Emmanuel, God is with us. Christmas Vigil

Friends

    Peace be with you. 

    I am so glad to see all of you here tonight! Whether you are someone I see pretty much every weekend, someone I see occasionally, or someone I see very rarely, I want you to know how great it is that we come together this night/this day to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, son of God and son of Mary.

When I was in middle school, my parents took me on a vacation to visit my godfather who lived in Orlando. It was the first time I travelled on a plane. I can remember that plane ride because they weren’t certain one of the landing gears was down but, thank goodness, it was. It was also the first time I ever saw oranges and grapefruits growing on trees in people’s backyards. Both fruits even seemed to have a darker color coming directly off the tree. On the trip, my parents brought me to Sea World and we got to see many sea animals I’d never seen before. At the Orca or Killer Whale, show I noticed a man sitting with a very fancy video camera dressed all in black with a black mohawk and black sunglasses. I recognized him immediately as a professional wrestler named The One Man Gang. He was a meanie, one of the bad guys of the wrestling world. I pointed him out to my parents and my Mother gave me a piece of paper and a pen to get his autograph. I just shook my head, not because I was intimidated by his in ring persona, but because I thought to myself, “Why would someone famous want to meet me?” 

You see, as I shared in a bulletin column recently, this is one of my foibles. If I seem kind of snobbish or shy it’s because I don’t always think people will want to meet me. I suspect some of you are this way or maybe some of your kids or your relatives are this way. 

I would bet St. Joseph felt this way. In the Gospel of Matthew, which we just heard, he never says a word. In fact, as Deacon Robert correctly pointed out this past weekend, St. Joseph never says a word at any point in scripture. Yet, you get the sense that Matthew must have heard from St. Joseph, or someone who talked to St. Joseph, in order to write the gospel passage we just heard. At the time, there was a two step process for marriage, the betrothment and the indwelling. The betrothment isn’t exactly what we would consider being engaged in our culture. The couples would exchange promises in front of their family and friends and committ to a life together. Then, the husband would go off and build their house get a job or prepare a dowry to give to his future father-in-law. Then, after all of that was completed, which could take as long as a year or year and a half, the husband would come back and take his wife into his home and the two would, hopefully, build a family of their own. Our story is taking place between the betrothment and indwelling. During this time, Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant. Now, according to the Old Testament book of Leviticus, he could have exacted a capital punishment on Mary. It says that Joseph was unwilling to expose her to shame so he decided to divorce her quietly. He may have done this because he loved Mary and wanted what’s best for her by allowing her to go off and have the child in a place where no one would know. St. Thomas Aquinas and others thought that it’s also possible that Mary shared with Joseph the vision she received from the Angel Gabriel about how her son was to be special, a Son of God, and so Joseph thought to himself that he wasn’t important enough to be the father of such an important person so he was divorcing her so she could marry someone more important. 

If that’s true, it makes sense that the Angel had to visit Joseph in our gospel to explain that he has two important roles to play in this child’s life: first he is the one that will connect Jesus to King David. St. Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah in which it is prophesied “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” This passage also connects the Messiah to being a descendant of the Old Testament King David. Second, it is Joseph who is given the job of naming Jesus. The fact that he’s told what to name his son shouldn’t be seen as making St. Joseph any less integral. The name Jesus means “God saves”. Joseph will be the first to declare the salvation that comes through Jesus to the world and will clarify that the salvation will not come through a political dynasty like his ancestor King David tried but a salvation through the forgiveness of sins. 

Perhaps the most important thing that is revealed to St. Joseph is that, despite his feelings of unworthiness, his son would be the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah would be called Emmanual, or God is with us. Joseph would know that God is with us every time he looked on the face of his child. That means that, rather than having to search all over the world for a God playing hide and seek with us, we have a God who is with us. We may feel, like St. Joseph, that our lives are too sinful or too boring or too exciting or too whatever for God to care about us. But God is with us. He is with us in the Eucharist, in the real presence of his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. He is with us in the Bible, in the inspired Word of God given to the church to build up our faith. But he is also with us in the quiet of our prayer. He is with us in the smile of our wife or husband or children. He is with us to save us from our sins. God doesn’t care about prestige or power. He only cares about you. Please take some time today noticing the many ways God is with you.