The Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 18, 2022
Penelope Bridges
Our King and Savior now draws near: come, let us adore him.
Within the lifetime of my mother, the Magdalene Laundries were still operating in Ireland. You may have seen a movie about them some years ago, telling the story of a shameful episode in Ireland’s history. The pregnancy of an unmarried woman, no matter the circumstances of conception, whether voluntary, involuntary, even raped by her father or the parish priest, was a scandal that had lifelong consequences. Girls and women who had “transgressed” were sent to convents where they were put to forced labor in primitive laundries, unpaid, imprisoned, abused, and ultimately separated from their babies.
Sometimes it was a life sentence; sometimes the women and/or the babies died in the course of pregnancy or childbirth, or afterwards. The mothers and babies were buried in mass or unmarked graves, the children eternally condemned for the sin of being born on the wrong side of the blanket, as they used to say.
This condemnation of women for their God-given gift of fertility, a gift that makes possible the continuation of the species, is of course as old as history and still exists in some cultures and religions today. In first century Israel a girl could be stoned to death for extramarital pregnancy. To be found to be pregnant on the eve of her marriage was as great a scandal as a family would ever face, bringing shame not only on her and her own family but also on the family of the man she was to have married.
That Mary was “found to be with child from the Holy Spirit” didn’t mitigate the seriousness of her situation. Matthew doesn’t say if anyone believed Mary’s claim that this was the work of the Spirit and not human activity, but it doesn’t change the fact that Joseph had every right under the law to condemn his fiancée. Instead he chose to quietly make the problem go away by dismissing her. It wasn’t the most compassionate decision, but it was merciful compared to what he could have demanded.
And then came the dream, and the message from the angel that changed everything. I wonder if Mary had told Joseph about her angelic visitor, and if it was only when he encountered an angel himself that he decided to believe her unlikely story and honor their engagement.
God sent an angel to this ordinary, righteous man, and told him to put away his fear of scandal, to accept Mary and her unborn child, and even to name the baby Jesus, Savior. And he did as the angel instructed him. He protected Mary and the child, taking them to refuge in Egypt when Herod started murdering babies, and he nurtured the boy as his own. He was everything you could hope for in an adoptive father. God gave this man the grace to trust God’s word, to choose compassion over legalism, to give his life to raising this child despite the risk of dishonor and disgrace.
If you look back at the verses in Matthew that precede our reading today, you’ll find a family tree for Jesus, and it’s Joseph’s ancestry. For us who understand genetics it seems peculiar to say in the same breath that Jesus was conceived from the Holy Spirit AND descended from Joseph’s line; but for the people who lived in that time, what mattered was the family in which someone grew up. For all practical intents and purposes Jesus was Joseph’s son and shared Joseph’s lineage. And the unique way Matthew shares Joseph’s family tree tells us that irregular liaisons were not unknown to Joseph’s forebears.
You see, in the forty-two generations listed in Matthew’s genealogy, each generation is named for the patriarch, starting with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and going all the way to our Joseph. But four of those generations are identified, unusually, by both the father and the mother. Judah, one of Jacob’s twelve sons, was the father of twins Perez and Zerah, and their mother was Tamar, who was Judah’s daughter-in-law. When Tamar was widowed without children she took the desperate measure of disguising herself and seducing her father-in-law, only revealing his identity as the father of her children when he himself called for her to be burned for prostitution.
Several generations later, Salmon became the father of Boaz with Rahab. Now, Rahab’s story is told in the book of Joshua: she was an indigenous woman who kept a brothel in Jericho, and at the time when the people of God were invading the promised land, she conspired with Jewish scouts to help God’s people enter Jericho and take it over. So, when she married Salmon, not only was she a despised Canaanite, but she brought quite a bit of scandalous baggage with her.
Boaz, the son of that irregular union, himself caused scandal by marrying Ruth, a Moabite woman who had been married to a Jewish man but after being widowed journeyed to Israel with her mother-in-law, Naomi. And, much later, Solomon was the child of David and Bathsheba, whose relationship began with an adulterous affair and the abuse of power. So, four scandalous women in this family tree that culminates in naming Joseph and Mary, the fifth unlikely pairing. It is not an accident that Matthew includes those four ancestresses in the line that leads to Jesus. Matthew’s message is subtle but clear: God works in mysterious ways to bring about God’s purposes. There are twists and turns, scandalous liaisons and unsuitable people involved, all the way through our faith story, but they lead inevitably to the most scandalous of all: the incarnation of God on earth.
Why scandalous? Because the idea of the Lord God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, ruler of the universe, living outside of time and space, shrinking and humbling Godself to fit into the body of a mere human being, is outrageous. And the idea that this God of ours was willing to give up all the privilege of divinity, to be vulnerable and mortal, to be born into a poor family in an occupied country at a time when life was cheap, is practically blasphemous.
And yet, this is what we believe. This is the incredibly good news that we get to share with the world: that God loved the creation so much that God was willing to stoop and squeeze into human substance, to undergo the worst suffering that anyone can endure, to be put to death as a despised criminal; and all so that we would know how beloved we are.
God works in mysterious ways, through ordinary and unlikely people, disregarding what is proper or expected, finding a way where there is no way, to get across the message of Christmas: you are loved, no matter who you are or where you come from, no matter what scandalous baggage you drag behind you, no matter what mistakes you have made. You are loved, and nothing can change that. And so, as we approach the festival of the nativity of Jesus, we give glory to our loving, life-giving, liberating God who has given us this good news to proclaim to all the world.
Our King and Savior now draws near: come, let us adore him.
