A Husband's Love

The list of names appears in our local newspaper once a week. Just below the names of those born and those who died are the names of couples filing for divorce. Maybe your name has been on that list. Certainly you have had a family member or friend who has gone through the pain of a broken marriage.

   It's pretty shocking to open the pages of Scripture and find one of the Bible's heroes contemplating divorce. But when Joseph of Nazareth makes his first appearance in the biblical story, that's exactly what he is doing. His marriage to Mary has only been promised. The engagement period has already lasted a number of months, but now new information has come to light — information that crushes Joseph's heart and drives him to desperate extremes.

   Maybe this is how the scene unfolded. Shortly after Mary's return from her visit with Elizabeth, she met Joseph in the

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garden of her parents' home or some other suitable location and told him that she was "with child." She told Joseph not with tears of shame but with quiet confidence. At first, Joseph couldn't believe what he was hearing. He even entertained the thought that Mary was joking with him, but he knew Mary would never joke in such a coarse way. What she said was true. She was pregnant.

   Joseph's first question was the one any man would ask in the same situation: Who was the father? Joseph's conscience was clear. He had never violated the purity of the engagement period. His relationship with Mary had been carried out in full view of her family and the close-knit community surrounding them. But Mary obviously had not been the person Joseph thought she was. One of the things that had attracted Joseph to Mary was her humble desire to live transparently before her God and before the community of believers around her. But now, in one brief conversation, Joseph found his perception of Mary shattered — and his life in shambles.

   When Joseph asked her who the father was, Mary said that an angel of God had spoken to her and told her that she would conceive miraculously. Her son would be the promised Deliverer, the Messiah, God's Son. She said it so calmly, confidently. But how could Joseph believe a story like that? He left the garden without saying another word and went back to his home to cry. He wrestled for hours with his response. Divorce seemed his only solution.

   Local opinion would be harsh; most people would tell him to divorce her openly in a public condemnation before the religious leaders. That would bring Mary shame and reproach — or worse. In the old days, before the restrictions of Roman law, an adulteress was stoned. This was adultery, even though the marriage had not been consummated, for in Jewish custom the betrothal period began with the exchange of solemn

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vows as binding as those of a modern wedding ceremony.

   The other option for Joseph was a private divorce. Two or three trusted friends would stand by as witnesses. Joseph would write out a bill of divorce and give it to Mary. No reason for the divorce needed to be mentioned; the community would find out only when people recognized that Joseph and Mary no longer sat together in the courtyard. They would also see Mary's figure begin to change as her unborn child grew to maturity.

   As Joseph turned the options over and over in his mind, one fact emerged with such power that it overshadowed all his pain and sense of betrayal. Joseph realized that he loved Mary more than any other person he had ever known. He couldn't pay back her betrayal with more betrayal. Public humiliation was out of the question. He decided to divorce her privately and to do it quickly. He would arrange it the next day, and before the coming sabbath it would be completed. He would go on in life alone.

   With that decision made, Joseph fell into an exhausted sleep. But in a dream God opened up to Joseph an option he had never considered. That's how God often works in our lives. When we are at the end of possibilities, the Lord opens a door that calls for a radical change of direction — and confident trust in God alone.

The Man Mary Loved

Both Mary and Joseph came from families who originally lived in the southern region of Palestine around Jerusalem. Both were descendants of David and traced their heritage to the clan of Judah, one of the sons of Jacob. Two genealogies of Jesus are listed in the New Testament. The genealogy in Matthew (1:1-17) traces Joseph's lineage from Abraham, the great father of Israel, through David and Solomon, the great kings of Israel.

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Joseph stood in the royal line of David's descendants. The crushing destruction of Jerusalem and the long exile in Babylon almost six hundred years earlier had brought an end to the rule of Davidic kings, but Joseph stood in a very prestigious heritage. Jesus, as Joseph's "adopted" son, inherited all the privileges of royalty.

   The second genealogy of Jesus recorded in Luke's Gospel most likely traces Jesus' heritage through Mary, his mother. Luke follows Mary's line back to David not through Solomon but through another of David's sons, Nathan. Then Luke goes all the way back to Abraham and beyond to Adam. Jesus through Joseph was the royal heir of David's kingdom, but through Mary Jesus was a member of the human race. He really was one of us!

