Advent 4 Joseph 18/12/22
In his book ‘Walking backwards through Christmass’ Bishop Stephen Cottrell writes in a first-person style with some of the characters that were around when Our Lord was born. One of these characters was Joseph.
Bishop Stephen writes
I come from a long line of dreamers. You wouldn’t know it to look at me. My hands are rough and gnarled from a lifetime at the lathe; knotty, like the wood I turn. I hope for things so that inside this old body there is always a fresh spring rising.
An underground stream that makes glad the heart, but I don’t know whether anyone can see it anymore. Nobody calls me a dreamer as they used to when I was young. Well, not till now. And until this year I felt the same about myself. I was alone.
But then it changed. Betrothal. Me an older man, and she was a young girl full of joy and vigour; full of hope and expectation of what life could bring, full of zest. She reawoke my dreaming.
Was it love? I don’t know. Not yet. Love isn’t a feeling. Love isn’t just desiring, though how I desired her. Love is the patient accumulation of shared memories, the joining together of two lifetimes into one, and the weaving of separate stories into this story.
But no sooner had we begun, than things changed...
After she first told me, I saw the fear and horror in her eyes, the fear that I wouldn’t believe her and wouldn’t stand by her; and, yes, I was furious and angry and jealous, and all sorts of other things; But when I did fall asleep, I had a dream. A simple dream, a simple requirement. In the unfussy logic of a dream, I was instructed clearly: ‘Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. Do not abandon her. The child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. And then the words from Isaiah the prophet that I had heard many times ran through my dream: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, “God is with us.”’
And what do you do with a dream like that? Ignore it? Despise it? Argue against it? I woke with a start. It was still night, and I had been asleep for only a few minutes. But the dream and what it said to me was as clear as the day. It was as if God himself had spoken to me and asked me just to be faithful: faithful to Mary and faithful to the dream inside me.
And so I have done what I have been told. I lay on my bed for a few more hours, then I rose before dawn and walked the half-mile or so to Mary’s house. I knew she wouldn’t be sleeping either; our two stories were already becoming one. Sure enough, even as I approached the house, I heard the sound of her gentle weeping. I think she had been up all night too, worrying and probably praying that there would be some sense in all of this. She opened the door to me and there was a lovely defiance in her eye. She was ready to meet whatever it was I would give her. I saw then, as clear as the dream, her own certainty in what was inside her. I held her tiny soft hands in mine, looked her full in the eye, and told her that I was with her, that I believed her; I had had a dream, and my dream had confirmed her story.
We became the talk of the town. People would point and whisper and plot. But inside I knew how I had chosen to respond. And I was not going to go back on this. Something was unfolding in the shared story that was my life with Mary. God had visited her in some way that I will never fully understand. For even if you begin to believe the strangeness of the story I am telling you, Mary is not what you might think she is. She is not a quiet stream. She is a tempest. She is not an empty vessel, but a skin of wine uncorked. She is not what men think godly, self-effacing and discreet, reposed and receptive. She is a force: a force of joy and energy and life. And I love her for that. I will go on loving her for that.
We should be in Bethlehem by dusk and this baby can’t be far from birth. I place my hands upon Mary’s stomach each evening as we lie down to sleep, and I feel the baby’s strong movements, turning in her womb and kicking out against the world.
But will I know then? God with us? What does a son of God look like, except a son of man, a child like every child? And for what purpose is this child born? Is it to save? How does that work? Who will know him and who will believe him?
The night is falling and we must rest, Mary is settling down for the night now. Although she is tired, so tired, she is still all-focus and energy - holding and bearing an inner stillness and resolve that is beyond the meandering fantasies of most men. And the child she bears, this child from God…
Will he be rejected? Will he be broken? Will he be a barren tree on a lonely hill that bears no fruit at all? Or will he be something else?