You will no doubt remember the comedian Spike Milligan who is buried in Winchelsea in my former Diocese. Apparently, he requested his gravestone should carry the epitaph, ‘I told you I was ill!’ The Diocesan Chancellor was less than enthusiastic about this deviation from faculty rules and refused. However, Spike had the last laugh. If you visit his grave today you will find the inscription there as requested; its just written in Greek! In the end he got a highly appropriate tribute.
The reading from Matthew 1 this morning tells us of the legacy of a character with a small part in the Christmas story, namely Joseph. In Christ’s life he appears infrequently and only in the first few years, disappearing after the incident where Jesus is left behind in the Temple by mistake. In this passage, we hear the commentary on his epitaph. Joseph was a righteous man. In the language of the scriptures there could be no higher accolade. He manifests this primarily in an act of profound kindness to Mary his betrothed.
Marital codes in the ancient near east of that time were strict. Couples were promised to each other from an early age by their families. Such betrothals were binding. If Mary had become pregnant in the normal way of things it was a terrible breaking of social convention; a moral failure of the worst kind. However, even before the angel’s revelation of what had really happened, he is already minded to respond to her vulnerability with kindness. Joseph is not a child of the social media age. I look at Facebook occasionally, but it isn’t very good for my soul. I abandoned Twitter/ X some time ago for the same reason. They promote visceral responses to issues without rational thought. The wise response that there are always two sides to every story or the charitable assumption is not encouraged. I have learned to my cost that if normally well-meaning people do things that look anything but, its most likely to indicate they have more information on which they based their response than I do to judge it. Joseph would have been within his rights to make a spectacle of her rather than act with mercy. Such precipitate action would have missed the angel’s revelation. This was not what it seemed. God was at work in the most miraculous way in this supernatural conception. Only a profound spiritual experience and clear revelation could have adjusted his course. To have exposed her to public disgrace would have been to cast her on the mercy of her family who would most likely have thrown her out to avoid family shame. The prospects for such a vulnerable, pregnant teenager cast adrift from family support were unthinkable.
I was drawn to Joseph’s example through listening recently to the 2025 Reith Lectures by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. In them he calls the West to a moral reformation and rediscovery of virtue in politics and the life of society. He is actually calling for a righteousness like that of Joseph. If we seek to be righteous; to respond rightly in every circumstance, we cannot do so in a framework which leaves God out of the equation. Such a secular model cannot give a reliable account of reality. Unfortunately, despite being the son of a Pastor, Bregman’s thesis gives insufficient weight either to God’s revelation of what righteousness is, nor the reality of human sinfulness. He proposes the typical secular solutions of deploying our best minds to the problem, somehow making virtue fashionable, or shaming the misbehaving! He cites the campaign to abolish chattel slavery in the 18th century as an example of what can be achieved by small groups of people working subversively to undermine conventional wisdom, but seriously underplays the importance of their Christian faith in this endeavour.
To describe Joseph as righteous is to say he felt an accountability to a higher authority than mere social convention or even the letter of the law. For him God’s opinions and the spirit of the law were equally important. The greatest of our statesmen and women have had a similar sense. There are more important sources of authority that political expediency, public opinion and social media mobs. But in the complexities of modern life, doing the right thing is not always straight-forward.
The account of Jesus birth in Matthew chapter 1 essentially tells us that if we want Joseph’s righteousness and the moral reformation that accompanies it, we need saving from our sins. This is what Jesus came to do. This is what Jesus makes possible in his life, death and resurrection and our response to it by faith, trust and obedience. All the problems our world faces today, be they war, climate disaster, racial injustice, economic inequity and many others are rooted in that fundamental problem. We can achieve wonderful things as beings made in the image of God but unless the sin is dealt with, we will always muck it all up.
We only need to go back to the creation accounts to see that the heart of human folly was to take to ourselves as finite beings, decisions that are really in the realm of the infinite. We cannot in our frail humanity know the likely outcome of every decision. We do not even really know what is good for ourselves. Cut off from direct communion with God, human beings are left to respond with whatever feels good to me in the moment.
This prideful streak is present in all of us and the root of what the scriptures call it sin: a turning from God. St. Augustine described it as a collapsing in on ourselves. This is the condition from which we need saving and for which God sent Jesus – in a sense the fruit of Joseph’s kindness and Joseph and Marys’ preparedness to live with the whispers and accusations of illegitimacy. This salvation, the gift of forgiveness and the restoration of relationship with God opens the channel to the divine wisdom we so desperately need amid the complexities of modern life.
Our world is indeed complex and troubled. We have long since left behind the hubris of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Politicians then spoke of the end of history and the triumph of liberal, democratic capitalism. Now long supressed forces of nationalism have reasserted themselves, sometimes even finding legitimacy in a corrupt theology as in Russian Orthodox justifications of war in Ukraine. The necessary international co-operation to deal with the climate emergency, illegal migration and economic injustice is undermined at every turn by narrow national interest.
But wisdom in such complexity is to be found, but not in secular models of politics nor psychological models of human flourishing alone. True wisdom is to be found in the Logos, the Christ, the one who came that we might be set free from our bondage to ourselves into the life in all its fullness which is only to be found in Jesus. This is the dynamic, flexible wisdom that comes from the indwelling Spirit. This is the wisdom that acted through the righteous kindness of Joseph. This is the wisdom of love.
You are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. This is the heart of the Christmas message. May we all know its liberating power this year.