Watch for the Spirit
Advent IV
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him 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.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
“Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”
When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.
Matthew 1:18-25
As we finish up this Advent season of watching and praying and preparing for the coming of Jesus Christ, we enter into the story of the first two people who ever watched, prayed, and prepared for the coming of Jesus. While Mary deserves her due, today I’m going to focus on Joseph because Matthew is the only gospel writer who gives us this particular glimpse into Joseph. We otherwise don’t know much about him.
While some traditions have imagined him as an old man, Scripture does not say this. He was actually very likely a quite young man, an age when a Jewish teenage man would be getting married. And while we know him from another part of the gospels as just a carpenter, some scholars have pointed out that the word for his vocation, tekton, was more of a “home builder,” or to us, a day laborer, a subcontractor doing whatever the job required. That would have often involved not only woodworking but also stone masonry. So rather than being “just” a carpenter, he was at least a carpenter.
A carpenter shapes wood into a creative vision, and has to work with the wood at hand. The only thing the wood “has” to do is bend to the carpenter’s will.
That is a phrase we are (rightfully) allergic to, “bend to their will.” It gives a negative connotation of people exerting undue, manipulative influence: “He bent to the will of the mob.” But if we can reclaim or reimagine that phrase for a minute, we can see that it describes something of nature that is also a model of spiritual development. Like all the wood Joseph would bend to his will as a carpenter, Joseph allowed himself to be bent and shaped to the will of God in response to the Holy Spirit, who he was hardly looking for.
Our fierce American independence insists that we don’t bend to the will and whims of tyrant kings and false gods. But we can trust God—not religion, but God—enough to bend to his will when we understand his vision. A master carpenter doesn’t just start without any idea what they’re making, improvise halfway through, and say, “Well, okay, I guess this can be a chair.” No, the carpenter knows that the dining room needs a chair and designs accordingly so that it fits into the home. God, the carpenter, had a vision for the salvation of humanity that involved a baby born in the midst of Roman-occupied Israel to a construction worker. His vision continues to surprise us despite our best intentions.
Joseph had every good, moral reason to act differently. Thinking Mary had betrayed him, he was ready to call it even by saving her from the disgrace of what he thought she’d done. This is something more noble than many would have done in his time, for as far as he knew, he was a victim of adultery. Joseph’s namesake, the original Joseph of the Old Testament, Jacob’s son, was himself made a victim of betrayal by his brothers who robbed him, then made a victim again through attempted adultery by Potiphar’s wife, then became a victim of a false accusation.1 God used that Joseph, the dreamer, and shaped him to his will for the flourishing of Israel, turning what was just a family into a true, full people of God.
To Matthew’s Joseph, God said wait a minute—first of all, no, you’re right, it’s not your kid. But not only are you not a victim, but you also have an important part of my vision, a crucial job to do in the story of my people. And so Joseph became one of our models for discipleship before Jesus even had disciples.
Likewise, for anyone hearing this, God did not just accidentally make you, but made you to play an important part of the story he is still writing. God did not stumble upon Joseph and Mary in his shop and just start whittling away without a plan until he came up with a Messiah. In Joseph, maybe he chose someone who worked with wood because at least a carpenter would know what it means to be good wood.
The invitation for you in this chapter of God’s story is to wonder, how will you let yourself be shaped by the Holy Spirit?
To do so, we want not only to watch for it and listen for it, but also to move with the Holy Spirit. Don’t just notice where the Holy Spirit is knocking on your door…let it move you to respond to what you hear.
The Spirit is always working somewhere, and often closer than you think. Sometimes you’ve been busy doing the right thing, with truly good and righteous plans like Joseph, and then the Spirit comes along with an even truer thing. They say “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and the road to hell would have been paved with Joseph’s good, gracious righteousness had he listened to them instead of the Spirit. He had no idea what the Holy Spirit was up to while it was working right beside him, so God made it clear.
Notice, though, that God gives Joseph a choice. Even better than a carpenter with wood, God doesn’t force us to do anything. He doesn’t actually bend us, he gives us an opportunity to respond to his grace. “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,” he says. Now, to be clear, this is not just like an advice column suggestion; he is also enjoined to obey. Yet we always have the option to obey a command or not, and that is one thing that makes us different than wood. Joseph had the option to take Mary or not. But when he understood what was at stake, and when he saw the undeniable movement of the Spirit at work, he knew, in the fullness of God’s love, he that he wanted to obey. If we could see God’s love in the same way, we would respond the same.
While Joseph had the privilege of an angel, sometimes God is not so loud. Elijah waited for God to show up in earthquakes and fires and a big show, but God spoke to him in a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19). Maybe you already have good plans and are ready to do the right and hard thing, like Joseph. But also, leave room for the Holy Spirit. Leave room for an even bigger truth speaking in a small voice. Watch yourself closely and watch for God even closer, for even when it seems like the right thing is ahead of you, the Holy Spirit may be redirecting us and shaping you towards greater things in heaven and earth than we could ever dream in our philosophy.
This Christ child would grow up. He would one day say to his fishermen friends, “I will send you out to fish for people.” (Matt 4:19). But the disciples did not realize they were the fish being caught in that moment. And God said to Joseph, “I will have you, O carpenter, help craft the most beautiful person by being his adopted father.” But Joseph did not really shape Jesus; rather, God was shaping his soul from the very moment he said “yes.”
None of us has always allowed our souls to be perfectly shaped and formed by the Holy Spirit at all times. We’ve had our personal visions, our laziness, our cowardice, things you’d maybe call our “woodliness.” We want to hand God our scribbled blueprints and parade them around to the world as if he has signed off on them.
But I believe all of us have at least sometimes been good wood. All of us, sometimes, have let God shape and form us and been quiet enough to be in communion with him and where he is working. Remember those moments. Meditate on them. All of us, I truly believe at least once, have fully obeyed God and known that it was good, even if we don’t use that word “obedience,” because we may also have an allergy to it.
Obedience is just about being good wood. Jesus himself was perfectly obedient, a paradox of the Trinity, the Son obedient to the Father, God obedient to God. It just means that he perfectly cohered and was shaped by his Father’s will. He was the perfect instrument to become the Savior. Scripture reminds us that he was “obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil 2:8), that this obedience directly reversed the original disobedience of humanity (Rom 5:19), and that we are invited to join with him in being shaped by God (Heb 5:8-9). Jesus never forces us to obey, but invites us into obedience that he first shared, only inviting us to be shaped in the way was he also shaped. In his life, Jesus was as perfectly obedient as a beautiful piece of wood, all the way until he was nailed to one, the perfect sacrifice for all of us so that we no longer have to sacrifice each other. That was the ultimate unexplainable work of the Holy Spirit that continues moving to this day.
Every day through the Holy Spirit, the God you have been waiting for, the God you have been praying for, the God who is in still your midst is still doing things we can’t possibly see and know. While we are not all gifted with the grace of an angelic alarm clock piercing open our dreams, listen for the voice who calls you, just as he called Joseph, “Set aside your righteous plans, Joseph, and let me do the work. I’m not asking you to move heaven and earth; I am moving heaven and earth. I am only inviting you to move with me.”
Yes, Joseph was at least a carpenter. Even better, he was a great piece of wood. May we be the same. Amen.
Genesis 37-50