I admitted in public this week that when hanging up our Christmas Cards on strings, I organise them into themes, not all of which are easy to spot. It’s a way of spotting card trends: some years there are magi aplenty, and in other years it’s angels. For some years now it’s been the scene at the crib. I have a string of the Madonna and child, Sometimes it’s just Mary and Jesus, but this year we’ve treble that number of whole crib scenes. I’m told that of the most frequently asked questions on courses on medieval art is “who is that woman dressed in blue with the baby?” Mary was given blue as a colour relatively late in history: she often had red previously.
Another question is about how you depict Joseph, and it’s one which raged at our Carols at Henderson Court this week, as we debated which of the male figures he was. One of my best cards has Joseph clearly so exhausted by the whole thing that he’s fallen asleep. That’s at least balanced by the scene which Pope Francis has publicised this year, where Mary is asleep and it’s Joseph looking after his adopted son.
One of the problems with whole crib scenes is that they bring together all the disparate elements of the birth narratives, add some traditions, and rather take away from the individual emphases of Matthew and Luke. No manger in Matthew, no magi in Luke. No flight to Egypt in Luke, no flights of angels over the shepherds in Matthew. In neither of them is there a stable, an innkeeper, a donkey or an ox. It’s inevitable that the story gets fleshed out, not least by references from the prophet Isaiah to the ox and ass knowing their master’s crib. But we should take the chance, when we can, to look through the familiar telling of the Christmas story and see what the individual writers say.
Simply put, Luke focusses on Mary and Matthew on Joseph. Luke relates the narrative to Israel’s history of worship: Mary is from a priestly family. Matthew places Jesus firmly in the context of power and authority: Joseph from the family of King David; the visit of wise ones and the upheaval of Herod’s kingship and authority. Luke’s narrative is shaped around religious and family history, and is centred on the role of mothers. It is for Matthew to focus on men, and on the political, on Governments and international relations. It is Matthew who concentrates on Joseph and his descent from King David, on Herod and his engagement with advisers from other nations.
It’s a real shame that most patterns of Bible reading leave out the very beginning of Matthew – the genealogy, with all those ‘begats’. Matthew, in showing Jesus’s place in the line of Abraham and King David, includes four women in that line of men. All four women are outsiders in their way. Tamar, eventually wife of Judah, though how she got there was complex. Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho who shelters the Israelite spies and eventually marries one of them. Ruth, grandmother of David, and a Moabite not an Israelite. And Bathsheba, whom David married again through complex means and of which he had to repent.
I love the fact that Jesus’s genealogy is complicated. Anyone who has traced their family tree will have turned up some stories which raise their eyebrows. Jesus’s ancestry includes outsiders, people who make massive mistakes, people on the edge and people at the heart of power.
Matthew is keen to tell us that Jesus’s birth is into a world where things are complicated and messy. Included in Jesus’s line are people who held the reins of power and authority, and those who, because of their gender, had no temporal power, yet changed the course of history. Mary is the fifth woman in Matthew’s genealogy. Again she has no temporal power, but her place in that line is what we celebrate today, on the fourth Sunday of Advent.
But, do note that it’s Joseph on whom Matthew concentrates. Like Mary there’s an announcement and there is obedience. We’ll hear of Gabriel and of Mary’s response in our nativities and carol services. Today we hear of Joseph’s angelic visitation. Look carefully at that. Mary is awake when she receives Gabriel. Joseph’s visitation is in a dream, and just as life changing. As someone has commented: sometimes when life is complex and you don’t know what to do, leaving it till the morning is probably best. He’d resolved to divorce her when he went to sleep, and knew he must not when he woke.
Joseph’s obedience is vital in giving Jesus his earthly place. It is Joseph who is descended from David, and it is into that line that Jesus is placed, adopted into the line he began as through him the world was created. Matthew invites us to reflect on the great historical story of the descent of Christ from a line he himself began. He asks us to see the birth of Christ in the context of God’s love and rescue of his people again and again, often through complex means and through unusual people. And he asks us to reflect on Joseph, aware of his history, obedient to God’s call, and willing to risk shame and ridicule from those who did not understand. Mary continues in the story of the life of Christ, and is a witness of his death and resurrection. Joseph disappears from the telling after the family settle in Nazareth. Today we celebrate his obedience along with Mary the God-bearer.
And we, thinking of them both, reflect on Christ, raised up from within a human, family and religious world which is waiting expectantly for God to act. We then should look to our past, to what has shaped us and tell the stories to find the ways of God in dwelling among us. We do this with a history and within our families – however easy or difficult that might be – and where we work and play. And like Joseph and Mary, amazed that God should call them, we should be amazed that God should choose us. We celebrate that today with Iris Cleo, who is now included in that history, that genealogy, that family line. May we, with her, be filled with courage to do what God asks, in the power of the Spirit, to the glory of God, though Jesus Christ. Amen.