Biblical Text

You can read Matthew 1.18-25 here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

The time has come. Indeed, the time has come. To be more precise, the time is long past. What we should have done many centuries earlier, we have not done till today. Or rather, what we once did, we surrendered to the powers that be and are now in a position where wresting it from these powers is proving to be and will prove to be an immense task.
I hope I have you thinking, “What is he talking about?” Or “what is he referring to?” Or perhaps, “Has he finally fallen off the deep end?” Whatever the questions you may have, I hope there are questions, because there are times when some confusion is necessary before clarity is achieved.
The passage for today is one that most of us, if not all of us, know well. We have perhaps seen or acted in Sunday School skits that depict the events in our passage. Unfortunately, we look at this passage probably only during Advent.
What that means is that, though we are aware of the broad outline of the passage, the details are somewhat lost to us. The preceding portion of the Gospel, in which Matthew gives us Jesus’ genealogy, is opaque to us because we are not used to talking about our heritage and our ancestry. At some stage it became unfashionable for us to talk about where we came from. It seemed to us that defining ourselves with respect to our past would render us unable to express ourselves and to show how each of us is distinct.
The irony is that most of us today do not even know where we are going. We have no clear idea of our destiny, floating rudderless in a sea of increasing possibilities, carried away by every passing fad. We need anchors both in the past and in the future in order safely to navigate this adventure of life. Indeed, did you see how Matthew tells his story?
Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus, linking Jesus firmly in the past, tying him with a story that started with Abraham and continued through David and the Babylonian exile. But he does not stop there. Rather, notice what the angel tells Joseph. “He will save his people from their sins,” says the angel, thereby tying Jesus with a destiny that was as unshakeable as his origins.
I have a friend who is a pilot with Qatar airlines and he tells me that, in these days of automation, apart from filing a flight plan, the pilots have very little to do, except perhaps some minor course corrections in case of inclement weather. But key in the flight plan is the point of origin and the destination. You cannot have a flight plan without that. And the same is true about us humans. I’ll say it again. We need anchors both in the past and in the future to navigate this adventure of life.
We are created to be a part of a grand story – the story of a loving Creator who earnestly desires that his creation would flourish and thrive. But there is one thing that is hindering the fulfillment of this desire – humans have turned their back on their vocation to be God’s regents in this world, refusing to govern it in ways akin to God’s. Humans, having rejected their vocation, have surrendered their authority to the forces of evil and have ended up marring both themselves and creation.
But this loving, creative God will not be thwarted by humans who refuse their lofty calling. Rather, he chose to enter into this world, becoming a part of the grand story himself. And our passage tells us how that entrance began. As I said earlier, we are familiar with the passage so I will not give a blow by blow account of it. Rather, I wish to focus on three questions.
First, what was Joseph probably thinking about when he was intending to divorce Mary quietly? Second, why did the angel say, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”? And third, what, from the perspective of salvation history, was God doing through the birth of Jesus?
So to our first question: What was Joseph probably thinking about when he was intending to divorce Mary quietly? I have long wondered how Joseph could have divorced Mary quietly. How could he have accomplished this in a small village where everyone knew all the gossip? No matter how he did it, if Mary did not live in Joseph’s house, people would have known that they weren’t married. And people would have wondered and speculated about the reasons.
We just need to think about this. Even today, if we do not see the husband or wife for a long time, we may begin speculating about the state of the marriage. And this in an urban center like Bangalore! How much more speculation would have happened in a small village like Nazareth?
So it just couldn’t mean that Joseph would hand Mary her divorce papers in secret. What I think Matthew intends for us to understand is that Joseph understood something about Mary’s condition that made him want to relate to her as though they were divorced. In other words, he thought something had happened to Mary that made Mary out of bounds to him sexually. That is, he planned on never consummating their marriage, which would have been something secret that no one else would have known and that would effectively have been a divorce.
Why did Joseph reach this conclusion? We are a suspicious lot. And so we naturally think that Joseph thought that Mary had had sex with another man. But what if both Mary and Joseph were more – much more – trusting than we are? What if Mary had taken Joseph into confidence about Gabriel’s visit? What if she had repeated Gabriel’s words to him? And what if he had understood and accepted and believed her? What if he believed that this child now growing in Mary’s womb was the result of the action of the Holy Spirit? What would have run through his mind then?
Joseph would have only had the Old Testament examples of holiness to guide him. What were these examples? The first occurrence of the word holy in the bible is in Exodus 3.5, where, at the burning bush, God tells Moses, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”
The next big event indicating that something is holy is when God is about to give Moses the Torah. Moses tells God, “The people cannot come up Mount Sinai, because you yourself warned us, ‘Put limits around the mountain and set it apart as holy.’”
And all of us can probably call to mind the grand vision in Isaiah 6, where the temple and its foundations tremble while the Seraphs sing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.”
