Decisions & Dilemmas

Mark Whittall
1 day ago
6 min read

There are times in our lives when we don’t know what to do. When even though we really want to do what’s right, we don’t know what’s right. Joseph is deep into one of these dilemmas in today’s gospel reading. He is a righteous man. He is a kind and gracious man. He deeply wants to do the right thing. But he doesn’t know what to do.

Life is not black and white. Life comes at us in full colour, beautiful and wonderful, yet puzzling and overwhelming sometimes. Relationships are not black and white. Relationships, while they may have their moments of simplicity, they also have their moments of ambiguity, of complexity, of agonizing decision-making about an unknowable future. Do I want to be with this person for the rest of my life, or not?

That’s the question Joseph faces when he gets the news about Mary. Joseph was engaged to Mary, he thought that he’d already made his decision. But then Mary is found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. And Joseph is afraid. The life, the future that he’d thought he’d chosen, it’s gone. Wouldn’t you be afraid if you were Joseph?

Mary is found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit, and so Joseph, being a righteous man, not wanting to make a public spectacle of Mary, planned to divorce her, to end the engagement, but quietly.

Why did he decide to divorce her?

We don’t know exactly. The text is open to possibility here. It’s ambiguous for us, the readers. The most common interpretation, and the one that most of us would probably latch on to, is that when Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant, he assumes that Mary is pregnant with another man’s child. You can imagine Joseph’s shock and disbelief, even anger, and not one of us would fault him for ending the engagement. Yet he is a righteous man, and a kind and gracious man. And so, knowing that the law in Deuteronomy carries harsh penalties for a woman caught in adultery, Joseph resolves to divorce Mary quietly, so as not to expose her to public disgrace.

Yet there is another way of understanding what’s going on. The first presumes that all Joseph knows is that Mary is pregnant. But what if he knows more, what if he knows exactly what the text tells us, that Mary was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit.

Now that would also be overwhelming. Again, no wonder Joseph is afraid, but now it’s for a completely different reason. He knows his scriptures, he knows that God has promised to send the Messiah. But to think that this watershed moment is happening now, that it is his fiancé who is pregnant with the long promised one, that God has chosen Mary to bear his child and it’s all happening right now – well maybe that’s all just too much for Joseph. Maybe he thinks he has no role to play in all of this, maybe it’s better to just step back and get out of the way. Let Mary and the Holy Spirit get on with whatever is happening here. Maybe he feels unworthy – surely the Son of God has no need of him as a father.

Which interpretation of scripture is the right one here? Well, maybe they both are. Maybe the text has been written this way in order to drive us as readers into the same ambiguity and uncertainty that Joseph was experiencing. Maybe Joseph had been told that Mary was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit and just didn’t know what to believe. Had Mary been unfaithful, or was this a powerful act of God? Perhaps Joseph’s heart leaned one way but his head told him something else. Either way, Joseph is afraid, and after some agonizing days and sleepless nights, he resolves to divorce Mary quietly. To step away, and get on with his ordinary life, and to let her get on with hers, which promises to be quite extraordinary.

And it is only a divine intervention that prevents the divorce of Mary and Joseph.

An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son; and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

“Joseph, you are to name him Jesus.” The angel is telling Joseph that, yes, this child is from the Holy Spirit and yes, Mary will bear a son, but you have an important role to play too. For you are to name him.

In those days, to name a child was an act of great significance. To name a child who was not your own was to adopt him as your own. The angel is telling Joseph that he’s not being shunted aside. God wants you, Joseph, to be a father to this child, to raise him as your own, to support Mary his mother and to adopt him into your lineage, as a Son of David. And the name Jesus has great significance. It means ‘God will save us’. That our God is a God of redemption. That whatever path we are on, whatever our circumstances, God will work to bring out the good for us. That even the most challenging circumstances can be redeemed, and we will be saved from what ails us.

All this to fulfill, as Matthew points out, what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophets:

First, in the book of Samuel we read that through the prophet Nathan, God made a promise to David. The promise made to David was that God would raise up a son of David, through whom he would establish his kingdom forever, and to whom God promises “I will never take my love away from you.” This is the first promise to which Matthew is pointing.

The second is the one from the prophet Isaiah we read in our first reading this morning:

“Look the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel, ‘God with us.’”

God is with us. God will always love us. Matthew, the gospel writer, wants us to know that through the birth of Jesus to Mary and in his naming and adoption by Joseph, these promises of God to us are being fulfilled.

And Joseph? Well, Joseph is a righteous man, a good man, kind and gracious. So when Joseph awoke from his sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife, and when she gave birth to a son, he named him Jesus. I’m not sure that all his questions had been answered, but he knew what he needed to do.

Life is not black and white. Life comes at us in full colour, beautiful and wonderful, yet puzzling and overwhelming sometimes. Relationships are not black and white. Relationships, while they can have their moments of simplicity, they also have their moments of ambiguity, of complexity, of agonizing decision-making about an unknowable future.

In this story, in Joseph’s life in this moment, there is resolution, a clear way forward at least for now - but only because of divine intervention. When our lives get complicated, when we have decisions to make, when we can’t figure out the right way forward, we can’t count on having an angel visit us in a dream to show us the way. We can certainly pray for guidance, and that’s really helpful, but still, our lives often feel more like Joseph’s situation before the angel than afterwards.

We’re certainly not the first people to have to live with ambiguity, with wanting to do the right thing but not knowing what that is. Joseph would know exactly how we feel. If there are any takeaways from his story, maybe it helps to know that wanting to do the right thing matters, even if we don’t know what it is. It also matters that whatever we do, that we act with kindness and grace towards those that we love.

And beyond that, if you’re in a place right now which is confused or conflicted, and you don’t know what to do, if you’re struggling with a decision and don’t know the way forward, remember this: God is with you, just as he promised. And that whatever you decide, God will be with you, working to bring out the good in whatever path you find yourself on, for you and for those that you love.