baby came from, but acted in this way because he saw God possibilities in it. Echoes of Hosea.

So the next day Joseph went beyond even the loving spirit of the law to do something that was redemptive. Convinced by his dream that God was in this somewhere, he was willing as a righteous man to accept the public opprobrium that must have followed his taking Mary to be his wife. It would have meant sniggers and whispers and criticism behind his back. It also meant hard work and suffering – Joseph had to cope with his bride giving birth in a stable far from home, and then had to take his family as refugees to Egypt to escape the government.

If Joseph had followed the legalistic option and exposed Mary as a sinner, and had her stoned, God would have had to find another mother for the Messiah! If he had followed the merely loving interpretation of the law, and quietly sent her away, who knows how Mary would have survived as a single mother in that society, with Herod’s soldiers out to find and kill her baby.

Congratulations, Joseph; you’re the man!

Today, many of us who call ourselves Christians are quite legalistic in how we regard other people. We consign them to the devil when they do not comply with our understanding of what the law says.

To avoid this, many of us then rightly temper the law with love. That is a good thing and often is the right thing to do. But sometimes God calls us to go beyond the right thing and even beyond the apparently loving thing, to discover the amazingly redemptive impact of grace. Grace is undeserved love expressed in actions. We don’t throw the law out the window; Jesus calls us to fulfill the law because laws are there for our protection, but Jesus also calls us to exceed the law, because grace is there for our salvation. The impact of grace between people is reciprocal – both the giver and the recipient are saved through it.

What does this mean in practice? Clearly it means not judging others. That should be clear anyway from other teachings of Jesus. But it points to what not-judging really means. It means more than just letting people off the hook from our position of righteous superiority. Joseph married the woman he decided not to judge. We can’t marry more than one person at a time, but we can look every person in the eye and see the dignity of Jesus looking back at us – even from people of whom we disapprove. It may mean putting up with social rejection because of our treating outcasts as family. It may mean hard work and suffering as we struggle actively for the dignity of others treated unlovingly by our society and even our church.

Who are these others? As we finalise our advent preparations for Christmas, let’s recognise the insidious prejudice many of us hold against the poor, for example. It’s easy to hide, as we hand out alms from a position of righteous superiority. More evident is prejudice against foreigners. Then shamefully some followers of Jesus call on about four verses in Scripture to contradict the whole message of Jesus and tell gay people they were born wrong! We condemn groups from other religions brought up with a different set of values, thus losing the opportunity for grace. And (in case we are are looking down at these judgemental people) those of us who think we have received a higher version of Christian insight about not judging the poor, the foreigners, the LGBTI community, the Muslims, whoever, judge and dismiss those we think are primitively judgmental. Big sins like that grow out of daily little transgressions like judging the person who got the punctuation wrong in the hymns screened in church (confession time!). We insult people quietly in our minds all the time.

The message of Christmas includes the invitation to be lavishly radical in exceeding the law as we join with God’s Spirit to bring about God’s will on earth as in heaven. Like Joseph, when we hear God speak to us about living in grace, we can bring about consequences wildly beyond our imagining.