Scripture can be found here…
“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah, God’s anointed One, took place in this way.”
That’s how our story begins. What follows is startling—scandalous—the kind of thing families sometimes try to bury when they tell their story.
And Joseph is at the heart of the scandal. We know very little about Joseph. And much of what we think we know is contradicted right within the bible narrative.
We know his father was named Jacob—according to Matthew. Although, according to Luke his father was Heli. Though many of the names differ along the way, according to both Matthew and Luke, Joseph traces his ancestry back to King David, and beyond him, all the way back to the patriarch, Abraham.
We know he was a “tekton,” a Greek word which we usually translate as “carpenter.” However, it also means stoneworker, or artisan. Whichever is actually was, we know Joseph has a humble profession, because people bring it up when they are wondering where Jesus got the gifts—or the moxie—to stand up in the synagogue and teach. People ask one another, “Isn’t this Jesus the tekton’s son?”
We know that Joseph and Mary were engaged, in a more formal and serious arrangement than our modern day customs. Engagement was as binding as marriage. Many engaged couples lived together before marriage, it was that sure a thing.
We know that Joseph and Mary did marry, and that Joseph was the only father Jesus knew on this earth.
And we know that Joseph was in the picture until Jesus was at least 12 years old, because that’s when Joseph and Mary lost track of Jesus for a few days, while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
After that? Joseph vanishes from Jesus’ story.
We know very little about Joseph, but there is one other thing: when he learned a baby was on the way, he decided to break off his engagement with Mary, because he knew the child was not his.
Joseph wanted a divorce, but he didn’t want anything bad to happen to Mary—“Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” That’s what Matthew tells us. So we know that he certainly didn’t want her to be stoned to death, which was the punishment on the books for an engaged woman becoming pregnant by someone other than her fiancé. And at first, Joseph believed Jesus’ father was another man. Naturally. For him, that was reason enough to end the marriage, though not a reason to hurt his fiancée.
But then, Joseph has a dream.
There are not a lot of characters named “Joseph” in scripture. Off the top of my head, I can think of only three. There’s the man at the heart of this story; there’s a disciple of Jesus who hails from Arimathea; and there’s one other: the one we associate with the really fancy coat. Joseph, son of the Old Testament patriarch Jacob.
If we want to understand our Joseph, I can’t help feeling we can learn something from this other Joseph. That’s because biblical names are always sources of knowledge for us, keys to understanding the big picture. Joseph who is visited by an angel in a dream is most certainly connected to that other dreamer called Joseph.
The first thing we know about the Joseph of the Hebrew Scriptures is that he is almost, but not quite, the youngest of Jacob’s sons—he is the eleventh out of twelve. And because he is the first son of Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachel, Joseph becomes his father’s favorite. That’s why Jacob gives his son that beautiful, very special coat.
None of this sits well with sons number 1 through 10.
The boy Joseph is also very aware of his status among his siblings, so much so that he has dreams in which fairly obvious stand-ins for his brothers and parents bow down to him. Eleven sheaves of wheat bow down to his sheaf of wheat. The sun, the moon, and eleven stars bow down to him.
Joseph sharing these dreams with his brothers does nothing to improve relations with them, and they decide to get rid of him. At first they hatch a plot to kill him, but in the end, they sell him as a slave to a passing caravan.
In the beginning of his story, Joseph’s dreams of greatness result in his losing everything.
Later on Joseph finds himself in prison in Egypt. But then dreams return—not his own, but the dreams of others. And Joseph has a gift for interpreting dreams. Eventually he interprets a dream for the Pharaoh, helping the ruler to anticipate and prepare for a famine. His wisdom saves Egypt from devastation. This results in Joseph being appointed the Pharaoh’s right-hand-man, essentially ruling over Egypt.
As his story progresses, Joseph’s understanding of dreams results in his gaining everything.
Even the bitter feud with his brothers comes to an unlikely and beautiful conclusion—Joseph saves his own family from the famine, forgives them in a scene which finds them embracing and weeping as the ugly past is, finally, put to rest. Their elderly father has his long-lost son restored to him., which you might call a dream come true.
What can that other dreamer Joseph tell us about our New Testament Joseph?
I think one key is character.
The first Joseph-son-of-Jacob is the son, grandson, and great-grandson of men who grapple with God, wrestle with their faith, and follow with deep trust in God’s promise to them: an everlasting covenant of faithfulness.
Our Joseph—a righteous man—follows, first, his intuition that he must do no harm to Mary or the baby; and then, follows God’s guidance through the revelation of the dream. He places his own deep trust in the information revealed by the angel: that this child is the child of God.
I think another key is found in hardship: the challenges and the pain undergone by both men. As a result of sibling rivalry combined with a father who didn’t have the wisdom to try to love all his sons equally well, the first Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, and has to make his way in a dangerous world by his wits and hard work.
Our New Testament Joseph experiences another kind of hardship, a different kind of betrayal: his belief that Mary is pregnant by another man. Our passage describes a dream Joseph has, in which an angel informs him that the truth is something altogether different. But that doesn’t mean Joseph’s decision to remain committed to Mary and, now, her baby, is somehow, suddenly, an easy one.
It is not always easy to do the right thing, especially we have been hurt. It is entirely reasonable to assume that Joseph’s initial pain would linger, despite his dream, despite the angel and the prophecy and the promise.
But sometimes, pain can actually help to clarify what is our best path. A favorite heroine of mine is described in a novel as learning to discern with the help of her pain. She is described as
… trying to quiet her mind enough to hear the small inward voice that would tell her which way to go, what to do. In her experience, hard knowledge, painful knowledge, was a gift: God’s way of pushing aside the distractions, the self-centeredness, leaving the right way clear, open, marked for travel.[i]
I imagine something much like that happened to Joseph: the hard knowledge, the painful knowledge of a pregnancy for which he was not responsible, was a kind of gift. Together with the angelic dream-visitor, it pushed aside any temptation to self-centeredness and left the way to him clear, open, and marked for travel.
But the most fundamental connection I find between our two Josephs—the last and most important key—is the content of that angelic dream, which echoes the content of an Old Testament prophecy.
“Look: the young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, (which means, God Is With Us).”
This is the truth of God throughout scripture, from the stories of creation to the visions of Revelation: God is with us.
This is the truth for Joseph when his brothers sell him into slavery, and when he ends up doing a stint in prison, and when he rises to power in the aid of a nation and, eventually, the very brothers who harmed him: God is with him, every step of the way.
This is the truth for Joseph whose fiancée turns out to be pregnant, and whose child he accepts, on faith, as coming at the initiation of the divine: God is with him, and God will be with them.
This is the truth for us, when we face painful things, and when hard knowledge comes into our lives to clarify, to push away distractions, and to leave our paths clear, open, and marked for travel: God is with us.
Our Joseph bears the same name as a dreamer of old, whose dreams led him on a winding path that, finally brought him home to a new life and a new vision of what was possible with God: healing, wholeness, restoration, forgiveness. Our story turns on a dream. Before the dream, it is a story of a young man in pain and a young woman on the verge of being shamed and sent away. And after the dream? It is the story of a startlingly modern situation: family blended together by faith, and by hope, and by love. They are bound together by a promise that is still as fresh and true today as it was two thousand years ago:
God is with us.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Julia Spencer-Fleming, In the Bleak Midwinter (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).