Homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent, Dec. 21, 2025. Gospel of St. Matthew 2:18-24. Theme: A Father for the Son of God
In order to better understand today's Gospel, and St. Joseph’s dilemma, it helps to know a bit about ancient Jewish marriage. It had two parts: Betrothal and Wedding. When a couple became "betrothed" (a much different and stronger bond than our relationship of engagement) a marriage contract was agreed upon and signed. They were committed to one another with no way out except for a few very serious exceptions. However, they did not live together until the groom completed the necessary preparations to bring his wife into his home. And so the actual wedding proper was called the “Home-Taking”. Up until that time the couple were morally obligated to refrain from sexual relations.
So, when Mary became pregnant before the Home-Taking, she found herself in a very precarious situation that meant one of two things for her: at best, she would be shunned by family and villagers and at worst, she could be stoned to death on the legal grounds of infidelity. And thus, we arrive at poor Joseph’s dilemma. For him, it meant trusting Mary’s word and believing the unbelievable. For the people, it meant that Mary was unfaithful and should be publicly rejected by Joseph to preserve his own dignity and reputation.
But Joseph knew Mary better than anyone. He knew her virtue, her integrity, her goodness and her obedience to God’s Law. He knew very well what we would call her “holiness”. It just could not be possible in his mind that she had either been unfaithful or that she had lied to him. There just had to be another answer. We can well imagine the tossing and turning, the sweating and kicking of blankets that accompanied his fits of sleep that night!
But then God came to the rescue by sending Joseph an angel dream. Through this dream, he was assured that his intuition was correct and that Mary had been faithful. He was informed that the Child was of God. The dream showed Joseph a third way out of this dilemma; a way that saved Mary from gossip or death, but that would cast a dark shadow upon his own reputation. The angel directed Joseph to not only take Mary as his wife but to publicly declare himself to be the legal father of her Child.
Now, how would he do this? By standing up and holding the Holy Infant in his arms at the Jewish circumcision ceremony. And that time he would be the one to officially name the Child and in Judaism these two ritual actions meant that he was publicly declaring the boy to be his own son, legally if not biologically. It was Joseph’s perfect solution. Or rather, it was God’s perfect solution! He now had a new way of embracing the situation, ready and eager to take Mary into his home and be father to her heaven-sent Child.
However, Joseph’s love for Mary, his self-forgetfulness and compassion as a righteous man, moved him to carry out this noble act without any public explanation. And that’s key to his action. He did not specify the exact nature of his relationship to Jesus. This was his and Mary’s shared secret which they kept within the privacy of their spousal relationship. And so the villagers assumed that he was indeed the biological father. As a matter of fact, the Gospels will later on identify Jesus as "the son of Joseph" or "the son of the carpenter". And so the clueless villagers most likely gossiped that it was Joseph who was at fault for breaking the celibacy rule and not Mary. He was the one who could not wait until the “Home Taking”, but had jumped the gun with her, so to speak, forcing Mary into disregarding Jewish custom. And in their mind she, who was just another poor and humble village girl, had no choice but to comply.
Joseph's reputation was besmirched by this plan of action, but what mattered more to him was that Mary would remain innocent. This shows us that he was indeed a man of integrity, a man whose love moved him to sacrifice himself, no matter what the personal cost. As a man, as a husband and a father, I myself am deeply moved by the self-sacrificing love that St. Joseph had for Jesus and Mary. His plans for marriage took a wild turn that he didn’t expect. He freely sacrificed his desires for sexual intimacy and biological fatherhood, two things that are extremely important to a man, for the sake of Mary’s unique prophetic role as the Ever-Virgin Mother of God’s Son.
The Gospel today presents us with this noble and inspirational insight into Joseph as a husband and father whose love and devotion were so great that he was willing to take a fall for the sake of his family. As we draw closer to the celebration of the Nativity of the Lord, let's do our best to grow in our devotion to St. Joseph. We literally would not have Christmas without him! No wonder that it was this amazing man whom God himself chose to become his male role-model when he came to live in the flesh on planet Earth. And in response, Joseph devoted his whole life to simply being the best man that he could be for Jesus, thus earning him the right to truly be called “father to the Son of God”.
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