We could, of course, recount many such events. But the one that we probably also remember is the fate of Uzzah in 2 Samuel 6, who tried to prevent the ark of the covenant from falling and paid for his concern immediately with his life.
All these examples of holiness or rather of what is holy had one common thread – they were terrifying experiences, for it is dangerous and life threatening for sinful humans to be in the presence of what is holy. One does not tinker around with what is holy. One does not interact with what is holy in a commonplace manner.
And so Joseph must have reached the conclusion that if Mary had conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, she was in some way holy. He must have remembered that Gabriel had told Mary, “The holy one to be born will be called the Son of God,” clearly meaning that this baby was holy. And he would have drawn the analogy between the relationship of the ark of the covenant to the holy of holies and that between the baby and Mary’s womb.
Mary’s womb was to Jesus as the holy of holies was to the ark of the covenant. And so Joseph concluded that Mary, as with all things holy, was off limits to a commoner like himself.
This brings us to our second question: Why did the angel say, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”?
If, as I have claimed while answering the first question, Mary had confided in Joseph, and Joseph knew that the child was holy, why did the angel have to repeat that? Repeating something we already know cannot help to convince us of anything. If Joseph had to alter his attitude toward Mary, the angel had to have said something to him that he had not known till then.
In order to get at what the angel said to Joseph, we need to do two things. First, we need to look carefully at the text – the Greek text – and translate it. The Greek text of verse 20 reads μὴ φοβηθῇς παραλαβεῖν Μαρίαν τὴν γυναῖκά σου, τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου (mei phobeitheis paralabein Marian tein gunaika sou to gar en autei gennethen ek pneumatos estin hagiou). I wish to focus on the last four words ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου (ek pneumatos estin hagiou).
This phrase is most often translated as ‘is from the Holy Spirit’. However, the splitting of the two words πνεῦμα (pneuma) meaning ‘spirit’ or ‘wind’ or ‘breath’ and ἅγιος (hagios) meaning ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ or in reference to people ‘saint’ occurs in only this place. In all other occurrences, if both words are present, they appear right next to each other with no word in between.
Matthew has chosen a different syntax, one that appears nowhere else, and this must mean something. If we allow the normal word order to play a role, we would translate the last phrase as ‘from the Spirit is holy.’ In this case, the words of the angel would be, “Do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife because what is conceived in her from the Spirit is holy.” But this still doesn’t help us understand what the angel really meant by his words. And to determine that, we need to do another thing.
Having translated verse 20 differently, we need to ask ourselves what the word ‘because’ means in this verse. We often think that this might be quite an easy word to define. I mean, how difficult can this small word be to interpret?
Allow me to quote from the Oxford English Dictionary which says, “When ‘because’ follows a negative construction the meaning can be ambiguous. In the sentence he did not go because he was ill, for example, it is not clear whether it means either ‘the reason he did not go was that he was ill’ or ‘being ill wasn’t the reason for him not going; there was another reason’.”
In verse 20 we have a similar negative construction indicated by the words, “Do not be afraid.” And hence the word ‘because’ is ambiguous. All translations seem to take it with the first sense of giving a reason. According to them the angel is saying, “Do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife and the reason for not being afraid to do this is that what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
However, it seems to me to make better sense of the angel’s words if we use the second sense of ‘because’. In this case the angel is saying, “What is conceived in Mary by the Spirit is holy, but do not let that deter you from taking her home as your wife.” You see, Joseph was afraid of Mary because she had been touched by the Holy Spirit. Both she and the child in her had been made holy. And he was afraid of what was holy because his scriptures gave him many depictions of how dangerous what is holy can be.
But the angel told him not to be afraid of what is holy. Yes, the child was holy. And yes Mary had been touched by the Spirit. But this was not a reason for which he should think of living with her and not consummating the marriage. This was not a reason for which he should live with Mary in a state equivalent to a divorce.
I understand that this is probably an interpretation you have never heard. So, before we get to the third question, let me recap what we have learnt from the first two. We first asked: What was Joseph probably thinking about when he was intending to divorce Mary quietly? We saw that this probably meant that Joseph knew what Gabriel had told Mary and that he believed her.
And so, terrified of doing something profane with what was holy, he had decided to not consummate his marriage to Mary, living effectively as though they were divorced. No one would know that they had not consummated the marriage and so this effective divorce would be secret.
We then asked: Why did the angel say, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”? To answer this question we did two things.
We first translated the verse differently and saw that the angel said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife because what is conceived in her from the Spirit is holy.” We then insisted that the angel was not giving Joseph a reason for which he should not marry Mary. Rather, the angel was saying that the fact that the child growing in Mary was holy was not a reason for which he should not take her home as his wife.
