Scandal

Matthew 1:18-19

December 10, 2017 • Mount Pleasant UMC

You can’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV, or check your social media newsfeed without running into yet another scandal these days. In the last few weeks, names like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, Roy Moore, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor (among MANY others) have had allegations and accusations made against them for varying forms of sexual harassment. Some have admitted indiscretions, and others have denied the allegations against them, but it seems, at least in the online community, we now live in a “guilty until proven innocent” world. Now, let me be as clear as I can: sexual harassment is real and it is ugly and horrible. It is something no one should ever have to endure. When it happens, it needs to be dealt with in a serious manner and the victim or victims need to be cared for. We cannot let perpetrators of such harassment continue to “get away” with their actions. But we also have to recognize that sometimes allegations are made without any sort of proof. That doesn’t seem to be the case in the majority of these recent cases, but social media’s rush to judgment ought to be concerning to all of us. We live in a world where an allegation can lead to the destruction of a person’s reputation and the end of their professional (and maybe their personal) life, even before the allegations are proven true or false. Given the current political and social setting, it’s highly likely that, were the story taking place today, Joseph of Bethlehem would have ended up on the list and publicly shamed.

During this Advent season, we’re focusing this year on the gentle step-father of Jesus, a man named Joseph, and we’re seeking what he might teach us about being faithful. What little we know about Joseph in the Gospels actually comes from Matthew’s Gospel, mainly because Matthew tells the Christmas story through the eyes of Joseph; Luke, on the other hand, tells it from Mary’s perspective. And Matthew is rather straightforward about it, beginning with a genealogy (which I’ll talk about in a few minutes) and then launching into the story with these words: “This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about” (1:18). Ironically, even with those words at the beginning, we never do get a description of the actual birth. It takes place “off stage,” you might say. What we get instead are the wrestlings and the struggles of the “faithful” carpenter named Joseph.

To really understand these two verses that we read this morning, we need to first know something about the process of marriage as it took place in the first century and why Mary’s unplanned pregnancy was not only a scandal in her hometown, but even more so for Joseph. In the first century, marriage was not a “meet someone, fall in love, get married” proposition. Most Jewish marriages in that day were arranged by the parents, perhaps even long before the bride and groom were adults. Marriages were arrangements between parents and early on, they would be “loose” understandings. When the girl entered puberty, the agreement began to take on a more serious, and lasting, nature. At that point, there would be a formal engagement and the wedding ceremony itself would follow one or two years later, but the formal engagement, or betrothal, was binding. To end it required an actual divorce because at the engagement, a formal document was signed. Today, we sign marriage licenses at the actual wedding; in Joseph and Mary’s time, the equivalent of the license was signed at the engagement. The two were at that point considered husband and wife but they were not yet allowed to live together and certainly were not allowed to consummate their marriage yet. That had to wait until the actual ceremony (Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 74).

Not only was this a social or legal contract, however. There was also money involved. When the engagement took place, the father of the groom would pay a “bride price” to the father of the bride, an amount that equaled the price of a one-bedroom house in those days. This bride price was considered “compensation” to the father of the bride for the “loss” of a member of his family. Now, lest we think the father of the bride just went out and spent that on a new camel, it was custom to set aside most of that money as a sort of insurance policy or savings account; in the event that the husband died prematurely or divorced her, the bride would get that money to help support her since women generally weren’t able to work for money in those days. In addition to the “bride price,” the groom would also give an amount that amounted to several months’ worth of his salary to the bride—again, as more insurance in case he divorced her or died early. A financial pre-nuptial agreement, you might say. Despite our usual view of the first century as being very male-centered, there were actually, at least in Israel, pieces in place to protect the woman if things did not go as planned. There would also be gifts exchanged between the families at the time of the engagement; in some ways, the engagement was a bigger deal than the actual wedding, and there’s one more factor that we have to remember. Even though, at this point, the marriage had not yet been consummated, if either the man or the woman slept with someone else during this time, they were considered adulterers. In the Biblical Jewish world, that came with serious penalties, up to and including death by stoning (Hamilton, Faithful, pgs. 45-48). So when we encounter Joseph and Mary in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth, this is where they are in the process. Matthew puts it this way: “Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit” (1:18).

