Laura Reads Matthew (1:18-25)

 

The Dream of Saint Joseph - Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674) - public domain

So, it turns out Mary is pregnant, and she's engaged to Joseph who has not had sex with her. 

We know so little about Joseph. Was he old? Young? At least we know he is relatively kind because he did not want Mary to be shamed, apparently much less stoned. It was likely an arranged marriage. Did he love her, or was she just an addition to his property holdings? 

We know he was convinced by a dream to go ahead and take her as his wife and to accept that the child she was pregnant with was conceived by the Holy Spirit. I wonder how it would affect one's marriage to believe that your wife, out of all the women who will ever walk the earth, was chosen by the Holy Spirit to bear God's son? 

We believe these days that all of us who follow Christ are given the Holy Spirit as an inner guide. So, how does, or should, that affect our relations with anybody else who is also a bearer of the Holy Spirit? I can't say I'm very good about keeping that in mind.

I'm kind of fascinated by the sway that dreams have with these biblical people. Joseph's dream and later on, Peter's dream of a sheet coming down from heaven had massive consequences. I mean, dreams are often just crazy stuff. Why did they give credence to these particular dreams? I've had dreams so crazy that I wake up scratching my head with how my psyche could possibly have conjured up such a wild story. We live in an unenchanted world today, with lots of explanations for why we dream what we do that range from what you've been watching on tv to what you ate for supper. We would scoff at making any consequential decision based on a dream. At least, I would. But, it's stories such as this one that make me wonder if we're missing out on a lot by not letting our world be a bit more enchanted. 

Did Joseph and Mary keep Jesus' origins a secret? It seems they must have. The 3 kings who visited with gifts knew something of his importance, but did they know that the Holy Spirit planted the baby in Mary? Seems doubtful.  If I were not a Christian and didn't believe Jesus was divinely conceived, I might wonder if those wise men knew something about the baby's human father. Maybe they weren't following a star, but following the orders of a wealthy patron who had been visiting and knocked up a pretty girl he met on his travels. Feeling guilty, he later sent some valuable gifts to assuage his conscience. Could the whole story have been concocted to protect Mary from Joseph? He already bought the dream thing. And I wonder - if the divine conception wasn't true, would I still believe Jesus was the Messiah? Couldn't God take a fully human person and make him the Messiah? We believe that he adopts us as his children through the Holy Spirit, so is it such a stretch? 

At the end of the day, I don't think it matters to me whether he was divinely conceived because if I believe everything that exists was created by God, then it's all enchanted anyway you slice it. 

Laura Reads Matthew (1:1-17)

Judah and Tamar, School of Rembrandt, public domain

 I write here in fits and spurts. But, after nearly 2 years of no writing, I feel compelled to do it again. 

I am reading Matthew...again. I think it's my favorite book of the bible. My faith waxes and wanes, but when it grows strongest, it's the words of Matthew's gospel that attract me the most. We don't know for sure who the author of the gospel of Matthew really was. However, we're pretty sure that he was a Jewish writer writing for a Jewish audience. And so, he begins with a geneology, tracing Jesus' ancestry back to Abraham.

My first husband's mother had a framed document that showed their family geneology traced back to both Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. She was very proud of it. At the time, I though it very impressive, but I have since learned that there were quite a few fraudulent such geneologies, giving innocent folk the impression that they had descended from ancient rules who had established Christianity in medieval Europe. In a similar fashion, my grandmother was sure that she was a direct descendent of Gen. Robert E. Lee. She was, like many of her generation, take in by the revisionist history put out by the notorious Daughters of the Confederacy that Gen. Lee was not guilty of the ownership of slaves, much less their mistreatment. She saw him as a hero, not a traitor to the Union. However, I've done the work. I do share a common ancestor with Gen. Lee, but we are not direct descendants. 

It all goes to show that people put much stock in who their ancestors (supposedly) are. Folks feel that descending from someone important makes them important too, I guess. None of us really wants to contemplate the reality that we will be lost among the hundreds of millions of people who have lived and died on this earth. 

It was important to Matthew to show that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophecy, and to prove that he had a pedigree of royal descent. But, you have to recognize that the things may have been, well, fudged a little to prove the point. For one thing, Matthew's generation count is off. Also, Luke provides a different geneology. At the end of the day, whether Jesus' geneology is entirely accurate in regards to the prophecies doesn't change whether or not I choose to believe in him. But, then, I'm a gentile in 2025, not a Jew in the first century. 

History is told by the victors. We never really know what is and isn't accurate. I don't put much stock in the idea that scripture was miraculously preserved as accurate. And so, I don't know, and frankly don't care whether the geneology in Matthew was 100% right. But here's what I do care about.

Matthew includes women in his geneology, and all of them have potential sexual disqualifiers. The first is Tamar, who tricks her father-in-law into having sex with her (he thought she was a prostitute) so that she can have an heir to the family's estate. The second is Rahab, a prostitute who assists the Israelite spies who are scouting out the promised land. The third is Ruth who lies at the feet of Boaz to get him to marry her. And finally, there is Mary, the mother of Jesus, who has somehow become pregnant by other than Joseph. They are all not just women, but potentially disgraced women. And we read about them today in Matthew's gospel. They are not forgotten. They are not cast aside. They are worthy, according to Matthew, because Jesus descended from them. It's yet another way that we see the upside-down kingdom of Jesus. The geneology was, ostensibly, to show Jesus' ancestral creds. But instead, we see the backwards creds of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Mary. If we believe that he is the Messiah, then he legitimizes them, in spite of their stories. 

And so, what might have been the most boring passage in scripture becomes an inspiring one to me.