NewCreation

Homily for Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the fourth Sunday in Advent. Today we have the beginning of Matthew's Gospel, or rather the second beginning, because just as in the book of Genesis there are two accounts of what we call the creation — two accounts of the Genesis, the becoming of things — there's the first one which we know with the days and the light and all that, and then the second one which is with Adam and Eve in the garden. And so in Matthew's Gospel we have two accounts of Genesis, and both have the word Genesis. The first, if you remember, is a long list of ancestors. It's what we call a genealogy. So the title is the Book of the Becoming, the Book of the Genesis of Jesus. And it's a genealogy about which, incidentally, there's a beautiful homily by Herbert McCabe which I strongly recommend to any of you who can get hold of it, in which he goes through the relatives and makes some interesting and astute observations. But the key point is that the list of relatives starts with Abraham and ends with Joseph and Mary. They start with the only thing that might reasonably be thought to be a virgin birth in the Old Testament, which is God's promise of a child to Sarah when she was well past child-bearing age and Abraham himself was well past the age of such things, and she was given a child the next year. It doesn't say it was by parthenogenesis, but at least it's the space where it was a divine gift to Abraham. So it starts with Abraham, and the centerpiece is David. It makes quite clear that the whole purpose of the genealogy is structured around King David, who is the high point of the promises of God to Israel. And it's emphasized that it's David by the fact that the genealogy is divided into three chunks of fourteen generations, and the fourteen generations is based on the letters, the Hebrew letters for David, which give us David, which are worth four, six, and four in the counting system used there. So fourteen means David. So we're having here that the creation up till now was the fulfillment of the prophets through a miraculous birth announced by the Lord to Abraham's wife, and now we have that becoming fulfilled by Mary, for whom Joseph is going to have the role of Abraham in some ways. When Abraham — when Joseph finally gets addressed by an angel, he is referred to, as we will see in just a second, as Joseph, son of David. So that's the key point. For Matthew, the whole of creation is coming up to the high point of the revelation of the promised heir to David. This is centered around the Jewish understandings going way, way, way, way back. So today's Gospel is the second account, where we come down to earth a little bit from the genealogy and start to look at what actually happened. And again, the descriptions here are very subtle, and an awful lot is going on, as we will learn to expect everything with the Gospel writers. So let's see where these words take us. "Now the birth" — the Genesis — "of Jesus the Anointed One took place in this way: when his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph." Much more formal than our understanding of engagement, but before they lived together. This would be absolutely standard. People were betrothed at a very young age, maybe 12, but didn't necessarily start to live with their betrothed and therefore become formally a husband until much later. Betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Okay. That would be, under normal circumstances, an exceedingly alarming and frightening thing — certainly for her, shocking for any relatives, possibly shocking for the potential husband if he was assumed to be the one responsible, and certainly shameful for him if he was not thought to be the one responsible. So the immediate beginnings of Jesus happen in a very precarious and dangerous place. "Her husband Joseph" — that's to say her husband-to-be, Joseph — "being a righteous man," dikaios, "and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace," so not wanting to shame her publicly. "Planned" is the word it says in our text, but actually the word is "pondered," "thought" — it's a mulling. Mulled over dismissing her quietly. This word we get in Genesis when God ponders: he sees all the violence going on in relation to humanity as it has come into being, all the descendants of Cain, Lamech, and so forth, and he sees all this and he is so saddened that he ponders what to do, and in his anger decides to destroy them. That's when we get the flood. So when God ponders in this way, it's with a view to sorting things out violently. Later on we get pondering in the Book of Wisdom, and there it's the sort of pondering that has to do with fixing your mind upon something. And actually we have some very interesting references here. For instance, here's Wisdom: "For to fix one's thought on her is perfect understanding." Fix one's thought — that would be the same verb here — "on her," meaning Wisdom, "is perfect understanding, and those who lie awake on her account will quickly be free from care." So the kind of pondering that Joseph might be doing might be that positive sort. Also from the Book of Wisdom: "Blessed is the eunuch who has done no lawless deed with his hands, nor pondered evil things against the Lord, for special favor will be given to him for his faithfulness, and a very delightful lot in the shrine of the Lord." Effectively, the traditional understanding of Joseph was that he became a voluntary eunuch for the sake of the kingdom. So he was putting his mind to that. But these are different possibilities. One is… Pondering something with a view to doing something terrible, and the other is pondering something in different ways. So Joseph has a lot of pondering to do. And if you were in his situation, and he was wanting to be a righteous man, this is very difficult, because actually the law of Moses made quite clear what he had to do. And when it says here he planned to dismiss her quietly, secretly – the Greek is lathrai – so he meditated on putting her aside, so giving her a bill of divorce quietly, in other words not getting into trouble. But if he were a just man in the sense of the law, he would know this from Deuteronomy 13: "If anyone secretly entices you, even if it is your brother, your father's son, or your mother's son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend, saying, 'Let us go worship other gods,' whom neither you nor your ancestors have known, any of the gods of the peoples that are around you, whether near you or far away, from one end of the earth to the other, you must not yield to or heed such persons. Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them, but you shall surely kill them. Your own hand shall be first against them to execute them, and afterwards the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Then all Israel shall hear and be afraid, and never again do any such wickedness." Okay. This is not an obscure text for Joseph. Anyone wanting to be a just man would have known that that was the case. I hope you can see that each one of these words suggests that the work of trying to work out what is genuinely from the Lord, and what a promise from the Lord looks like, and whether it is genuinely from the Lord, is not an easy thing to discern. There would have been plenty of reason for him to have pondered on the law and come to exactly the reverse decision that he did come to. When he had resolved to do this – to dismiss her quietly – and that might mean sending her off to somewhere where things could get very nasty for her. I mean, a single mum turns up and is pregnant; even away from home, things would not go well. But just when Joseph had resolved to do this, suggesting that he had come to a kind of half-solution, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from Holy Spirit." Now here's the interesting thing. The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, and the form of dream in Matthew's Gospel – actually this word onor – Matthew is the only author… In the whole of the Bible, except for the New Testament, to use this word "dream." And it's given as a sign of agency to get away from persecution. It's quite a direct thing. It's not the same word as a dream which we get in the Joseph of the Old Testament, when you remember he was called the dreamer and he had dreams and then he interpreted dreams. That's a different word, based on a sleeping dream. This word is "dream" with quite a fixed command message — very clear. In fact, the only place where it appears outside the infancy narratives — when Jesus is being protected and sent away from the various forms of persecutions that are put across, the angels tip people off in a dream — the only place it appears is at the very end of the Gospel, when Jesus is about to be executed, when Mrs. Pilate, Pilate's wife, comes and says: "Do not do any harm to that just man, for I have been suffering much in a dream." It's an exact parallel to this instance of the just man. Here, Joseph wanting to be a just man and thinking of putting someone away and deciding from the angel not to; and an angel appearing to Mrs. Pilate to try and dissuade him from putting this just man to death. The parallel between the beginning of the Gospel and the end of the Gospel is the same. So the angel of the Lord appears to him in the dream — the commanding dream — and says, "Joseph, son of David." So it's indicating here: this is the Davidic thing. God's plan is going to come in this messy, dangerous, precarious way. "Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife." And it was probably "do not be afraid" that tipped Joseph off that this was the angel of the Lord. The presence of the angel of the Lord — from the holy Scriptures, from back in the Hebrew Testament all the way through into the New Testament — the standard presence of the angelic figure is "do not be afraid," why? Because the appearance is something that might frighten. "Do not be afraid to receive Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit." If Joseph needed a parallel to that, it would have been Sarah having a son when she was too old — and here is Mary when she's too young and not yet married. "She will bear a son, and you — thou — you are to name him Jesus." In other words, the Davidic line is going to come through you, just as Sarah's son was given a name by Abraham and therefore came into his line. You, Joseph, are going to bring Jesus into the Davidic line. "And you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." And that's quite interesting, because it's not "from their enemies," which you might have expected. Yahweh saves — Joshua, Yehoshua — you might have thought "from our enemies," but no: "from our sins." Curious, the suggestion that… Actually, maybe this is a kind of salvation that is going to make people more introspective as they have to work out what we need being saved from. All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet. The prophet is Isaiah: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which is to say, God with us. And that passage comes in the very beautiful reading from Isaiah which we have in our Mass today. And remember that that reading is more than merely "the young woman is with child," but the Lord speaks to Ahaz saying, "Ask a sign of the Lord your God, let it be as deep as Sheol or high as heaven." So the Lord there speaks directly to the king. But actually, the oldest version we have of this text, which is the Hebrew version found at Qumran, does not have "ask a sign of the Lord your God" — it has "ask a sign of the mother of your God, let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven." And within the ancient Hebrew royal understanding, that would make much more sense than it does to us. But therefore, when the Lord says, "The Lord himself will give you a sign" — child Alma is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Emmanuel — there is no question at all that it is talking about the coming forth of the definitive Davidic king, the Davidic heir, the one who is to rule over people and be therefore the representative of God amongst us. So Joseph wakes up, and when he has woken up — remember therefore that he must have been pondering through all these things while he was asleep — he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. In other words, he could have gone along with the law. And in fact, there will be a huge argument going on throughout Matthew's Gospel concerning how to live with the law and how to obey the promised angel, the prophet who was promised by Moses, who would come after him. All of that is going to be the work of discernment in Matthew's Gospel. He did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He received her as his wife, but he did not know her — which might refer to "had no sexual relations with her," might refer to "he did not formally sign the marital contract with her" — until after she had borne a son, and he named him Jesus. In other words, he obeyed. We see that the mercy of the Lord takes the form of protecting someone in immense precariousness, so that that person might become the true fulfillment of all the Davidic and glorious promises, and become the light who will enlighten us all. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.