getting serious

 

A woman gets serious about life when she marries, a college professor of mine once said. And a man when he becomes a father. 

Twenty years later his widow, with a wink, said that was certainly true in his case. 

When I think about Joseph this week I think about the trust that was handed to him. The tremendous gift and responsibility of being a husband to Mary and raising her son. The joy and the sorrow that were to come. Of perhaps seeing ahead to her widowhood and bereavement. 

For now though and for years to come he had a wife to care for and a boy to raise. 

Not just any boy. For in him was embodied the promise of ages.

Joseph had an extraordinary trust. This child to raise. This woman to protect, and to love.

God had entrusted him with this charge. It would change the world. And it would change him.

What would it mean, one can only guess, to realize what his dream meant. What a solution it was to the apparent dilemma he had gone to bed with. What a challenge it meant on waking. 

This one, after all the ages, will carry forward what God had been doing all along.

For Joseph was, as a scion of the house of David, an heir to the promise to Israel of a new hope, a messiah, one anointed to bring them freedom from fear, freedom to worship, freedom of speech, freedom from want. Those days of destitution, of oppression, were to end. Freedom as a people. 

It was not to be, not yet. But in this hope of Israel was carried a greater hope: that the joy of God, the life of people in communion with their creator, redeemer, and sanctifier, would encompass all the people of the earth. 

Come to me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, the son would say, and I will give you rest.

Israel had all these centuries carried the trust, the hope and joy and burden and sorrow, of being God’s people, chosen to bear witness to the truth and bear it forward into the world.

God is one. One who loves what God has made. One who does not forget his promise. One who brings hope to the world.

In Jesus, in what he did, the signs and spenders of that hope became visible in the world. It was not the end of suffering but it was the presence of God with us in the midst of travail. 

It was the beginning of the completion of the hope begun in Eden and carried on the cross at Calvary and discovered at the side of an empty tomb, and awaited everywhere after Easter.

The one who was, the one who is, the one who is to come. The hope of the world. 

And it all began with this little baby.

Hold him Joseph, hold him close. And hold his mother beside you.