Mary was much in need of Joseph’s love and care.
She would need that love to keep her steadfast, for there came, when least advisable, the jarring journey to Bethlehem, when birth was imminent.
It took faith and the courage of faith to take God seriously.
It did for Abraham. It did for Moses. It did for Jonah. It did for Daniel. It did for Joseph.
And it did for Mary.
She needed God to hold her hand, and Joseph too.
In Bethlehem, she waits while over there he knocks. -Calvin Miller
Again refused ! ...
“There’s nowhere else to go tonight,”
he said. She fought the burning in her eyes—
...He took her in his arms and that embrace
dissolved the desperation that they faced.
“I paid the stable rent,” he said with shame.
“Your son will come tonight,” she said.
Her son did come that night.
At the end of that taxing journey from Nazareth, Mary’s son, the Son of God,
when the time had come, was born in a barn and laid in a manger.
“God, cribb’d, cabined, and confined within the contours of a human infant.
The infinite defined by the finite.
The Creator of all life thirsty and abandoned.” -L’Engle
When Mary held her first-born son,
she wondered and pondered in her heart,
there was so much she didn’t know...
And what about Joseph,
this God-chosen man, this man who was faithful
in spite of the gossip in Nazareth ,
in spite of the danger from Herod.
This man Joseph, who listened to angels...
What was he thinking as he looked down on this Little One?
“Back in Nazareth I’ll make a proper bed for you... -Ron Klug Joseph’s Lullaby
of seasoned wood, smooth, strong, well-pegged.
A bed fit for a carpenter’s son.
Just wait till we get back to Nazareth .
I’ll teach you everything I know.
You’ll learn to choose the cedar wood, eucalyptus, and fir.
You’ll learn to use the drawshave, ax, and saw.
Your arms will grow strong, your hands rough—like these.
You will bear the pungent smell of new wood
and wear shavings and sawdust in your hair.
You’ll be a man whose whole life centers
on hammer and nails and wood.
But for now,
sleep, little Jesus, sleep.”
...a man whose life centers on hammer and nails and wood...
Yes, for in that manger is a cross.
Joy came to the world, but it was silenced
through a crude carpentry project on a barren hillside.
And in our honest moments we wonder how
joy and world find their way into the same sentence,
when so much in our world is wracked by evil.
We too need God to hold our hand as we ponder the mystery of the incarnation:
the Word made flesh, because God so loved the world.
And we wonder:
What kind of God is this? What kind of love is this?
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