“She was found.” We’re not really told how Joseph found out about the pregnancy for sure, whether Mary came and told him or if he heard a rumor going around town. Joseph was, most likely, living and working in Bethlehem at this time (it was his hometown, after all), and he probably didn’t see his fiancé all that often. But we do know Mary came to stay with her relative Elizabeth, who lived in the nearby town Ein Karem. Ein Karem was less than a hour’s walk from the Temple in Jerusalem, and just seven miles from Bethlehem (cf. Hamilton, The Journey, pg. 62). According to Luke, Mary arrived at Elizabeth’s house when Elizabeth was in her sixth month and stayed for three months—or until the baby was born (Luke 1:26, 56). So Mary would have been at least three months along by the time she left. It’s possible—we don’t know for sure, of course, but it’s possible that during this time either Joseph came to Ein Karem to visit or Mary went to Bethlehem and she shared her story with him. It’s just as likely that, if he saw her during this time, he might have noticed a little “baby bump” before she could say anything to him (cf. Carson 74). However it came about, Joseph found out Mary was pregnant, and he knew the baby wasn’t his. What else could he assume but that she had been unfaithful to him? While he was building a life for the two of them in Bethlehem, she must have found someone in Nazareth better to her liking. Her story sounded crazy because Joseph, like everyone else, knew where babies came from. In fact, “If Joseph hadn’t known how babies were normally made he wouldn’t have had a problem with Mary’s unexpected pregnancy” (Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One, pg. 7). Mary was, in Joseph’s mind, an adulterer. She was unfaithful.

Matthew tells us this about Joseph by telling us he was “faithful to the law” (1:19). Other translations say he was a “just man” (KJV) or a “righteous man” (NRSV). That means he wants to be faithful to God, to follow God’s law as best he could. He stood in a long line of men and women who tried to live the life God wanted them to live, and for Joseph, that life and that mindset put him in a difficult place. He could not, in good conscience, marry Mary because she was now believed to be unfaithful (Carson 75). As a “righteous” man, he could order her death; the Old Testament law prescribed death by stoning for anyone found guilty of adultery—and, as I said, that applied during this engagement as much as it would have during the actual marriage (cf. Deuteronomy 22:23-24; Keener, Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, pg. 47). However, that was a rarely practiced punishment in the first century. Another possibility open to him was a public divorce, but that would be messy and lead to a lot of shame for Mary. Joseph seems to have been unwilling to do that to her, which tells me that not only was he “just” or “righteous,” he was also compassionate and merciful. He may or may not yet have had a feeling we would call “love” for Mary, but on many levels he certainly cared for her and for what would happen to her. So he passed on the stoning and he passed on the public, messy, shameful divorce. What he makes up his mind to do is the third option available to him according to the law: a quiet, private divorce witnessed by just two other people (cf. Carson 75). This would allow him to follow his conscience, exercise his compassion and protect Mary.

It’s not until after he makes up his mind that God steps into this story. Now, we’ll talk about the dream and the angel in a couple of weeks, but after that encounter Joseph makes a radical shift in how he approaches Mary. At God’s request, Joseph agrees to take Mary as his wife and raise Jesus as his son (1:24). It’s easy to read that and gloss over what it really meant. To raise Jesus as his own meant that Joseph was going to take Mary’s shame on himself. Going ahead with the marriage would be understood as an admission of his own guilt, that he had violated Mary before their official marriage. He knew he hadn’t, but you know how people in small or large towns talk. Joseph takes on Mary’s shame and the scandal of an unplanned pregnancy so that Jesus would have a father. He makes a sacrifice of his own desires, his own wishes, his own righteousness so that he could be obedient to God. Think about that for a moment: God called Joseph to a scandal. God asked Joseph to take Mary’s shame on himself. God expected Joseph to be an agent of grace to Mary, and as Philip Yancey once wrote, “Grace always has about it the scent of scandal” (Yancey [foreword], John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, pg. 13).

But then again, if you’ve started reading at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, you’ve already been prepared for such a scandal. Jesus’ lineage is full of scandal, and Matthew doesn’t try to hide that from us. For one thing, Matthew includes four women in Jesus’ genealogy, which is unusual enough (genealogies were most often traced through the father), but look at who those women are. In verse three we have Tamar named; Tamar’s story is often overlooked in Genesis (38), but she played the part of a prostitute so that she could trick her father-in-law into sleeping with her and be able to have a child after her husband had died. Go on down to verse five and we have two more women named: Rahab and Ruth. Rahab was an actual prostitute who lived in Jericho and helped to protect the Israelites when they were spying out the Promised Land. In her story, you have to ask why that’s the first place in the city the spies went to (Joshua 2)! And Ruth—well, Ruth was an honorable woman but she was not an Israelite. She was from Moab, an ancient enemy of Israel, and yet she became the grandmother of King David and therefore an ancestor to Jesus himself (Ruth 4:18-22). Jesus’ family line is not pure Hebrew. And the final woman listed is in verse 6, and her name isn’t even given. She is listed as “Uriah’s wife,” though we know her as Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11). She, too, was a foreigner, a Hittite, and King David had slept with her then had her husband killed. Though later she became the mother to Solomon, the wisest king ever known in Israel, her beginnings with the Hebrew people was sketchy at best. Four women. Four women with questionable morals. Four scandals that have woven their way into the birth story of the savior of the world. And now, a fifth: a engaged woman, pregnant with a baby that is not her husband’s. Joseph, a man faithful to the law, put his reputation and his righteousness on the line for the sake of Mary and her unborn child. He took her shame, her brokenness, and made it his own.

