Joseph was a Righteous Man – be like Joseph

Just before last Christmas I preached on Joseph, drawing on some of my MA research a few years ago into Joseph’s care for Jesus and its correspondence with foster care.

Image from He Was One Of Us by Rien Poortvliet

On two occasions over the past couple of weeks I’ve been moved to tears while hanging up the laundry in the bathroom. Not because of the task at hand – that was tedious, although not tear-jerkingly so – but because of what I was listening to while doing that job.

One of the occasions was when I was listening to Bridget’s sermon from a couple of weeks ago – and I should clarify that I was moved to tears in a good way! Bridget was speaking about the inspirational words of Mary in Luke 1, and I found it very inspirational – if you have not heard it, find it on the website and listen.

When we were planning December Sundays, we thought it would work well to have one sermon about Mary and one about Joseph. Bridget spoke about Mary, it was Christingles last week, so it’s Joseph today. What sort of father was Joseph to Jesus?

Children’s Christmas stories, such as Jesus’ Christmas Party illustrate Joseph’s problem, and the problem for a preacher on Joseph. In this story, as in many children’s Nativity plays, Joseph – a character who is mentioned in the Bible – is outshone by a character who isn’t. In this case it’s the innkeeper – in other cases it might be the innkeeper’s wife, a little shepherd boy with a baby lamb, or even the donkey – little or otherwise.

It’s true that the gospels don’t help us with very many details of Joseph, and this has caused much speculation about him down the years. I like this picture of Joseph, but he’s not always seen this way. A few weeks ago, Jane and I sang in an Advent service and one of the choir numbers was The Cherry Tree Carol, which is bizarre in many ways – the opening line is: “Joseph was an old man when he married Mary, in the land of Galilee.”

Was he an old man? The Bible doesn’t say so. Some in the medieval church wanted him to be old for various reasons, which needn’t detain us now, but there is nothing in the Bible to suggest anything other than Joseph was a young man, engaged to a young woman.

Was he a carpenter? Yes, sort of, but the word probably means something more like a master builder in charge of construction projects, rather than someone knocking up stools in his workshop.

Why doesn’t he appear in the gospels after Jesus starts his ministry?

So many questions – let’s see what we find when we go back to the Bible itself…

One of the famous Christmas Bible readings is Matthew 1.18-25. It follows on from Matthew’s introductory genealogy of Joseph, which is read much less at Christmas. That, itself, has brought Matthew’s reader up short in thinking about Joseph and Jesus – after generations of A the father of B, B the father of C, C the father of D… we read Jacob the father of Joseph, Joseph the father of Jesus – wait, no! Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Christ or Messiah.

So, Matthew has already signalled that there is something different about Joseph and his relationship to Mary’s child before we reach the famous passage about Joseph wondering what to do, an angel coming in a dream to tell him, a fulfilment of a prophesy, and Joseph and Mary not sleeping together until after Jesus was born.

But what does this tell us about Joseph, the man? The key verse for this is verse 19, and the key idea appears in the NIV as “Joseph was faithful to the law” or (in a footnote) “a righteous man”. And this idea of righteousness does (sort of) mean ‘faithful to the law’ but it’s so much more than that.

Remember that, for Matthew’s first readers, the ‘law’ meant the Old Testament, the Hebrew scripture, and especially the first five books of the Bible. And those books of ‘the law’ are not simply a dry list of some DOs and more DON’Ts – they are a description of what it means to live in God’s world in God’s way. They tell of God’s righteousness and justice (back to Mary again!), God’s love and mercy, God’s faithfulness to God’s people. And they call God’s people to live in ways that love and honour God, and that love and honour other people – ways that live out the justice of God, and that challenge injustice, in the ways that we treat each other.

So for Matthew to say that Joseph was righteous is not simply saying that he was very good at knowing what the law said and doing it. It is saying that Joseph was living out the way of life that God called him to. He was committed to justice for the people around him. In the New Testament, and in the language it was originally written in, righteousness and justice are intimately linked, and represented by the same word. So, something that might seem personal and internal – my, your righteousness – is one side of the coin. The other side of the same coin is external and communal – justice for those around, especially those who are vulnerable to experiencing injustice for whatever reason.

This isn’t always simple, as illustrated here for Joseph. He was a righteous man, faithful to the law, so he knew that the ‘right’ thing to do, upon finding that Mary was pregnant but not by him, was not to proceed with their marriage. But he was a righteous man, faithful to the law, so he knew God’s heart for the vulnerable and did not want to put Mary to shame and disgrace. What’s a man to do? The simple application of the letter of the law would have put Mary in a place of shame and disgrace. The harder thing to do, to take Mary as his wife was to risk being in a place of shame and disgrace himself – there would, after all, be questions about whether Joseph or someone else had got Mary pregnant before she should have been – but it was to follow God’s law of love, mercy, and care for the vulnerable.

Joseph was a righteous man, committed to God’s law and to justice.

I wonder what it was like for Joseph waiting for the arrival of Jesus. He’d been taken by surprise by Mary’s pregnancy. He’d been visited by an angel who’d told him not to worry about it. He’d been told that Mary’s baby would be “God with us”. What might Joseph have been feeling as the time came to actually meet this baby?

And then the baby was born, and I’m sure that we can assume that he was an ordinary baby – Jesus was fully human, and just like any other baby he needed wrapping up and keeping warm, he needed a bed to sleep in (in Jesus’ case a manger, but don’t get me started on the stable), and the baby’s mother needed care too. An extraordinary birth of an extraordinary baby, but most of what was required of Joseph (and Mary) was the ordinary care of a newborn human baby. Hold that thought about ordinary and extraordinary, while we look at what else we might know about Joseph.

