Matthew 1:18-25
In today’s Gospel from St. Matthew, we are told that Joseph was a just man – or, what would be a better translation, a righteous man. This description of Joseph’s character applies to more than one aspect of his life.
First, it means that he was an honorable and moral man. He had not committed fornication with his fiancee Mary.
The time when they would be allowed to live together as husband and wife had not yet come. And so Joseph, as a righteous man, had not been intimate with her.
Exercising this kind of moral discipline was important for a pious Jewish man like Joseph. It demonstrated respect for the institution of marriage, as God ordained it.
And it demonstrated respect for God himself, whose will in these matters was considered to be more determinative for how a man should conduct himself, than his own unbridled urges.
Not everyone in Joseph’s day felt this way, of course. His contemporaries in the non-Jewish Greco-Roman world certainly knew how to indulge their impulses for sexual adventurism, of both heterosexual and homosexual varieties.
But this was not how things were among the Jewish people. This is not the way Joseph thought. As a genuine believer in the God of Israel, this is not the way Joseph lived.
Joseph was a righteous man. And because he was a righteous man, specifically in this way, he knew that he was not responsible for Mary’s untimely pregnancy.
Since he had had nothing to do with getting her pregnant, he assumed that she had been intimate with another man, and had violated her pledge of marriage to him. And so, he decided to break off the betrothal – which, according to the Jewish understanding, would have had the force of a “divorce.”
But another aspect of what it means for Joseph to have been a righteous man, is evident in the fact that even under such circumstances, he was going to do this quietly and discreetly. He had every reason to feel that Mary had deeply insulted and humiliated him by her actions. But he was not going to be vindictive or vengeful in response.
He was not going to expose her to public shame. Joseph, as a righteous man, was a kind and decent man – even to Mary, at a time when he was quite certain that she had betrayed him.
We are so different from Joseph, so much of the time, aren’t we? We live in a sex-drenched society. Our commitment to sexual purity – in thought, word, and deed – is no doubt significantly lower than his was, even though God’s standards have not changed.
And when we perceive someone to have betrayed us, or publicly embarrassed us, we do not hold back in “getting even,” and in making sure everyone knows who the “bad guy” was in that matter.
It is said: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” It could just as well be said that hell hath no fury like a man scorned, or humiliated, or made a fool of, before his friends and neighbors. But Joseph was not like this.
He did value his reputation, and he did seek to honor and obey God in the way he lived. But he did not guard his reputation with arrogance and pride.
When he felt that his reputation was being threatened, he did not lash out in anger against the one whom he perceived to be the offending party – in this case, Mary.
At this point, as Joseph was contemplating the discreet and quiet divorce he planned to get, God communicated something to Joseph – by means of an angelic visitation in a dream – that he certainly did not expect to be told. Matthew reports:
“But while he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘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.’”
The explicit meaning of this is obvious. Mary’s pregnancy was the result of a miracle. Joseph was assured that Mary had not betrayed him after all. She, too, was an honorable and righteous person, and Joseph should therefore go through with the marriage.
But there was another message for Joseph, that was implicit in this angelic announcement. When you read between the lines, God was basically saying this:
“Joseph, son of David, I am asking you to take care of this very special woman, and this extremely special baby. And so I am asking you to take the blame for this pregnancy, in the eyes of your friends and neighbors.”
When it became known in the community where Joseph and Mary lived, that Mary was pregnant – before the time when she should have been – the people in the community would have started watching Joseph, to see what he was going to do.
If he had separated from Mary, and called off the marriage, then everyone would have concluded that he was not to blame. His reputation would have remained intact, even as Mary’s would have been severely damaged.
But if he did not break up with Mary, and if he instead followed through with the wedding plans, then everyone would have concluded that he and Mary had sinned. It would have seemed to everyone that Joseph was tacitly admitting as much, by staying in the relationship, and by raising the child who had been conceived outside of wedlock as his own.
Nothing that Joseph could have said would have changed that perception. If he had tried to explain that Mary’s pregnancy was by the Holy Spirit, and that the child was the Son of God, it would only have made things worse.
No one would have believed him. The townspeople would instead have become even more annoyed at him for compounding his guilt, by making up what they would have seen to be a blasphemous and impossible story, instead of just taking the blame for his sin like a man.
