00:00:00:23 – 00:00:37:25
Clint Loveall
Hey friends. Welcome back. Happy Wednesday. We are one week from Christmas Eve and we are continuing, through tomorrow with a short series on looking at the Bible stories of Christmas in Matthew and Luke. If you were with us yesterday and sorry we had a little hiccup with some of our equipment here. But if you were with us, or if you’ve watched that since we began covering some of the characters that are mentioned in the story saving, I would I guess you’d have to say the big three for today.

00:00:37:30 – 00:01:07:17
Clint Loveall
Joseph? Mary and Jesus. Joseph. In some ways, although, yeah, we don’t know a great deal about Mary or Joseph. I would say that in my opinion, Michael pushed back. If you think this is overstated, I think both Matthew and Luke give us the sense of Joseph as an honorable person, particularly in the story, when he’s going to divorce her in, in Matthew.

00:01:07:17 – 00:01:35:20
Clint Loveall
But even in Luke, when he get, you know, he’s told, that he goes with her. And don’t be afraid to take her as your wife. We don’t know a great deal about Joseph. Tradition holds that he was a carpenter. Probably in the typical pattern of that day. Mary is likely, an older teenager, perhaps 16 to 19.

00:01:35:20 – 00:02:15:47
Clint Loveall
Somewhere in there. Joseph is likely upper 20s to low 30s. That would have been a kind of ordinary coupling. So he probably a little bit older than she is. We don’t get we don’t hear from him. At all do we get Joseph say, I, I can’t think of the word, but but we do get the impression in both gospels that he is faithful, that he’s compassionate, that he genuinely cares for Mary.

00:02:15:52 – 00:02:26:53
Clint Loveall
In the instance where he’s not going to get her subject to public ridicule. But handle that quietly. So, an interesting character, the one we don’t know a great deal about.

00:02:26:58 – 00:02:56:30
Michael Gewecke
So I do think that Joseph is, is fascinating for a lot of reasons, because the truth is that Joseph is an important part of this story. And yet also and simultaneously, Joseph is not a principal part of the story, but does need to be present for, I think, some structural reasons. Let me say that more clearly.

00:02:56:34 – 00:03:27:12
Michael Gewecke
Here we have this angel that comes. We have the prophet being quoted this idea that the virgin shall conceive and bear a son. They shall name him Emmanuel. We spoke yesterday about the importance of prophecy being made again, that God is speaking. And here the idea that God is speaking to Joseph in a moment in which he is the full lawful right to dismiss Mary.

00:03:27:25 – 00:03:56:25
Michael Gewecke
Yes, there’s a note of character about that. He wants to do this in a honoring way, in a wise way, and in a way that is in her best interest, but yet that he, we are told, is considering this. And what is striking here is after this dream, he awakes and he takes Mary as his wife. And then I think verse 25 is really important here because it helps us see that the gospel writers are doing a lot of things at the same time.

00:03:56:25 – 00:04:19:03
Michael Gewecke
But on one hand, they’re helping to explain to us, the reader, how it is that Mary and Joseph are together, that write that ultimately, how is it that Joseph is going to be serving as Jesus’s earthly father? And yet also here we see very, very clearly verse 25, but he has no marital relations with her until she’s born.

00:04:19:03 – 00:04:30:30
Michael Gewecke
The son, Matthew, wants it to be abundantly clear. Make no mistake, this this wasn’t a pre marital accident, that this is the miracle.

00:04:30:30 – 00:04:32:44
Clint Loveall
There’s no other explanation, right. Yeah.

00:04:32:47 – 00:04:59:42
Michael Gewecke
And that’s a direct question that Matthew wants to answer. But by the way don’t miss this. Another question that Matthew wants to answer is why doesn’t Joseph dismiss Mary. Right. Like, ultimately an ancient person would have said, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa. What? Why would this woman who becomes pregnant, why would she then end up with the man that she was engaged to if it wasn’t their child together?

00:04:59:42 – 00:05:32:16
Michael Gewecke
And here Matthew’s answering both of those questions with this story, in this gospel narrative. And I think, Clint, just to name this, are we as modern people, sometimes practice unneeded arrogance? We had a comment in the previous video that we released here in the last couple of days, one of these Christmas ones, where a person said, well, Mary made it up that the commenter was just basically, well, obviously Mary made up well, I just wanted to point out in the context of this study, everybody that’s not like that’s new to Christian, right?

