Hilton Head Island, SC – December 13, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 1:26-35
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. – Matthew 1:19; And Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no husband?” - Luke 1:34
She was probably fourteen or fifteen years old. That was the age at which most girls in first-century Judea were married. I say “girls” rather than “women,” because though peasant females of that age were capable of bearing children, they were still quite young by any standards, even if they might have been very mature for their age, and our culture is different from their culture.
Only two Gospels, Matthew and Luke, and no other New Testament books, say anything about Jesus’ birth. In Matthew, an unidentified angel appears to Joseph in a dream and announces that Mary shall be the mother of the long-awaited Messiah. In Luke the angel Gabriel makes the announcement in person to Mary. Why the discrepancies I don’t know. Further, I am highly skeptical about the existence of angels as they are normally understood.
Reputable biblical scholars insist that none of the Gospel writers had a personal relationship with Jesus during his lifetime. The Gospels were written from thirty to seventy years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The writers gathered their information from various people over a considerable length of time, and not everybody told exactly the same recollections to any of the four. So the writers did the best they could in trying to re-construct a narrative that seems to flow plausibly from one event to the next.
There are other factors in first-century Jewish marriages we need to keep in mind in order to grasp the nuances of the two birth narratives. Virtually all marriages were arranged by the parents of the bride and groom. But the arrangements might be made before they were born or when they were just infants or children. A year before a couple were to have their wedding, they would be legally betrothed. They did not live together, nor did they sleep together in the sense we figuratively understand those words today. Further, the notion of a romantic origin for marriage probably did not become widely popular anywhere in the world until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. In addition, I have read that in Palestine or Judea, it was not uncommon for men in their late twenties to late forties to marry girls in their mid-teens.
There would be no celebration of Christmas at all without Matthew and Luke, so we shall now look at some more of the details Matthew and Luke included in their accounts of Jesus’ birth. In Matthew, Joseph learned that Mary was pregnant before she told him anything about it, and, as it says, “being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, (he) resolved to divorce her quietly.” Therefore we may deduce that he intended to end their betrothal --- not their marriage, for they weren’t married yet --- but their betrothal. And in that culture at that time, a broken betrothal could only be ended by a legal divorce.
Next an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream. He tells Joseph that the baby is “a child of the Holy Spirit.” No one in the entire history of the Jews had ever heard that term, so Joseph was deeply perplexed, mystified, and perhaps even angered over what that might mean. In addition, said the angel, Joseph was to name the child Jesus (in Hebrew Yeshua.) That name means “Savior” or “God Saves.” Despite his reservations, Joseph became convinced that this whole thing was copasetic, so he continued the betrothal, even though Mary was pregnant, although not by him, and “he knew her not until she had borne a son; and he called his name Jesus.”
It is interesting that in Matthew an unidentified angel came to Joseph in a dream, and not to Mary. However, in Matthew, males have almost all of the leading roles in the drama, whereas in Luke females play far more significant roles, including Mary herself. The mother of Jesus doesn’t get into the narrative very much, even in Luke, but Mary Magdalene makes frequent appearances, as do several other named and un-named women.
Not surprisingly therefore, in Luke there is a much richer and fuller annunciation narrative. The angel Gabriel is sent to Mary. Had he spoken Latin to her rather than Hebrew or more probably Aramaic, the language of the region of the Galilee, he would have said, Ave, Maria, gratia plena, Dominus te cum: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.” You don’t have to be a Roman Catholic to know that the Ave Maria is a very important proclamation in Catholic public or private worship. “But,” says Luke, “she was greatly troubled at the saying [of the angel], and she considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be” (Lk. 1:29). The angel tells her that she will conceive in her womb, and that she will bear a son, and that she (not Joseph) was to name him Jesus.
One way or the other, great news, huh? Terrific news! In a fairy tale, maybe, but this is intended to portray real life, her life, and this is the most embarrassing, mortifying, dismaying news she could ever hear! So Mary, in her youthful innocence, blurts out to Gabriel, “How can this be, since I have no husband?” She’s going to have a husband, she and Joseph are going to be married, but they aren’t married now, and they’re not going to be married for nearly a year, and she’s going to have a baby! Terrific? This is terrible!
In both versions of the Christmas narrative, a virgin birth is either explicitly or implicitly foretold. And for countless millions of Christians ever since, the virgin birth of Jesus by Mary has authenticated Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God, and the Second Person of the Trinity. But if the historical reality was as it is told in Matthew and Luke, this was a disastrous turn of events for an ordinary carpenter who was presumably an older man and a teenage girl who found herself in an impossible social predicament.
Think about it. She is pregnant, but she and Joseph will not have hastened the betrothal stage of their relationship, because this baby-to-be is not his baby. This is God’s baby, Adonoy’s baby.