And that makes me wonder who has done that for you. Who has been willing to sacrifice their own wants, desires or preferences for your sake? Who has been willing to take on your brokenness, your hurt, as their own? Throughout the twenty-five years I’ve been in ministry, I’ve been keenly aware of several people who have sacrificed much in their lives for the sake of a loved one. One woman in particular comes to mind as her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and all of their hopes and dreams for retirement and travel and mission work evaporated in a moment. In addition to that, they had a special needs son who often experienced severe seizures, and was unable to live on his own as an adult. I watched as that woman put much of her life on hold to care for her son and her husband, and she never quit fighting for better treatment for those with special needs and for better health care for those with debilitating diseases. Is that the life she imagined for herself? No, it wasn’t. But she had made a promise, to God and to her family, and she was willing to sacrifice to see that promise fulfilled. She was willing to take on their brokenness and their hurt. I know there are some of you here this morning who have faced and are facing those same choices. We love our Grace Unlimited kids in this congregation, and I know there are times when you parents get tired and bone-weary. Yet, like any parent, there isn’t anything you wouldn’t sacrifice for the sake of your child. And some of you have loved ones, maybe even spouses, who have serious health challenges. Some of your situations will not get any easier as the months and years roll by, and yet I watch as you sacrifice for the sake of the one you love. It’s not exactly like what Joseph went through, but the idea is the same. We take on the other person’s brokenness, their pain, their need and we trust, we believe and we hope that God will use it to make something good. We hold onto the hope that the worst thing is never the last thing.

Sometimes, when we’re in the midst of a difficult time, people will quote Romans 8:28 to us. You know the verse? “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” The problem with people quoting that to you or me is that they usually mean it in this way: “God gave this to you, so you just need to suck it up and deal with it.” No one would say it quite that way, but when folks say that to you as if you’re supposed to just get over it, that’s what they mean. But Paul, in that verse, does not say that God brings difficult times to us. Paul also does not say that everything that comes our way is good. Paul does not say we should just smile though the pain and the brokenness or offer some Christian platitude as if the difficulty doesn’t matter. This unplanned and unexpected pregnancy was not something that was easy for Mary or for Joseph. What Paul says is this: there is nothing that happens that God can’t bring good out of. God doesn’t bring the pain, but God can and will use it to bring about good. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but he will do so. That’s who he is. Not everything is good, but God can use everything to bring about good.

So that brings me back to where I started this morning, and to the scandals that continue to show up in the news and in our world. In light of the story of Joseph, we have to ask what the church’s role is in such situations. How do we or how should we respond to people caught in the midst of a scandal, whether that scandal is an accusation of sexual harassment or financial wrongdoing or drug abuse or infidelity or any of the many other forms of brokenness that routinely manifest themselves in our world? What do we do? Well, what we have often done, and part of why the church has such a poor reputation these days, is to point fingers at those in the midst of scandal and tell them again how bad they are. You know what? When someone is in the midst of such a time, that’s the last thing they need. They already know their life is messed up, even if the accusations aren’t true. They don’t need us reminding them. The other thing we often do in the church is to abandon people whose lives are rocked by scandal. And usually that’s not because we don’t care about them; it’s because we don’t know what to say, we feel awkward, and so we just stay away. We hope no one will bring it up.