00:05:32:16 – 00:05:44:24
Michael Gewecke
Like you might think that that is a new idea. No, Matthew has built into this gospel the answer to some of these things, because they have been there as long as the stories existed. Sure.

00:05:44:29 – 00:06:16:19
Clint Loveall
And just a little bit about the context, because I do think that helps in Mary and Joseph’s day. The breaking of an engagement or an affair upon an engagement was considered adultery, and it would have been rare. But technically, Mary could have been taken to trial and one of the possible judgments would have been execution. Now that the Jews aren’t necessarily free to practice that under Roman law.

00:06:16:22 – 00:06:44:00
Clint Loveall
But but that’s in that’s how seriously that is. And we often think Michael of Mary taking this leap of faith. You know, we get that wonderful thing in Luke. Let it be done to me as you have. But Joseph, in his own way, takes a leap of faith as well. Certainly, that we we have to say it’s not quite the same as as Mary.

00:06:44:01 – 00:06:44:33
Michael Gewecke
No. Great.

00:06:44:43 – 00:07:26:12
Clint Loveall
But this upends his life as well. It brings him lots of questions, lots of uncertainty. This isn’t easy for anybody. And I think that Joseph commits to Mary that he is obedient to what the angel tells him, that he follows through, that there are many signs of Joseph being elevated and and while not a primary character even in this part of the story, and certainly not in the gospel itself, I do think he is important and, in his own way, celebrated.

00:07:26:16 – 00:07:53:45
Michael Gewecke
Well. It’s a kind of celebration in which he and his actions are an essential answer to God’s invitation to Mary. Right when Joseph says yes to God’s action. Yes. It’s not about burying this child, but it is to make a home for God’s son. It is to be the kind of person who will be a caretaker of God’s gift to the world within that home, and that is a substantial gift.

00:07:53:45 – 00:08:21:29
Michael Gewecke
And quite frankly, one of the interesting parts of Joseph’s story is how we hear about him at the beginning of Jesus’s story. We’re going to hear about Mary at the end of Jesus’s story, but not Joseph. We’re not going to get, continued sort of touch point about what happened to his life. And so biblical scholars, quite frankly, they look back at church history and they make some speculative, you know, comments or they try to explore what might have happened to Joseph.

00:08:21:34 – 00:08:51:00
Michael Gewecke
But the fact that the gospel writers want to include him at the beginning makes it clear that they want us to know that Joseph was there for the birth of Jesus, that he was an important part of this first family, and that in that practice, God gave Joseph an important job, because though he wasn’t Jesus’s biological father, as the gospel writers tell us, he was the one who would exercise parental authority in Jesus’s life growing up.

00:08:51:00 – 00:08:52:50
Michael Gewecke
And that is significant.

00:08:52:55 – 00:09:14:52
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And in Matthew, which you would expect, we kind of talked about that. He’s the one that gets warned in the dream to flee Herod and go to Egypt. So, certainly an important character, a character that we honestly wish we knew more about. It would be fascinating to hear more of Joseph story. The Scripture is not into giving us a lot of backstory.

00:09:14:52 – 00:09:44:54
Clint Loveall
It kind of tells us what it thinks we need to know and right. It doesn’t get too distracted by the things that we wish it included. But, that’s Joseph. We move on from there to, in some ways, the, you can’t say central character of Christmas, but very near the center you have Mary or the Virgin Mary, which is itself a claim to fight back those accusations.

00:09:44:54 – 00:10:23:38
Clint Loveall
As you mentioned, Michael, we of course, as Protestants, as Presbyterians, we don’t do with Mary what our Catholic friends, Catholic brothers and sisters do who have, developed a very deep and very powerful theology of Mary, much of which might make us uncomfortable. But I wonder if there’s a sense in which, when we distanced ourselves from some of that, we we maybe don’t give Mary sometimes the credit.

00:10:23:38 – 00:10:51:56
Clint Loveall
I mean, this young woman stands before God with the world, the universe in the balance and says, yes. And then, particularly in Luke, this beautiful song of praise that she offers, again, we we don’t know as much as we wish we did about this young woman. But what we do know very much makes her seem remarkable.