Oh, sure. Just tell everybody what the angel told you, Mary and Joseph say to themselves. No problem. Who would doubt it? Who would doubt it? Who would believe it? How can this be? What will happen to them? This is not a happy story for them; this is a sad story, a tragic story, if this is truly a virgin birth. And there is only one way to deal with it, if it occurred factually as we are told. Joseph and Mary can never say anything to anybody about a virgin birth --- not one word. If this truly is a virgin birth, both of them have no choice other than to say nothing and to act as though they had jumped the matrimonial gun. And in that exceedingly traditional society, such an event was greatly frowned upon. Unless they are completely quiet about it, they will be laughed out of Nazareth forever.
I am now going to say something very directly I have never said in fifty-six years of preaching. I have danced around it, but I have never publicly admitted it. I do not believe in an historical virgin birth. The older one gets, the more likely it is that caution, like brain cells, may somehow escape the capsule of the cranium. I probably did accept the doctrine of the factual virgin birth in my twenties and early thirties, more or less, but each Christmas since then I approached it with internal skepticism and external silence, or both. I understand why two Gospel writers and no other authors in the Greek scriptures posited the concept in their writings. They thought that it would prove to everyone that Jesus is the divine Son of God. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if Jesus of Nazareth becomes the Christ of faith primarily because of this singular theological premise, he stands on a very shaky foundation indeed, because there is so much more upon which to build a solid Christology.
Having said what I’ve just said, however, if you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, I strongly encourage you to maintain that belief. It certainly won’t hurt your faith system, and it can greatly enhance it. For me, however, Jesus becomes the Messiah and the Son of God and in some unique sense the incarnation of God because of who he was in his life and death, and not because of any uniqueness in his birth. Every baby’s birth is unique, because every baby is unique, but not because of their birth per se.
If Mary and Joseph made no claim of a factual, historical virgin birth, they would not experience a particularly sad or difficult time of it with their first-born child. They would not have to endure the inevitable life of social pariahs for making such a seemingly preposterous claim, nor would Jesus be adversely affected by it. That would be a very good thing for all three of them.
However, because of other factors, being the parents of Jesus may have been both sad and challenging for Mary and Joseph. The only incident in Jesus’ childhood that is recorded in any of the four Gospels is found only in Luke. It is the episode where the so-called holy family went to Jerusalem for Passover (Lk. 2:41-52). When Joseph and Mary headed back to Nazareth with all the other Nazarenes, unknown to them, the twelve-year old Jesus stayed behind in the temple, discussing theology and scripture with the leading biblical scholars of Israel. When his parents finally found Jesus, Mary said to him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I” [a very interesting statement, that!] “your father and I have been looking for you anxiously!”
Jesus almost certainly was a singularly talented child intellectually, and that brief story supports that notion. Because Jesus was so extraordinarily gifted theologically, it would have very hard to know how to be a parent to him. We can justifiably deduce that Joseph must have died sometime between that episode and when Jesus began his public ministry when he was “about thirty years of age,” as Luke, and only Luke, tells us. Joseph is never again mentioned after the episode in the temple. So from the day Joseph died until the day Jesus died, Mary had to try to be Jesus’ sole parent all by herself. And as we shall learn next week, that was often more of a burden than a blessing.
Having opened the can of worms about my non-acceptance of the doctrine of the virgin birth, I want to finish this sermon with a few more thoughts on the whole concept of virginity. Only a very small percentage of humans have ever remained virgin for their entire lives. In the age of LGBTQ, we have come to realize that most homosexually- or bisexually-oriented people also do not try to maintain their virginity for a lifetime. An even smaller percentage of the human population are truly a-sexual. That is, they have no sexual orientation or inclination whatsoever. For them, virginity is normal. For everyone else, it is abnormal.
Nevertheless, in the Early Church and in the medieval Church, both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, there was a tendency to elevate virginity to a higher level of humanity than a sexually-active humanity. I am convinced that was probably a mistake. There is a kind of nobility in a celibate clergy or celibate monks or nuns, but it seems to me it may create more problems than it solves. Pedophile priests, child-eroticism, unnatural (as opposed to natural) homosexuality, and scandalous 20th and 21st century media headlines may be some of the issues that indirectly arise from a religious emphasis on virginity.
The last part of this sermon may be more than what you wanted, or other than what you wanted. Rightly or wrongly, I decided to include it. I may regret it, but it is done.
Many times during her life, Mary must have been totally mystified by her son. He was brilliant; that she grasped early on, and often after that. But he was so different from all other children! She must have occasionally wondered if she was a failure, because she could never decide how best to raise her son.
Regardless of these speculations, where is God in this sermon, or this semi-academic inquiry? I have talked about Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, and about what the Church traditionally concluded regarding the nature of Jesus’ birth. But where was God in this?
Here is a brief answer. In the words of Saul of Tarsus, also known as the apostle Paul, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself [to God], not counting their trespasses against them” (II Cor. 5:19). In Jesus, God was manifesting Himself unto a sinful humanity whom God had already redeemed. But God would make the truth of that redemption visible in a way never before or since observed, in the most remarkable man who ever lived. Jesus was the clearest and brightest human reflection of the divine Yahweh that the world has ever known. And that, I believe, is what makes Jesus the Messiah and the Son of God.