December 21, 2025
Advent 4/ Year A
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex CT
Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
This time of year, the women generally take center stage. There’s the Annunciation of Mary with the angel Gabriel telling her that she will be the God-bearer, and there’s Mary and Elizabeth and the Visitation when Mary travels to see her elderly cousin who is also pregnant with the one we would come to know as John the Baptist. And as part of that, we have the Magnificat when Mary prophesies that God is doing a new thing, upending the world order so that the last will be first and the first will be last. I’m not sure we can truly appreciate how radical it is that women play such a large role in the Christmas story when, throughout scripture, they are mostly unnamed or given second billing in the stories (with some exceptions).
But this morning, Matthew has a different focus. Speaking of Mary, he says. “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man…” (Matthew 1:19). I am here to say that I have no problem with Joseph getting his due. He is mentioned only a handful of times and always simply as the “father of” or the “husband of” as if he had no identity of his own. But Matthew tells us he was a righteous man. To us, it’s almost a throwaway line. We take little note of it. But I think, in the Joseph part of this narrative, it is significant. Because if Joseph was not a righteous man, the rest of the story might never have happened. We often speculate on what might have happened if Mary said “no,” but what’s the outcome if Joseph is not a righteous man?
For a 1st century Jew in Palestine, to be a righteous man is to be a man who observes Jewish law, who honors the sabbath, travels to Jerusalem for the required festivals three times each year, who learns scripture through the teaching of the rabbis, and who prays three times each day. We can’t know for sure that Joseph did all these things because if he did, no one thought to write that down, but what did get written down was that Mary and Joseph traveled to Jerusalem for a festival when Jesus was a 12-year-old boy (Luke 2:41-52). We also heard this morning that an angel of the Lord spoke to him in a dream and told him to go ahead and take the pregnant Mary as his wife because her pregnancy was from God.
I would ask for a show of hands, but I won’t, to see how many of you would have bought this story. Marriage at this time was not about love or finding one’s soul mate; it was a business transaction between men. On the woman’s side of the equation, getting a girl-child out of the house meant one less mouth to feed or person to take care of. On the man’s side, the deal was to find a wife who could manage the household, perhaps tend some livestock, and, more importantly, bear children. To take as one’s wife someone who was already pregnant with another’s child flew in the face of logic, religious codes, and social norms. Joseph had every reason to divorce Mary and let her suffer whatever fate came.
But Joseph didn’t do that, because Joseph was a righteous man, attuned to listening for God’s guidance so that, when it came, he trusted the words that came to him in a dream. After Jesus’s birth, in Matthew’s telling, Joseph had another dream telling him to take the mother and child into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath, and eventually he brought them to Nazareth where Jesus grew up. Between the time Jesus was a boy in the temple until the start of his public ministry at about the age of 30, Joseph must have died. Other than these meager details, we know almost nothing about him.
But we know he was a righteous man who raised a righteous son. He taught him a trade and modelled what it meant to live as a faithful Jew. When Jesus, in Luke, shows up at the synagogue and starts reading and teaching from the Isaiah scroll, he didn’t just pull that out of thin air. Yes, I know he was the son of God and fully divine as well as fully human, but the Christian faith believes that he lived and died as a human being, not some superhero who dashed into a phone booth when he needed to display great power or intellect. No, he learned what it meant to be faithful by watching his parents. And as a male child, his father was his role model.
I read a study some years ago that I cannot cite because I can no longer find it, but it claimed that children traditionally tend to follow the model of their male parent when it comes to church attendance as adults, no matter if it was their mother who took them to church week in and week out. If they watched their dads go to church and pray and sing and worship, then they followed suit when they grew up. Obviously, this is an old study, and it would be interesting to know the practices of children who grow up in same-sex marital households. My guess is that when parents model faithful living for their children, the likelihood that those children will grow up to be faithful is much higher. While we may not have many young children here at St. John’s, when I look out and see families worshipping together, parents or grandparents pointing out how to follow the leaflet or the hymnal, it makes my heart sing, because it means that, someday, they are likely to do the same with their own children.
And I believe that Jesus learned from Joseph, which is what young boys in the 1st century would have done.
Joseph may not get all the positive press that Mary does, but he is there, quietly doing his duty in the background of our gospel narrative. We may not have a lot of descriptions of him or his life, but in just a short phrase, Matthew tells us more than enough: he was a righteous man.
And thanks be to God that he was.