Finally, we get to our third question: What, from the perspective of salvation history, was God doing through the birth of Jesus? The angel tells Joseph, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” These words, at least according to the angel, are an explanation of what was happening in and through Jesus. But what did it mean?
We, who are heirs of the Enlightenment, think in very individualistic terms. We think that ‘sins’ must refer to our individual private or public shortcomings enshrined best in the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.
But Matthew’s Gospel is very Jewish in nature. And for the Jews, the primary sin of which they were guilty was that of idolatry. In fact, all the seven deadly sins can ultimately be traced to some kind of idolatry, where we surrender our vocation to be God’s image bearers and accept the domination of some originally good part of God’s creation that has now become mutilated and marred, twisted and tainted, by our surrender. But we need to dig deeper still. If the primary sin of humans is idolatry in all its varied forms, what is the consequence of this?
In the Old Testament, the clearest consequence of idolatry was the deportation and exile of God’s people, first the northern kingdom to Assyria and then the southern kingdom to Babylon. And in Jesus’ time, though they were in the land, the Jewish people were not self-governed. They were a province in the mighty Roman Empire and were governed by Roman officials.
So many of Jesus’ contemporaries thought that they were still in exile though they were in the land. And if they were in exile, it meant that there still was sin to be dealt with. It is in this light that we should see the ministry of John the baptizer who administered a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. The whole nation of Israel had sinned and were effectively in exile in their own land. Their sin had to be dealt with. They had to repent and then God would forgive them and bring them back.
For many centuries the Jewish people had been aware that their idolatry had forced Yahweh from the land. Ezekiel describes in terrifying detail how the glory of Yahweh departed, first abandoning the holy of holies, then the holy place, then the temple, then Jerusalem, and finally the land of Israel, while all Ezekiel could do was watch in despair.
Daniel, searching the prophecy of Jeremiah, understands that the exile was to last seventy years. But when he asks God about it, to his utter dismay he is told that Israel’s sin was so pervasive that it would take four hundred and ninety years of exile to account for their sin.
And Malachi, having returned from exile to the land and finding that people were still unfaithful to God, looks forward to the day when the Lord would suddenly come to his temple to set things right.
The entire vision of the Old Testament is that God is utterly holy and that sinful humans would perish in his presence. And this is why actually he graciously withdraws or exiles humans, for if he did not do that humans would be completely consumed in the presence of his holiness.
But this manner of interaction is devoid of hope. After all, we humans are sinful. We are all tempted to surrender our vocation to the forces of evil and all of us, at some point or the other, give in and settle for giving our allegiance to something that is not God. If God always withdrew himself or drove us away, there could never be any hope of reconciliation.
And so God does something completely different, adopting a radically new strategy to deal conclusively with the problem of human sin. For the first time ever, God reveals his intention to deconstruct holiness. What do I mean?
We have seen how terrifying holiness can be, how dreadful anything that is holy can be. Joseph feared consummating his marriage to Mary because he was afraid of the holy. Knowing she had done nothing wrong, he did not want to say anything in public. But fearing for his life, he thought of not meddling with what was holy.
However, the angel tells him that even though the child growing in Mary’s womb was holy, this was not a reason for which Joseph could not have a fully consummated marriage with Mary. The fact that the child was holy was not a reason for which Joseph should entertain the idea of having a relationship with Mary that was no better than divorce. The fact that she and the baby had been touched by the Holy Spirit did not mean he had to keep a safe distance away from them. How long did Joseph take to fully grasp and accept this?
What the angel tells Joseph is that God has begun to deconstruct holiness. No longer will holiness be defined as something that can only be touched on pain of death as Uzzah unfortunately discovered. No longer will what is holy be defined in terms of what can desecrate it as was the ground near the burning bush. No longer will holiness be defined in terms of a top-down asymmetrical power relationship as in Isaiah’s grand vision. No longer will what is holy be defined in terms of who is in and who is out as was Mount Sinai when the law was given.
The angel tells Joseph that this child is indeed holy. However, there is no reason to be afraid. This is a drastic redefinition of what our response to the holy should be and quite frankly, whether Joseph ever accepted it or not, the sad truth of the matter is that we Christians have not in these twenty centuries.
For what our passage tells us is that now holiness is defined in terms of what is touchable, not forbidden; what is vulnerable, not impenetrable; what is inviolable, not easily tainted; what is egalitarian, not dominating.
The ark that was untouchable will soon be a baby in Mary’s arms. The sacred ground will soon be filled with dirty, lowing cattle. The remarkable separation of Mount Sinai will give way to the welcoming of all who believe. And the Lord Almighty who was lifted high will be… well, he will still be lifted high, but now on a cross. This Advent and this Christmas, I hope we will, while accepting and embracing this baby, also accept and embrace what he brings in his wake – the deconstruction of holiness.

(Sermon preached at Christalaya, Koramangala on 2 December 2018)