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December 20, 2009
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph”
Matthew 1: 18-25
Sunday, December 20, 2009
As many of you know, my wife has a collection of Nativity sets that we admire during the Christmas season. They have come from many different places in many different countries. Some have been molded, some have been carved, some are of porcelain, some of wood, some of stone, some of fabric. Some have shepherds and sheep, some have wisemen and camels, some have angels, but in all of the nativities there are three central characters. They all have the baby Jesus, His mother Mary and her husband Joseph. These are the three most important characters of the stories of the birth of Jesus. Matthew begins his account of the birth of Jesus with these three people in the paragraph I just read for all of you.
It has been said that Luke in his nativity accounts gives the woman’s point of view with the song of Mary and a statement of Elizabeth, and Matthew gives the story from the point of view of Joseph. While it may be true that this is the story from the point of view of Joseph, I think that it is important to notice the order in which the characters are mentioned.
To that end, I want to read for you the first 21 words of this passage. “The birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph,…” The order of mention is Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Jesus is mentioned first because this is his story. This is a Gospel, an account of the Good News about Jesus. This part of the story may be from Joseph’s point of view, but the story is about Jesus. As we approach Christmas I want to look at what Matthew says about Him. First he uses the name Jesus. Jesus was the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua. Yehosua or Yehosea means God Saves. There is a much earlier fellow mentioned in the bible with this name: Joshua the son of Nun. He was the one who led the Jews across the Jordan into the promised land after Moses died. He is the one who led the Jews in conquering the Caananites and settling in the land.
Jesus will lead his people into a new promised land. He is not sent to conquer peoples or nations. He is sent to conquer sin. In verse 21 Joseph is told “You are to name Him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” As Joshua was sent to deliver the OT people of God from and through the raging Jordan River and into the promised land, so Jesus is to deliver us through and from our sins and into His eternal kingdom.
It is interesting that the Greek word translated “Sins” here means “to miss the mark”. We have all missed the goal or mark that God has set for us. We have all failed to do those things that God commanded, and we have done those things that God commanded us not to do. We have missed the mark. And Jesus came to save us from the severe results of us having not fulfilled God’s commands.
In those first few words of this passage Matthew informs us that this Jesus, the savior, was also the Messiah. Messiah was a Jewish term for the one whom God would send to lead and rescue his people. In fact the Greek word Messiah is actually a transliteration of the Hebrew word Messiah which means the Anointed One.
This Anointed one was described in many different ways in the Old Testament. He is described in the Psalms and other places as the mighty King, the descendant of David. In Isaiah he is described as the Suffering Servant. In Daniel he is described as a glorious being who looked like a Son of Man.
Jesus came to fulfill all these prophecies and to be all these things. But the OT prophecy that Matthew relates to Jesus in verse 23 is a little more obscure and a little more difficult. In verses 22 & 23 Matthew wrote: “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’ which means, ‘God is with us.’”
Now the difficulty in all this is that the original prophecy of Isaiah which Dave read for us as our first reading (Isaiah 7: 10-17) does not specify a virgin, it specifies a young woman, and it says that she was already with child. The original child called Emmanuel seems to have been a child who was to be born a few months after the prophecy was uttered and the prophecy was about the changes that would occur in Judea before that child was fully grown.
The reason that Matthew used the word Virgin was that he was not quoting from the Hebrew OT but from the Septuagint which was the Greek translation of the OT. In that translation the Greek word for Virgin was used to translate the Hebrew word “Almah” which means Young Woman.
But the fact that the original prophecy does not specify a virgin does not really matter. Matthew is clearly describing a virgin birth. In this passage he twice writes that Mary was with Child “From the Holy Spirit”.
The reason he quotes from the Isaiah passage was that it had been revealed to him that Jesus was more than the sum of the Messianic prophecies and expectations. He was Emmanuel, God with us. He was God sent from God by God.
Regardless of the original intent of the prophecy of Isaiah about a boy named Emmanuel, Jesus was Emmanuel in a much greater sense, and he was born of a virgin.
And that brings us to the second person in our story, the Virgin Mary. Regardless of what some “Christian Scholars” might tell you, it is and always has been an important truth of Christianity that Jesus was born of a virgin. He was the child of Mary and the son of God. He was Human and Divine.
Mary is to be respected and honored not because of what she was, but because she was chosen by God to be the mother of our Lord. We Protestants do not believe that she was sinless, but that she was elevated in status beyond the rest of us to be the mother of Jesus. She gave birth to him, she protected and nurtured Him and helped him to understand who he was.
We Protestants also think that Mary later gave birth to other children who were the children of Joseph. And we believe that two of them James and Jude wrote books that are in our New Testament. Mary was a great woman and mother, but she is honored above others because She was chosen by God to be the mother of the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God, Emmanuel.
And that brings us to Joseph, the often neglected and sometimes ignored member of the inner circle of the nativity. It might seem from the way Joseph is introduced to us that he just kind of stumbled into this inner circle. He is introduced as the guy who was engaged to Mary who was to become the mother of Jesus. But in succeeding verses we learn much more about him.
We learn that he was righteous, that he was concerned about right and wrong and tried to do right. We learn that he was also merciful. He believed that Mary had committed an unrighteous and immoral act, but he determined to be merciful to her and break their betrothal privately.
We also learn in a round about way that he was chosen for his role every bit as much as Mary was. When he had decided to get out of the engagement to Mary and disconnect himself from her unborn child, God stopped him. God caused Joseph to have a dream as he had done to another Joseph long before. In this dream an angel appeared to Joseph and made it clear to him that it was God’s intention that he should be the surrogate father, or earthly father of God’s Son.
In the Jewish culture of the day, it was the Father’s duty to give a name to his child at the time of the dedication. When God told Joseph to name the child Jesus he was not only giving him the name, he was telling him that he was to act as the father of this child. Joseph did not fall into the inner circle of the nativity because he loved Mary. He loved Mary because God had chosen him to be the earthly father to God’s Son. And when it all got to be too much for Joseph and he was about to escape, God made it clear that God had chosen him to serve God in this special way.
The inner circle of the nativity consists of three very special people.
Joseph was the earthly father of the Son of God who raised him and taught him to be a man. The manliness of Jesus probably was taught and modeled by Joseph.
Mary was the Mother of Jesus. He is as much her son as he is God’s. She is to be recognized as the one who gave to us God’s greatest blessing.
Jesus is the one whom God sent through Mary to save us from our sins, or as Matthew wrote, he was to save us from when we missed the mark. We have all missed the mark or goal that God has set for us, we have all sinned. If Jesus is your savior you have trusted him to forgive your sins. Is He? Have you?
Pastor David Horner
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at December 20, 2009 02:17 PM