Doing what is right

Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. Matthew 1:19

Dear Friends,

Last Sunday, we had our Christmas Play, Who Will Save Us? For those of you who were able to watch it, you saw how many of the elements of the nativity story we have in Matthew echo or parallel the nativity story of Moses. Though we had wise men, you may have noticed that there were no shepherds or no “room at the inn” (even though we did put in a manger!). The intent was to highlight Matthew’s telling of the birth of Jesus… not Luke’s. This is also the reason that Joseph played a much more prominent part in the drama than Mary did…

The gospel of Matthew’s driving question seems to be: What does it mean to be righteous? In the verse cited above, Matthew tells us that Joseph was a righteous man. The primary Jewish understanding of what it means to be righteous is grounded in the Law of Moses beginning with the 10 Commandments. While the Hebrews were wandering in the wilderness, there was a kind of marriage ceremony that happened at Mt. Sinai. God gave Moses the 10 Commandments to give to the people. The covenant was: if they would obey these commandments then God would be their God and they would be God’s people. It is this covenant with God that the prophets throughout the Old Testament kept calling the Jews to return to. When the Assyrians conquered and dispersed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, the prophet’s answer was that the people had not been faithful to the covenant because they had turned their backs on God and God’s commandments.

So… Joseph was a righteous man. It meant that he was someone who lived into the identity of being God’s chosen people and observed the commandments. This meant that when his wife-to-be was pregnant and that he was not the one who had intercourse with her, the Law compelled him to break off the marriage and (he was well within his rights) to disgrace her and even have her stoned. This would have been the righteous thing to do…

But Matthew is telling us the good news of Jesus. In Jesus’ deepening of the Law, he was much more in the vein of Micah 6:8:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good,    and what does the Lord require of youbut to do justice and to love kindness    and to walk humbly with your God?

Even though the Law compels one thing, Joseph is led to trust God and be kind, merciful, compassionate… and loving for the sake of the world. The particular demands of the Law are overruled by God’s greater command and nature which is TO LOVE. As we revisit the Gospel of Matthew during the coming year, look for this tension about righteousness: Is it about strictly adhering to the Law? or Is it about discerning what the loving thing to do is? Pay particular attention to whenever the Pharisees become part of the conversation. (They were the ones who were most zealous about obeying every letter of the Law.)

Be righteous!

Pastor Phil