EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

We humans like rules. Rules turn the unruly into the ruled and give us a sense of control.

If you ever need someone to enforce some rules, get a four year old. Four year olds live to enforce rules. They are passionate about it. At the Montessori school where my daughters went to preschool, three, four, and five year olds all shared a classroom and over the years the four year olds were always the self-appointed class police. They were the ones who could be counted on to point out when someone was doing something they shouldn’t. Or not doing something they should, depending. That didn’t necessarily mean they always obeyed the rules, mind you, but they were terrific at reporting everyone else’s violations. Four year olds excel at righteousness.

It’s a demanding job, righteousness, and four year olds aren’t the only ones who think so. Matthew’s Gospel begins with a portrait of someone wrestling with righteousness. Luke tells the story of the announcement of Jesus’ birth from Mary’s point of view, but when Matthew tells the story of the Annunciation he focuses on Joseph.

We don’t get a lot of details about Joseph. He doesn’t have any speaking parts and the last we hear of him is that he’s warned to flee from Egypt in another dream, and he does and he settles his young family in Nazareth in Galilee . . . and then that’s it. We don’t hear any more about him. All we know about Joseph is the one thing Matthew tells us: we know that Joseph is a righteous man.

To be a righteous Jewish man means something very specific. It means to obey the laws of God as set out in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. But right here at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, righteousness is a real stumper for Joseph. Because he’s a righteously God-fearing, law-abiding man he can’t take Mary for his wife when she’s pregnant by someone else, but nor does he want her to be disgraced in public. ‘Being righteous’ and ‘shielding Mary from shame’ seem to be mutually exclusive and Joseph is stuck on the horns of that dilemma.

There are rules for this sort of thing and those rules say that if the woman you’re engaged to turns up pregnant, both she and the man who got her pregnant are to be stoned to death at the town gate. Unless, that is, the woman was attacked by the man, in which case only he should be stoned. Either way, it takes a public hearing to decide whether one or both of them should be put to death. (Deut. 22: 23-27)

Rules are rules for a reason. They help us make sense of the world by giving it some structure and some order. They help make life more predictable and less out-of-control. And rules help us live with one another in peace and harmony—at least some of the time, anyway. Rules protect the life of the community.

Which might be a helpful thing to remember the next time you’re dealing with a bossy four year old.

But rules, even the rules we call ‘law’, have their limits. And Joseph knows about those limits because being a righteous man he knows the stories of God’s presence in human history, the stories told in Scripture. In particular, he knows the stories of his own family which includes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David—and also, according to the list at the very beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

The presence of any woman’s name in a biblical list of who begat whom is highly unusual. The presence of these women in the distinguished line that stretches from Abraham down through the House of David to Joseph is downright scandalous: Tamar got pregnant by her father-in-law after his son, her husband, was dead; Rahab was an outsider and a prostitute; Ruth was another outsider, which is a big deal in tribal Israel; and Bathsheba committed adultery with David who killed her husband to keep from being found out.

So it’s not as if Mary’s unexpected pregnancy is the first time there’s been ever been a whiff of scandal in the family.

Tamar and Rahab and Ruth and Bathsheba weren’t stoned to death or disgraced. Far from it—they’re included as honored ancestors in the list of those from whom Jesus Christ is descended.

What happened to the rules?

Matthew’s genealogy is a kind of shorthand. It’s a shorthand list of stories that tell about God’s on-going relationship with Joseph’s family and all of God’s people. And although those stories do include rules for how to live righteously before God, they also point to God’s complete and unrestrained freedom to break any rules, any limits, and any bounds. Those stories tell us that God’s love and God’s mercy are unbounded and cannot and will not be constrained, not even by the rules God Himself handed down.

And that is the context for Matthew’s telling of the Annunciation.

If you’ve ever taken Art History, you know the Annuciation looks something like this:

Mary, a young girl with a golden halo, is sitting with her eyes modestly cast down with the Angel Gabriel kneeling before her, his pure white wings that seem to give off their own light stretching out behind him, telling her the surprising news that she’s going to bear God’s Son.

That’s what the Annunciation looks like in Luke’s Gospel. Here’s how it looks in Matthew’s Gospel:

Joseph, lying in bed, sound asleep, dreaming in the dark.

And this is why there are tons of beautiful paintings of the Annunciation to Mary and not so many of the Annunciation to Joseph.

Joseph must be surprised to learn in his sleep that Mary’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit and that God’s Son is going to be the newest member of his family—this is startling news—but he must also be relieved. He’s freed from his dilemma. Joseph, the righteous man, wakes up and does exactly as he’s commanded. He takes Mary to be his wife and names her son Jesus.

Righteousness, it turns out, has more to do with attentive obedience to God’s will than it does with following a list of rules. A four year old’s righteousness has to do with trying to control the universe. That’s self-righteouness and four year old’s aren’t the only ones who practice it. Anyone who would reduce the Bible to a rulebook for living has fallen into the same trap.

True righteouness, on the other hand, has to do with surrendering control and being open to God’s radical annunciation. It requires obeying God’s commands while simultaneously listening for new ones. And it requires taking the risk that we may well get it wrong. How will we know that our dream is a message from God and not just wishful thinking?

We won’t, necessarily. Righteousness takes more humility than certainty.

But we haven’t been left to our own devices, any more than Joseph was. We, too, have been given the stories about God and God’s unending care for God’s people, stories that teach us the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. We’ve been given one another and the whole communion of saints to school us in those stories and to teach us to watch for how they’re still unfolding. And we’ve been given the Eucharist which we make week after week knowing that God meets us here where we gather and forms us to hear and respond to His word.

And most especially, we have been given the Son of God, God’s radical newness, who came to us in all humility as a newborn babe, grew to be a four year old, and then to be a man who willingly died for us that all our sins might be forgiven, even when we break the rules, even when we can’t figure out what the rules are. God’s rule, God’s righteousness, is God’s love, Emmanuel, God-with-us, the newborn babe, Jesus Christ.

For that and for all else, thanks be to God. Amen.