We can assume that Mary had tried to tell Joseph the same thing, before his dream. But he didn’t believe her. That’s why he was planning a divorce – before his dream. So, Joseph knew that his friends and neighbors wouldn’t believe him, either.
Joseph was a righteous man. He had not done anything wrong in his relationship with Mary. In his own conscience, he knew this.
But when God asked Joseph to take Mary as his wife, according to the original plan, he was thereby asking him to put himself in the public position of being seen and judged not to have been a righteous man.
And Joseph was not going to be able to justify himself before others, or reclaim his formerly good standing in the community. He was going to have to bear this burden without complaint. In silence he would carry the weight of a publicly-perceived guilt for something he actually didn’t do, for the rest of his life.
The sin of fornication was going to be imputed to him and pinned on him. But this was the way it had to be – in order for Mary and her baby to be properly loved and cared for.
In his humble submission to God’s loving will, even at the sacrifice of his public reputation as a righteous man, Joseph showed himself truly to be a righteous man.
When God became one of us, he became one of us at the very beginning of a human existence. Emmanuel – God with us – lived with us as a human being, from conception to adulthood.
The divine Son entered this world as a baby, in need of the kind of protection and upbringing that would be afforded him by a righteous man.
God wanted that man to be Joseph. And Joseph dutifully accepted this divine calling – for the benefit of Mary, and for the benefit of Jesus.
The angel of the Lord had said to Joseph: “She will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
In a way that he may not have realized at the time, Joseph’s actions, and his obedience to God, foreshadowed what Jesus was going to do someday, to save his people from their sins.
Jesus – who was without any sin of his own; and who was himself a just and righteous man in the absolute sense – allowed all human sin to be imputed to him and pinned on him: all fornication and adultery, all slander and lying, all greed and envy, all hatred and murder.
Before the tribunal of the law of almighty God, Jesus – the Son of God – allowed himself to be thought of as guilty of these sins, and many more such sins.
And he did not try to justify himself, or shake off this burden that God the Father had sent him into the world to bear, according to his calling as the world’s Savior. Jesus needed to be smeared with all of humanity’s sins, and to carry those sins to the cross, so that by his death in our place all of those sins would be atoned for.
“Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth,” as Isaiah the Prophet reminds us.
This was all a part of God’s plan for making you to be a righteous person, like Joseph: in your moral behavior, as a disciple of his Son; but even more so in your standing before him in his Son, covered with Jesus’ righteousness, even as Jesus had been covered with your sins.
St. Paul writes: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Jesus took your sins to the cross and died for them there. And Jesus forgives your sins. His forgiveness, you receive by faith.
And now, as a fruit of that justifying faith, you know how to act when God – through your calling – asks you to bear an undeserved shame, and to protect others by taking the blame for things you have not actually done.
As a Christian, it is not the most important thing for you always to be seen by everyone as right in all your actions. As a Christian, you are not governed by such a consuming and selfish pride.
You know that it is more important to have a clear conscience before God, than to be well thought of by all other people.
This means, therefore, that you will sometimes endure unfair and undeserved criticism from people, because of how you handled a situation that your critics think they understand better than they actually do.
You may need to keep a confidence – to protect others from embarrassment, or to prevent others from being hurt – so that you cannot tell your judgmental critics what they would need to know, in order to know that you did the right thing after all. So, you will bear their negative opinion of you in silence.
Joseph was a righteous man. In his standing before God by faith, in his moral standing before his neighbors, and in the kind and gentle way he treated people, he was righteous.
And, when God called him to do it, he was righteous also in his willingness to be thought of as unrighteous, in order to fulfill a truly righteous purpose for the benefit of others: namely, Mary and the boy Jesus.
In Christ, you too are given this kind of righteousness. In Christ, you too are called to this kind of righteousness.
With the Lord’s help, we seek to live in a way that honors God. With the Lord’s help, we seek to live in a way that serves our neighbor, and protects our neighbor, even if it is at the cost of our reputation among people who misunderstand us.
But most of all – as this is illustrated for us by Joseph’s example – we humbly rejoice in Jesus’ willingness to bear our sin under the judgment of the divine law, and on the cross to be thought of and treated by his Father in heaven as if he were as sinful as we actually are; so that in Christ, and according to his mercy, God now thinks of us, and treats us, as if we were as righteous as Jesus actually is.
Amen.