Fourth Sunday of Advent (December 18, 2022)
There will be sermons aplenty this Sunday praising Joseph for showing faith. That’s fine. But I’d like to hear one praising him for keeping it, because raising Jesus can’t have been easy.
As an adult, Jesus could be startlingly brilliant, achingly compassionate, and downright handy to have around in crises ranging from running out of wine in the middle of a wedding party to getting caught out on the water in a storm, contracting a terrible disease or even dropping dead. But he also could be irascible, provocative, exasperating, appalling, and bewildering. We can only imagine what he was like during his terrible twos or – good grief! – as a teenager. A sinless kid would not necessarily have been a low-maintenance one. From what I have read, Jesus certainly wasn’t.
Trouble found the new family quickly. For Joseph, simply sticking with Mary despite her unexplained pregnancy carried risks and invited gossip. And the second chapter of Matthew describes how the arrival of the gift-bearing wise men alerted Herod to a possible rival, prompting Herod to condemn to death every Bethlehem male age 2 or younger. Warned in a dream, Joseph had to flee to Egypt and sneak back to Nazareth only after Herod’s death.
The Gospels tell us nothing about most of Jesus’ childhood. Imagine him, if you like, as a finer carpenter than Joseph from the start. I’ll go along with the assumption that he was probably a quick learner, but I’ll bet he banged his thumbs, sliced his fingers, whined about splinters, cut his boards too short, and ruined his share of projects, just like anyone else learning a trade. And through everything, I picture Joseph rolling his eyes and thinking, “Son of God, come to save us all, the angel said. I just wish he could cut a straight line.”
Our one glimpse of the adolescent Jesus can be found toward the end of Luke 2. Having been brought to Jerusalem, as was the custom, at age 12 to prepare for his full induction into the Jewish faith community at 13, Jesus gave his parents the slip. Discovering his absence a day into the trip back home, a panicked Mary and Joseph rushed back to Jerusalem, searched for three days, and finally found him doing what he evidently had been doing the whole time: discussing scripture with the Temple teachers and wowing them with his insights.
Called out by Mary, Jesus seems as indifferent to their anxiety as he would seem later, when his panicked disciples awakened him from his nap to demand why he didn’t care that a storm was about to drown the whole company in the Sea of Galilee.
“Why were you searching for me?” Jesus replies. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my father’s house?” Joseph was standing right there. That one must have stung.
Joseph’s story ends with a final indignity in Luke 4 as Jesus, by now an emerging celebrity, returns to Nazareth to give a sermon in the town’s synagogue. It all starts well, with Jesus doing a fine job of reading a passage from Isaiah, and everyone nodding in approval and murmuring, “That’s Joseph’s boy, isn’t it?” But then Jesus backhands his erstwhile neighbors with an insult by suggesting God had bypassed them in favor of – gasp! – foreigners, the way God had sent Elijah to a widow in Zarephath, and Elisha to a leprous Syrian called Naaman. Enraged, they mob him, planning to toss him off a nearby cliff.
Joseph’s boy? By then, the crowd probably thought of him as Joseph’s insolent little brat. We don’t know whether Joseph was around for this near-murderous riot or any of the fallout after Jesus mysteriously disappeared from the scene. Joseph just fades away in the Gospels, having never uttered a single recorded word. Classical art showing Mary and Joseph together often depicts Mary as substantially younger than her husband, on the theory that Joseph must have died of old age early in their marriage.
But through it all, whatever all of it entailed, Joseph seems to have kept his faith in what the angel had told him: This boy will save his people from their sins, and you must call him “Jesus,” so that you will repeat the promise each time you say his name.
We sentimentalize each of the Christmas story’s characters – Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, the wise men, and probably Jesus himself more than any of them. If the snoozing baby in the manger is the only Jesus you know, then perhaps you don’t know Jesus much at all. Real life with him is more like it must have been for Joseph: marked by deep love, to be sure, but also by frustration, weariness, bewilderment, offense, anger, doubts, and outrage at being asked to give yet more when so much has been given already. Sometimes, to know Jesus is to wish you had never met him. Blasphemy? Just ask John, whom we left, last week, sitting in prison, doubting everything and awaiting a fate that couldn’t have been difficult for him to guess.
The real Jesus came to love us, yes, but with real love, a love prepared to subordinate everything else – things like keeping us warm, preserving our safety, filling our bellies, protecting our egos, burnishing our reputations, growing our businesses, or even just letting us have a nice peaceful life among friends in a little place we can call home – to giving us the one thing we need most, and really the only thing we need at all: saving.
