What was Joseph's influence on Jesus as a father?

Sermon delivered Sunday, Dec. 18, 2016 (Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Matthew 1:18-25

Much of our focus during the season of Advent is on Mary. She is, after all, the one who carried Jesus in her womb, the one who waited for his birth like no one else ever has, like only an expectant mother can do.

Earlier this season I mentioned that using blue during Advent instead of purple emphasizes that Advent is not simply a mini-Lent, that the season of Advent is about waiting, watching, hoping, longing, not just about repentance. But for some, using blue during Advent also is about drawing our attention to Mary, since blue is the color traditionally associated with her in art and iconography. The Virgin Mary, “great with child,” is our icon of the season of Advent, the personification of what it means to wait and watch expectantly.

But today’s Gospel reading invites us to focus on Joseph rather than Mary as we consider the story of Jesus’s birth.

We don’t actually know a whole lot about Joseph, Mary’s husband, who was Jesus’s earthly father in a practical sense if not biologically. The scriptures mention him only a few times, mostly in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Perhaps as the official theology of the church about the Virgin Birth began to form, Joseph’s presence in the narrative made some people uncomfortable. If it’s a Virgin Birth, why is there a man in the story at all?

Well, uh… because in that culture a woman couldn’t be pregnant and single without being at risk for her life, so maybe Joseph was more like a guardian for Mary. And since it was probably an arranged marriage, and Joseph was probably a lot older than Mary (some traditions say he was as old as 90 when he became engaged to a teenaged Mary!), maybe they never slept together at all and she was a “perpetual virgin” – as the Catholic Church later came to hold as official doctrine.

Let’s face it, the story’s really all about Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the miraculous birth. Joseph’s kind of a third wheel, an inconvenient interloper, an awkward stepfather to God’s son. Christian tradition has tended to let him fade into the background as the spotlight shines on Mary and the Christ Child. Joseph becomes just a placeholder in a society where a woman couldn’t exist without a man’s protection.

But what if there was more to Joseph’s role than that? While we’ll never know specific details of what his day-to-day relationship with Mary or Jesus was like (unless an archeologist discovers Joseph’s diary in a cave in the Middle East somewhere!), we do know that in a society in which he would have had every right to reject Mary when she shows up pregnant with a child he knows is not his, he not only accepts her as his wife, but raises the child as his own. He chooses mercy over strict obedience of the law; if he’d been a stickler for the law he would have called for Mary to be stoned to death when he discovered her pregnancy.

He goes to great lengths to protect Jesus; as the story continues in Matthew, Joseph moves the entire family to Egypt to escape King Herod’s attempt to kill the child that he feared might be a threat to his throne.

When he and Mary take Jesus to the Temple to dedicate him to God, Joseph offers the sacrifice prescribed for the poor: two turtle doves, rather than a year-old lamb, which was the sacrifice expected of all who could afford it. This tells us he was likely a man of humble means, but even so, according to Luke, he took the family to Jerusalem every year for the Passover. The fact that he made this long, expensive trip every year despite the fact that it would have stretched his budget shows that he prioritized the practice of his faith over other things in life.

Matthew calls him a “righteous man.” But his way of being righteous, his way of practicing his faith, seems to have been a way that always focused on what matters most, a way that never allowed rituals to get in the way of relationships, a way that emphasized mercy over sacrifice, a way that focused on compassion and protecting the vulnerable. Maybe Jesus learned those things not only from his Father in heaven, but from his father on earth.

Last Sunday, Father John talked about how devotion to and veneration of Mary has given the church a counterbalance to the traditionally masculine imagery attributed to God. It’s given us a way to remember that the more traditionally feminine qualities – “nurturing, supporting, protecting, healing, loving” – are also part of God, however much human nature has tended to focus on the “masculine” qualities of “aggressiveness, anger, judgment, decisions, and action” when thinking about God.

This is certainly true, but in reflecting on Joseph this week, I’ve been noticing how much Joseph emphasizes those nurturing, supporting, protective, healing, loving parts of God.

John told us a joke last week to illustrate his point: a man dies and is greeted at the pearly gates with judgment, with an accounting of everything he did wrong in his life. The man pauses, thinks for a moment and replies, “Um, excuse me, could I please speak to Mary?” Behind this joke, John says, is “a sense that the male judgment may happen, but Mary will soothe and calm and ease the situation and will be forgiving.” But based on our Gospel reading for today and what we know about Joseph from the rest of the scriptural witness, I think I’d be just as likely to ask for Joseph at the pearly gates as I would Mary if I were looking for compassion and forgiveness.

It’s always bothered me that our society characterizes qualities as “masculine” and “feminine” the way that it does, in a way that stereotypes men as aggressive and judgmental and women as nurturing and compassionate. Because, of course, it’s not that simple. I’m sure we’ve all known women who are aggressive and judgmental and men who are nurturing and compassionate. No human quality is exclusively the purview of any one sex or gender. And Joseph is a particular illustration of that case in point.

Critique of the image of God as “Father” has rested on the assumption that a “Father” is a stern, emotionally distant figure associated with rules and punishment. We need a female image of God to balance this stern male Father figure, feminist biblical scholars have argued. But from what we know of him, Jesus’s earthly father didn’t fit that stereotype. So to the extent that as a human being, Jesus’s concept of what a “father” was came from his own earthly father, it seems that what he meant when he talked about God as a father was someone who was kind, loving, compassionate, forgiving – someone who would put his life at risk to protect his son’s, someone who chooses mercy over judgment. Joseph is a reminder to us that those qualities are just as essential to what it means to be a man and a father as they are to what it means to be a woman and a mother.