Joseph: Protector, Provider & Receiver of Complaints
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Was it just a week ago that we gathered to hear the story of Joseph and Mary traveling to Bethlehem? Was it just a week ago that we sang the carols and thought about the shepherds and angels, the donkey and the oxen, the Holy Baby, the Virgin Mother, and the star?
And now we gather again, and we make a turn. We turn away from Luke’s story of shepherds in the fields who were sore afraid. And we turn to Matthew’s story of the Wise Men and the jealousy of King Herod, the slaughter of the baby boys of Bethlehem, and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt and back again to the Promised Land—which is an echo of Moses. (But that’s another sermon for another year.)
As we enter into these stories today we enter into a landscape of joy but also of jealousy, of adoration—but also of massacre, of love but also of fear. Maybe today’s stories in Matthew’s gospel are a little more realistic than the lovely crèche scene of Luke. Jesus begins his life in a world ruled by a jealous tyrant. He and his parents don’t get the chance to settle down for a very long time. They are on the run. Refugees. And because of him there are murders and parents wild with grief.
We see the struggle between good and evil writ large in our gospel. The Wise Men and the Holy Family seem encased in golden light, and meanwhile King Herod and the forces of empire bring an evil chill into the tableau. And over it all watches God, whose angels shepherd the family out of danger and into the relative safety of Egypt.
God’s role in this second chapter of Matthew’s gospel is protector of the precious Holy Seed, the one destined to lead his people to the Promised Land in the next life. He must be guarded and sheltered at all costs—his mission must be completed.
And God’s chief instrument is Joseph. Joseph the Carpenter, about whom we know next to nothing. The gospels tell us his occupation, and that he was a good man, who had not a vindictive bone in his body. The gospels give us the stories we heard today—Joseph warned by angels in dreams to flee to safety with his family and then to come back again.
Joseph was God’s Protector of the holy Child. We hear of Joseph again in the story of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple. That story is the other gospel selection that we didn’t read today. But then Joseph drops out of sight from the stories of Jesus. Scholars speculate that Joseph may have been significantly older than Mary, a protective older man, and may have died some time during or after Jesus’ teenage years.
We DO have some apocryphal stories of Joseph. These come from certain gospels that were not canonized—they didn’t make it into the official Bible. But they tell us of another role that Joseph played.
One such story is from the document called “The Infancy Gospel of Thomas”, which dates from about 150 A.D. You can find it online—just Google it. It talks about Jesus as a little boy making 12 clay birds and then setting them loose and watching them fly away. And then it talks about the subsequent complaining of the Pharisees to Joseph that his son broke the Sabbath laws by working miracles on the Sabbath. Another story from the same document talks about the boy Jesus striking dead the son of a neighbor—a friend of his who dared to cross him. Jesus is learning the scope of his powers and making the typical mistakes of kids growing up—but this is on the scale of life and death! And once again, Joseph fields the complaints and faces the ire of the bereaved parents. (And Jesus brings the child back to life, too.)
And so we see Joseph, not only as guarantor of physical safety but also as the one who has to deal with the people whom his son offends. So Joseph really sounds like a modern-day parent, doesn’t he?
Now, even as we meditate on Joseph’s role as protector, provider, and complaint receiver, we remember that even as Jesus was protected, there were others who were NOT. These are the babies of Bethlehem whom the Church calls the Holy Innocents and who are regarded as the first martyrs in the New Testament. Violence breaks into the gospel with their slaughter, ordered by a king jealous of any threats to his power—even threats by a baby.
And we may rightfully ask why Jesus was protected / but these babies were not. I suppose a glib answer to the question is that God wanted to make sure that the Holy One was enabled to live out his mission of teaching, healing, suffering, dying and resurrection. But that means that we may see the babies of Bethlehem as expendable.
Ah! It’s a very difficult thing to consider. And it may lead us to the deeper question of why God tolerates anyone’s suffering in the first place. If God loves us and creates us to thrive and to love God, then why does God not intervene when terrible things happen in the world?
The Christian tradition has tended to answer this question by dwelling on God’s endowing us with freedom to make our own choices. And sometimes we may make terrible or even tragic choices. And people suffer. We suffer.
But the flip side of this, of course, is that if God created us without this freedom, then we couldn’t freely love God back. We couldn’t turn to the good and do what we can to work for God’s mission of reconciliation and healing in the world.
We would be puppets, unable to love freely. And that would be a loss to us and to God.
Now, this is where our theology of HOPE comes in. By the gift of God and the merits of Jesus, we are assured that there’s more than this life. That suffering will find redemption. That lives are not lost in vain, and that God will wipe every tear from our eyes.
God wept when the babies of Bethlehem were killed. God received them immediately into light and life, and loves them still. And their parents have been consoled, and welcomed by God, too.
Without the assurance that the next life redeems the suffering of this one, we’d be lost.
And we gather like this, week after week, to remind ourselves of these truths, and to cultivate hope.
So, may we turn to God, who loves us and wants us to thrive. And may we thank God for Joseph and his example. He was a man who loved, who dreamed, and who sheltered the Light of the World. May we do the same.
Amen.
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