“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream…”

– Matthew 1:18-20a

Beloved of God,

This month we enter the Year of Matthew. Not that we won’t also hear from Luke at Christmas—and a good deal from John, too, especially during Easter. But Matthew is our gospel of reference as Advent and the story of Jesus’ birth begin to unfold.  And Matthew’s take on the story is decidedly different than Luke’s.  In Luke’s story—with which we’re most familiar, the one we hear told every Christmas Eve—Mary holds center stage and the narrative follows her encounter with God’s messenger Gabriel, her visit to her pregnant elder cousin Elizabeth, her journey with Joseph to Bethlehem and the circumstances which attend Jesus’ birth there.  But in Matthew’s story Joseph has a much more prominent role in the drama:  it is he rather than Mary who has the encounter with God’s messenger (in a dream…like his ancestor and namesake Joseph, the son of Jacob); it is he who takes in and trusts the news that the Holy Spirit—and not some other guy—is responsible for his fiancée being pregnant.  Matthew takes us inside Joseph’s process of discerning what he should do when Mary tells him she’s expecting.  He’s described as a “righteous man,” one willing to go the extra mile and unwilling to expose Mary to public disgrace.  In a Middle Eastern culture highly focused on honor and shame, that’s saying something.

In countries throughout the Middle East and South Asia even today one hears of fathers who undertake to preserve their family honor by putting their daughters to death for real, assumed, or rumored transgressions.  If a woman or girl in these places is accused or suspected of engaging in behavior that could taint her family’s status, she can face brutal retaliation from her relatives that often results in violent death.  The United Nations estimates that around 5,000 women and girls are murdered each year in so-called “honor killings” by members of their families.  According to Amnesty International these so-called “honor” crimes are rooted in a global culture of discrimination against women, and the deeply rooted belief that women are objects and commodities, not human beings entitled to dignity and rights equal to those of men.  Women’s bodies, particularly, are considered the repositories of family honor, and under the control and responsibility of her family (especially her male relatives).  Large sections of these societies share traditional conceptions of family honor and approve of “honor” killings to preserve that honor.  Neither is America immune. This narrative found its way to our shores ten years ago in the case of Noor Almaleki, a 20 year old woman of Iraqi heritage who was run over and killed in Phoenix, Arizona, by a car driven by her father, Faleh Hassan Almaleki. (He was later convicted of manslaughter and is serving a 34 year sentence for her death.)

In the culture in which Joseph was raised the penalty for adultery was death by stoning. This leads me to ask: How difficult was it REALLY for Joseph to choose not to expose Mary to public disgrace and scorn and potential violence, but instead to let their betrothal go away quietly?  This high stakes tightrope of a story, told so sparingly by Matthew, beckons us to reflect more deeply on how it is that the Creator of the Universe would tread so closely to the edge of chaos in order become Emmanuel—God with us. As the Year of Matthew unfolds, we’ll return to that question—and many others, again and again.

“O Come, O, Come, Immanuel!”