Another gospel story where Joseph appears is in Luke 2. You might know the story – the family are on a visit to Jerusalem when Jesus is twelve, and when Mary and Joseph are travelling back, they realise that Jesus isn’t with them. Eventually they find him, sitting in the Temple, chewing the fat with the teachers of the law there. I’m skating over some of the details, because I want us to see Joseph, and his relationship with Jesus, in this story. We’re not going to hear Joseph because here, just like everywhere else, none of Joseph’s words are recorded.

Anyway, Mary & Joseph find Jesus, and Mary says, “Your father and I have been searching everywhere for you!” The phrasing here is interesting – ‘your father and I’ might be polite and proper English, but it’s backwards Greek. Usually it would be phrased, “I and your father…” – putting ‘father’ first flags up that it’s important for what we need to see here.

And Jesus says, “Didn’t you know I had to be about my father’s business [or in my father’s house]?” This is often taken as demonstrating Jesus coming to realise that his true father is God in heaven, and it may be that. But I want to see it too from Joseph’s point of view. How do you think Jesus’ comments about being in his father’s house (the Temple) sounded to Joseph?

Who knows what the last twelve years have been like for Joseph? Yes, he had that dream telling him that Mary’s child was from the Holy Spirit, but I wonder if there were ever questions in his heart. He knew the child was not biologically his, at any rate, but he’d spent those years caring as a father for Jesus – people around would go on to refer to Jesus as the son of the carpenter. And now here is Jesus, sitting surrounded by the teachers of the law, and the crowds milling around the Temple, saying, effectively, “You’re not my dad!”

What could this mean for Joseph? What could it mean for Mary? Potentially, more shame and disgrace? What does Joseph do? – he and Mary and Jesus head back home to Nazareth where he continues his ordinary care for this extraordinary child.

And we don’t hear of Joseph again – he does appear as a character in the stories of Jesus’ ministry. What do we suppose happened to him? Here’s my suggestion, which I’ve picked up from things other people have written.

I wonder whether Joseph died, perhaps when Jesus was in his teens. I don’t think he died of old age – maybe it was in an accident on a building site – leaving Mary a widow and Jesus and his younger brothers and sisters fatherless.

In that time, widows and fatherless children were the vulnerable ones, with no breadwinner to be the family’s protector. But throughout the Old Testament, God says that part of the way that the people of God should live is that widows and fatherless children should not be abandoned to their fate, but that society as a whole, people around them, should look out for them, care for them, provide for them.

And the only time that direction to care for the widows and fatherless children in repeated in the New Testament is in the letter written by Jesus’ younger brother James: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1.27

I wonder whether, after Joseph died, other righteous people – people in the community who knew the call of God to care, to stand against injustice – stepped in to make sure that Mary, Jesus, James, and the rest were loved and cared for.

As I said, in those days, widows and fatherless children were the vulnerable ones in society. Who might that be now? God’s call is still to be reaching out to care for those who are vulnerable.

I should tell you the other time I was moved to tears while hanging up our laundry. That time I was listening to an episode of the On Being poetry podcast, which was about one of our favourite poems – it also appears in an Advent anthology that we’ve enjoyed the past few years. It’s called “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. I’ve not reproduced it here (I’m not sure I have permission) but you can read it here.

The last line refers to “Love’s austere and lonely offices” – those hidden things that love does (like hanging up the laundry in the bathroom), not necessarily expecting thanks – “No one ever thanked him”. Jane often says it reminds her of my Dad.

Six years ago, my father died, and I remember clearly something that I said when I spoke at his funeral. We’d received a card from one of my uncles, one of my mum’s brothers, after Dad died, and one of the things he’d written was that my father was a ‘great man’. My first reaction was surprise that Dad should be described in that way – there were lots of good things that could be said about him, but a ‘great man’?

I reflected on this, and when I spoke at his funeral I said that I agreed that Dad was a great man – not great in the big ways that many people would notice, but great in the ordinary things of life – great in being there when someone needed something, great in being a family man, and great in seeking to follow where God called him.

Maybe Matthew would have described him as a righteous man, like Joseph. Joseph did not get noticed much – we don’t even know anything that he said – but he was there when Mary and Jesus needed him. He did not push Mary away when she was unexpectedly pregnant. He acted to protect Mary and Jesus from the tyrant Herod by taking them away to Egypt. He welcomed Jesus into his family and trained him up in the family business. Joseph was a righteous man.

…which is high praise from Matthew. If you read the rest of Matthew’s gospel you’ll find Jesus speaks a lot about righteousness. He saves some of his most scathing criticism for those who think they are righteous, and go to great lengths to appear righteous on the outside, but actually they are not.

And when talking to the crowds in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled… Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

A bit later he says, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees [who were really only interested in the letter, not the spirit, of the law] you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

And, “Seek first [your heavenly father’s] kingdom, and [everything else you need] will be given to you as well.”

Joseph was a righteous man – it’s a great calling to be put in a place to care for Jesus, the Son of God, for a child in need of a home because they can’t stay in their own, for any child – after all, all children arrive as strangers, or to care and seek justice for anyone who needs that.

It’s a great calling, but it’s also intensely ordinary – Joseph provided a place of shelter and warmth for Mary and Jesus. We put breakfast on the table for the children in our family. Every time you or I reach out to provide for the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the prisoner, we demonstrate the justice, the mercy and the righteousness of God. Be great in the ordinary things of life.

Joseph was a righteous man – be like Joseph.