   It's possible that the forebears of Joseph and Mary were part of a migration of Jews from southern Judea up into the non-Jewish, pagan region of Galilee. That migration began in the time of the Hasmonaean king Aristobulus I, one hundred years before Jesus' birth. Zealous Jews around Jerusalem came to Galilee as missionaries to convert the non-Jews in the area to the worship of the true God — and they were successful. In Jesus' day Galilee was definitely a Jewish area, though it was still regarded as uncultured by the sophisticated Jews in Judea.

   Joseph certainly inherited the spiritual zeal of the preceding generations. Matthew refers to Joseph as a "righteous man" (Matthew 1:19), and Luke portrays both Mary and Joseph as careful observers of the Law of Moses. Joseph was a carpenter, a trade he also taught to Jesus. In Mark 6:3 the people of Nazareth refer to Jesus as "the carpenter." The work of a carpenter was to plan and build homes, manufacture household furniture and construct farming tools. Joseph was not a wealthy man, but he should not be thought of as illiterate or untaught. The Jews expected every man to learn some occupation, and

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they placed high value on manual labor as a spiritual work offered to God. The great rabbis of Israel supported themselves with work. The trade of a carpenter ranked fairly high in the social structure. The prominent first-century rabbi Shammai was a carpenter, and his rival Hillel was a woodcutter. The apostle Paul, who from all indications came from a wealthy family and who was trained as a rabbi and scholar, also learned the trade of tentmaking (Acts 18:3).

   Joseph is never mentioned as being present after Jesus' ministry begins thirty years after his birth in Bethlehem (Luke 3:23). Most scholars believe that Joseph had died by that time. That fact has prompted many students of the Bible to believe that Joseph was significantly older than Mary. Some even suggest that when Joseph wed Mary he was a widower who already had grown children from an earlier marriage. The biblical testimony, however, doesn't give us any hint about his age. It seems just as probable that Joseph was a young man, of an acceptable age for a young woman like Mary, but a man who was mature in his faith and trust in the Lord God.

An Angel's Visit

Joseph was privileged to receive three messages directly from an angel of God. On the first occasion, just after he had decided to divorce Mary privately, Joseph was visited by an angel in a dream. He didn't dream this up; it really happened while Joseph slept. The angel told Joseph that Mary's story was true. She was carrying the Messiah in her body. She had not been unfaithful to Joseph. The conception was a miraculous work of God; the child was God himself in human flesh.

   In his carefully worded account of Joseph's experience, Matthew adds one more confirmation of Jesus' supernatural conception. He reaches back into the ancient prophecies of Isaiah and finds a stirring prediction: "All this took place to

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fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'A virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel' — which means, 'God with us' " (Matthew 1:22-23).

   I spoke to several hundred university students one Christmas about the birth of Jesus. I tried to get them to see beyond the sentimentalism of the story as they had heard it for so many years and to focus on the wonder of Jesus' coming as a human being. After I spoke, one student said, "I believe Jesus was God, but I don't think this whole story of a virgin birth is really that important. What difference does it make if Jesus was Joseph's son — or some other man's?

   He asked a serious question, and it deserved a serious answer. Theologians have usually argued that the virgin conception was necessary because it "proved" certain things about Jesus. Some Bible teachers have claimed, for example, that the virgin conception was necessary to guarantee that Jesus would not inherit a sinful human nature. The apostle Paul seems to indicate that (at least in a theological sense) our sinful nature is passed to us from Adam through our fathers. But Jesus could have inherited a sinful human nature from his mother, since men and women are equally fallen as a result of Adam's sin. This same desire to somehow protect Jesus from inherited sin led to the belief in the immaculate conception of Mary. If we believe that Mary was without sin, then Jesus clearly was sinless since he could not have inherited a sinful nature from his father or his mother. The New Testament, however, seems to avoid that argument completely. The angel simply says that the Holy Spirit would overshadow the entire event and, because of the Spirit's protection, Mary's offspring would be holy (Luke 1:35).

   Another theological argument sometimes advanced for the necessity of the virgin conception is that it demonstrates Jesus' preexistence. If Jesus had been conceived by a man and a

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woman, he would have begun to exist at his conception. The fact is, however, that God the Son has always existed, and his entrance into the world of humanity required a virgin conception. Jesus did not begin to exist in Mary's womb; Jesus became flesh in Mary's womb.

