Abstract
God in the Thick of It
Today’s Gospel, and the whole drama of Christmas, begins with an unwanted pregnancy. This is comforting, don’t you think? God’s great appearance on the stage of human history is in the midst of a family crisis, no doubt with hushed voices, angry whispers and dismay all round!
Perhaps something like this has happened in your family. It certainly did in mine. I was one of the 60,000 or more Australians given up for adoption from the 1950s to the 1970s. I was conceived out of wedlock and my brave mother went through it all alone, so that her family would never have to know. Then came the emotional fallout of giving away her newborn son without even being allowed to see me, followed by long years of trying to find a new start in life. But God is not embarrassed. God isn’t hamstrung by the muddles that we humans get into, by the shame that paralyses us, or by the things that we feel have to be hidden away. God blessed my natural mother through all this, and she’s done great things with her life. God blessed me, too, calling me from boyhood to be a priest, so I can stand in the midst of God’s people and testify as a witness that our God makes all things new.
Today’s Gospel reading charts this same terrain. Joseph is perplexed by his pregnant fiancée, and what to do with her. But our God is not the least bit phased, no matter how awkward things seem to us. Our God is eager to be in the thick of it, in the midst of Joseph and Mary’s family crisis, and in the midst of our lives—in our marriages and families, in our personal dark nights and wretched dawns, and in the struggles of our world, too, whatever crisis might be looming. That’s the message of Advent and Christmas: Emmanuel, God with us.
God was in the thick of Israel’s ancient history, according to our first reading from Isaiah today, bringing hope for a nation under the looming shadow of military threat. The birth of a royal son was a sign that God’s people had a future, though all looked bleak. Matthew lights on this Isaiah passage today, identifying Jesus with that coming royal son and proclaiming him to be no less than God with us. And as for Joseph’s panic in the face of Mary’s pregnancy, we come to see that all those concerns about family honour, about marriage rules and social expectations—all the things that made the ancient world go round—weren’t able to account for or interfere with Jesus’ coming. The image of Jesus’ virginal conception, which two of the New Testament writers, Matthew and Luke, give us, uses gynaecology and sociology to point to theology. Here we see a primarily theological conviction: that, in Jesus Christ, God decisively embraces the life of our world in all its blood, mess, and confusion; that God’s dreams are more than a match for our disappointments.
Paul, in our Romans reading today, also testifies to Jesus, though Paul has nothing to say about Jesus’ birth. For Paul, Jesus’ birth is like every other human birth ‘according to the flesh’. Paul’s testimony, rather, is to the new life revealed in Jesus’ resurrection, which is confirmed as Jesus is recognized as a living presence among Christian believers in the Church. Paul knows this presence in his personal experience with the result that, through his ministry, faith in Jesus’ living presence could became a reality for the gentiles—‘including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ’, as his testimony extends today to include you and me. So if the narratives of Jesus’ birth in two of the Gospels celebrate Jesus’ significance with stories of his coming into the world, the letters of Paul testify to Jesus’ significance on the basis of Paul’s own experience of Jesus Christ among God’s people in the Church. This is an experience that I share, and that you share.
One other thing I should mention is the intriguing and controversial verse in today’s Gospel about Joseph not having sex with Mary until she’d given birth. This is sometimes understood as yet one more nail in the coffin of healthy human sexuality, as if God preferred us all to be celibate. The Catholic tradition has even held Mary up as perpetually virgin, imagining Joseph as an old man, better able to leave his wife alone than a young husband might, and then dying conveniently so that the stage is left to Mary. But that’s a historical fiction driven by a deep spiritual suspicion of human sexuality—an attitude the Church is nowadays eager to move beyond a) because we’ve thought better of it, and b) because it’s not winning us any friends. What I think we can say about this Gospel text is this: Joseph realised that God was at work, and so he respectfully kept his distance. He acknowledged that Mary was God’s property, not his, until the thing was done, so we best understand his abstinence with Mary as to do with honouring God, rather than dishonouring the gift of sexuality.
Like Joseph, we can learn to respect God’s presence in our lives, in our relationships and families, and not intrude when we plainly shouldn’t, or always insist on our own way—and especially not at Christmas, when challenges on the home front can be particularly sharp. Also, in the affairs of our world we can decide not to demand our rights and so to obstruct the right outcome. The empowering reserve of God, that gives space for us to face and resolve our own problems, is one of the secrets of leadership that needs to be more widely appreciated, and Joseph gives witness to this quality by knowing when to leave well alone.
So our message in word and sacrament today is that, in the coming of Jesus Christ, God bursts the bubble, transforming the hopeless and marginal into the going concern of faith and new beginnings. This is God’s Christmas gift to the world, and to the people of God in every Eucharist.