But that’s not how Joseph’s step-son Jesus dealt with those who, in his day, were scandalized. John tells us Jesus once specifically went through Samaritan territory, a place “no good Jew” would go, so that he could talk to a woman at a well. Not only was it scandalous for him to talk to a woman alone, but this woman was particularly shunned by her community. She was a five-time divorcee, meaning five different men had decided they didn’t want her any longer, and she was currently living with a man who didn’t love her enough to marry her (John 4). Yet Jesus talked with her when no one else in town would. Jesus loved her, so much so that she became a missionary to the Samaritans. On another occasion, some religious leaders threw a woman on the ground, a woman who had been caught in the “very act” of adultery. You know, the last time I checked it takes two to commit adultery, so when I read that story, I always want to ask, “Where’s the dude?” But, nevertheless, the religious leaders set up this trap for Jesus, wanted to see if he accepted or rejected this scandalous woman. But Jesus doesn’t answer their questions; instead, do you remember what he does? He stoops down and doodles in the dirt. When he does speak, he only has to say one thing: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8). Could it be that Jesus was remembering the way his own mother was accepted and welcomed by Joseph when she very well could have been accused of the same thing this woman has been?

Jesus touched lepers, he welcomed children when the disciples tried to shoo them away, and during a dinner party at a prominent Pharisee’s house, he allowed a “sinful woman” (probably a prostitute) to touch him, to anoint him with oil—a very intimate act. Simon, the host of the dinner, thinks to himself, “If Jesus knew who this woman was, no way he would let her touch him.” But Jesus, who knows the thoughts of our hearts, says to Simon, “Whoever has been forgiven little loves little” (Luke 7:36-50). We could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. The scandalous were not shunned by Jesus. They weren’t ignored. They were welcomed. He engaged with them. He loved them, and he would have learned that, at least in part, from the example of his gentle step-father, Joseph, and the way Joseph welcomed Mary and took on her shame.

When Paul wants to describe Jesus’ life, several years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, do you know what word he uses? In his great declaration of every preacher’s purpose, Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). The word translated as “stumbling block” is actually skandalon, from which we get our word “scandal.” In another letter, Paul calls the cross an “offense,” using the same word. Jesus’ death was a scandal, but so was his life. On one occasion when he’s debating with the religious leaders of Israel, they claim that Abraham, the great patriarch of the Jewish people, is their father, and when Jesus pushes them a bit more on why they don’t live the way Abraham did, they come back with a response worthy of a modern political debate. They say to Jesus, “We are not illegitimate children. The only Father we have is God himself” (John 8:41). In other words, they knew that Jesus’ parentage was in question, and they weren’t above bringing it up to try to embarrass or scandalize him. Jesus’ birth, his life, his death was a scandal, just as Isaiah the Old Testament prophet had said it would be. Centuries before Jesus, Isaiah predicted a servant who would be “a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall” (Isaiah 8:14). And because of that, Jesus had a heart that was sensitive and welcoming to those who had been scandalized.

So should we. So must we. If we want to follow in the footsteps of Joseph, our calling is to welcome the stranger, the outcast and the scandalized. We can welcome someone and love them without approving of their behavior. Jesus didn’t approve of the wrongdoing; to the woman caught in adultery, he says, “Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11). The church is called to community, to welcoming all, even (maybe especially) those in the midst of scandal. As someone once said, the church is called to be a hospital for the broken, not a rest home for the saints.

It’s curious, isn’t it, that the only point where Luke’s nativity story and Matthew’s version of the same story come together is in Gabriel’s word that comes to both of them? To these two youngsters facing a scandal of God’s own making, Gabriel says, “Do not be afraid” (cf. Wright 6). What word could be more appropriate for someone facing uncertain times ahead? And why should they not be afraid? Because the one who is to be born is coming to change the world, to create a world where misfits and outcasts, prostitutes and preachers, the scandalized and those who believe they are perfect—all of us are welcome and equal at the foot of the cross. We are all equally undeserving of and yet equally welcome at the fountain of grace. And so this morning, if you’re in the midst of a scandal or just a difficult patch of life, hear this word: “Do not be afraid.” Even if the allegations are true, even if you’ve done everything despicable you’ve been accused of, there is still hope and grace and mercy and forgiveness and love available from the one who hung on the cross to become a scandal for you. Do not be afraid; come to the place where there is grace. And for those of you who have something in your past that you’re desperately afraid someone might find out about, hear this word today: “Do not be afraid.” The God who knows all about you knows everything in your past and still welcomes you and offers you forgiveness and grace. As one pastor I know put it in a Facebook post this week: “We might not forget it, but God will forgive it” (Adam Weber, 12/5/17). And to those of you who think you’ve got it all together, hear this word this morning: “Do not be afraid.” If your life has mercifully not been rocked or touched by scandal, God wants to use you as a minister of grace to those who have been. Do not be afraid to befriend, welcome, and love on those God places in your path. Do not be afraid, because my friends, it’s true: God is still in the resurrection business and he will bring good out of even the worst scandal, if we will let him. The worst thing will never be the last thing. Let’s pray.