| December 23, 2001 Isaiah 7 1 14 + Romans 1 1 17 + Matthew 1 18-24 |
| Matthew is concerned with the who and the how of Jesus. The central figure in his text is Joseph. The genealogy he uses just before today’s text begins shows that Jesus is Son of David, and the Matthew takes up the task of showing how he is also Son of God. The issue of legitimacy had risen early among the Jews as a contentious and troublesome matter, and Matthew takes it up creatively and boldly by making the point that the issue is not so much who was the father as it is the fact that God was involved and had a plan in the birth of this child. It is the same with the matter of the virginal conception, which was even and still is greatly disputed and discussed in scholarship. The point, Matthew suggests, is the prophecy that God will be among his people is fulfilled. |
| Matthew stands at the middle of a developing understanding of who and how Jesus came to be the Messiah. At first, it was thought that Jesus became the Son of God at the Resurrection. Then comes Matthew who moves that moment back to the Conception of Jesus. Then comes John who speaks of the Word being with the Father from the very beginning |
| Today’s text proclaims the who of Jesus revealed by the activity of the Spirit, through divine messengers, and through the prophets. Today’s text, with a gesture rich in meaning that escapes us who are not Jews, proclaims the howof Jesus with the story of Joseph, son of David, legally claiming Jesus as son and giving him is name. |
| This becomes the story of Joseph. The moment he names Jesus, he settles the issue of who and how Jesus came to be. The moment he speaks the name of this child, he joins the two threads of Matthew’s understanding of Jesus as both Son of David and Son of God. |
| Ultimately, this is a story that unfolds in the context of trust: trust between two lovers, and trust between those two lovers and God. Even though the circumstances raised some stressful concerns, these two young people our tradition has called, Mary and Joseph, trusted one another Mary was not only full of grace, she was full of trust: trust in Joseph as well as trust in God. In saying “Yes” to God, she trusted that she was not saying “No” to Joseph. At the same time, he had to trust that old ways were not always the best ways, that there can be something new under the sun, and that happy endings can come from sorry beginnings. He had to trust that doing the right thing even though it was not what he wanted was going to be the best thing |
| But the greatest act of trust in this story is on the part of God who placed trust in human beings even though prior evidence and a previous experience spoke to the contrary All the evidence spoke against trusting people, yet this story says that God believed that somehow people could do better than they had done before. In a sense, God either had to trust this human creation, or call the whole thing off And so Matthew tells this story of God’s trust in us as a way of raising the issue of our trust in God, of calling into question what can happen if we trust one another, of what can happen if we trust our scary dreams to imagine new possibilities, and what can happen if we trust God with our lives. |
| Because Mary and Joseph trusted each other, and because together they trusted God, Jesus, Son of God, was born into our world. Matthew affirms God’s trust in us and he urges us all to a little more trust in each other and in God with the hope that something will be born again in us this Christmas time. |