   No orthodox Christian would deny that God the Son had existed from eternity. Before Mary was born, before Abraham or David existed, before the worlds were made, the Son was in existence. But God could have brought about the incarnation by any one of the possible ways that his infinite mind could have conceived. Out of all the possibilities, God the Son became human through a virgin conception in Mary.

   The virgin conception does not necessarily prove anything about who Jesus was. It is consistent with other biblical truths, but it doesn't prove that Jesus was God or eternal or sinless. What is at stake in the virgin conception is not so much our understanding of Christ but our confidence in the Scriptures. If Jesus was conceived in Mary by Joseph or by any other man, the Bible (at least at this point) is a lie. Those who reject the virgin conception because it seems embarrassing in our scientific age have thrown away their confidence in the Bible as the truth of God.

   When I finished my long defense of the virgin conception, the student who asked the question was undaunted. "But if you read the myths of the ancient world, you can find other so-called virgin birth stories. Maybe Luke just borrowed the idea from other cultures in order to spice up the story a little." In my own undergraduate days I had confronted the same argument, and it led me on a search for these other virgin-birth stories. What I found were two kinds of miraculous birth stories.

   Most were stories like the birth of Hercules, who was the child of the Greek god Zeus and a human woman. These accounts involved a sexual encounter between a god and a

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human woman. If the woman was a virgin before the encounter, she was not considered a virgin afterward. The so-called virgin birth stories almost always involved some kind of sexual encounter between a god or goddess and a human being, an element totally absent from the biblical account. A few other pagan stories were like the Greek myth of the birth of Alexander the Great. The story goes that Alexander was virgin born after his mother, Olympia, cohabited with a serpent! It's a crude story doubtlessly derived from mythological stories about a powerful man, most likely long after his death.

   Obviously, neither type of so-called virgin birth myth can compare with the holiness and wonder of the historical record of Jesus' miraculous conception in Mary found in the Bible.

   In my first pastorate a doctor in our congregation, the obstetrician who delivered our two older children, gave a presentation one Sunday evening about how human life begins and develops over the first nine months of life. He started with a projected picture of a fertilized human egg, magnified hundreds of times. I will never forget his words as we looked at that picture. "This," he said, "is the degree to which Jesus Christ humbled himself to come to earth to be our Savior." Jesus came not as a glorious being descending from heaven in radiant splendor, not as a king born to great acclaim, not even at first as a baby lying in a manger. The infinite God, the Creator of the universe, became a tiny human embryo in Mary. By that act, Jesus stepped down into time and space. He identified himself irreversibly with his own creatures and his own creation.

Making It Personal

Joseph demonstrated his righteous character by responding to the angel's message with immediate obedience. Joseph obeyed God's word whether it was written in the Law of Moses or spoken in a dream by an angel. His obedience made a marriage

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where there might have been a divorce. The tears of bitterness he had shed the night before turned into shouts of joy in the morning. Joseph and Mary took the final vows of marriage, and Joseph took Mary to his own home. No consummation of the marriage took place until after Jesus was born, but Mary's companionship was an immediate, satisfying reality in Joseph's life.

   God the Father delivered his own Son into the home of two people whose hearts were fully his. Reading Joseph's story makes me wonder what risks I am willing to take to be fully obedient to the will of God. Those of us who want to experience "life on the edge" will never come closer to the edge than when we take the risk of pursuing the options that God opens to us.

   The whole story of Jesus' birth is a story of trust — Mary had to trust God's promise, Joseph had to trust Mary, later Mary had to trust Joseph as they fled from Herod's slaughter. Trust is difficult because it leaves us vulnerable. If we trust our mate and our mate fails us or deceives us, we look foolish. If we trust God and things don't seem to work out right, we feel embarrassed. Joseph must have wondered in times of difficulty if his encounter with the angel had been real. But as he walked on, trusting God at each step, he learned that God could be trusted.

   Not one direct word from Joseph is recorded anywhere in the Bible. Most of the people involved in the story of Jesus' birth talked or sang or shouted in praise, but not Joseph. He obeyed. Quietly, courageously, with the tenderness of a father, he demonstrated his faith by risking everything to obey the Lord. Mary had been promised to the right man! Both were willing to give up their reputations if that was what God asked of them.

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