00:10:52:01 – 00:11:18:27
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I was going to share a very similar sentiment. I think you got to be careful with this language, especially when we’re talking about the birth of Jesus. But the Protestant church maybe threw the baby out with the bathwater a little bit here, because at the end of the day, there is a lot of theological debates that at time of reformation had progressed and evolved.

00:11:18:27 – 00:11:55:15
Michael Gewecke
And we we’re not going to trace all that here today, but some of the stuff that was really concerning then is not the particular conversation we’re having now. And I think the thing that needs to know that now is that for young women, Mary is a substantial point that God has chosen to use human life as the entry point for our salvation, and that required a woman who would submit, a woman who would say, yes, a woman who would allow God to begin this plan even within her.

00:11:55:26 – 00:12:19:34
Michael Gewecke
That is a kind of vulnerable, a kind of trusting, kind of faith filled, kind of at the risk of your own body choice. And when we talk about faithfulness and we talk about discipleship, we talk about being the kind of people that follow God. We’re not as Protestants. We’re not going to put Mary in some kind of spiritual pedestal, because we don’t find that kind of conception helpful.

00:12:19:39 – 00:12:41:11
Michael Gewecke
But it would be foolish, I think, to not look at Mary and see in her all of the hallmarks of faith that we would be proud to have in our own lives. The willingness to say yes, the willingness for that to be at our own cost, not knowing what the cost will fully be, and yet trusting that God will be faithful to us in the midst of that task.

00:12:41:22 – 00:13:00:39
Michael Gewecke
Mary represents that in a human concrete way, and and she is a woman which in the time in which this is written in Jewish culture, that this matters it this is a lifting up of her and her faith in the way that we should celebrate, even if we don’t, you know, put her on a pedestal.

00:13:00:41 – 00:13:24:55
Clint Loveall
Yeah. I mean, these beautiful words here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word, that there is no partnership like this between God and the human being. God has called prophets. God has called kings and priests. God has called people to live beyond themselves. He’s called Moses to set people free.

00:13:24:55 – 00:14:05:08
Clint Loveall
And yet this stands as the pinnacle of God and a young human woman literally partnering to bring about the birth of the Messiah and the salvation of the world, that there’s nothing there’s nothing else like that. And. Many of the arguments about Mary historically have been theologically based. Right. Could Mary have somehow been exempt from sin so that she could have borne Jesus?

00:14:05:13 – 00:14:38:21
Clint Loveall
Did Mary ever then go on to have other children or have intercourse with Joseph? The Catholics have leaned toward protecting Mary from the idea of maybe normalcy or humanity. We live on the other side of the fence, and I think we have celebrated Mary’s humanity. That that the thing that makes Mary special is that God chose her and she agreed.

00:14:38:25 – 00:15:13:14
Clint Loveall
And she had swollen ankles when she had a baby. And it hurt when she learned to nurse. And she wasn’t somehow divinely protected from the realities of being a human being. God participated in them with her. And it’s it’s interesting that in the Protestant understanding of Mary, in the Catholic understanding, Mary, I, I do think you almost see it an attempt to make her somehow protect her from her humanity.

00:15:13:19 – 00:15:35:08
Clint Loveall
And on the other side, where we are. But and the idea of embracing her humanity and I think, obviously, because that’s where we’re comfortable, we’ve been more able to see that side of things. But this is, she is at the heart of the story. I mean, obviously, you have to say Jesus is at the middle of it.

00:15:35:13 – 00:15:43:05
Clint Loveall
He is the center of it, the origin of it. But it starts with Mary. Well, it starts with God. And then Mary’s there, too.

00:15:43:10 – 00:16:11:16
Michael Gewecke
I think that looking at the end of Jesus’s story is an important way of seeing the significance of Mary in the beginning, because the gospel accounts tell us that as Jesus is hanging on the cross, he gives voice to behold your mother. I take care of my mother. There’s a love, a compassion, a connection with Mary that she matters to God that the gospel wants to tell us.

00:16:11:16 – 00:16:45:09
Michael Gewecke
Jesus is God and Jesus loves Mary as a mother. That is not insignificant and we shouldn’t just brush it away. That doesn’t mean that you need to accept all the theological that’s that’s a conversation that we can let people with with higher degrees handle. The point here today is Mary is someone who any Christian who understands this story should admire and look up to and see deep faith in and whenever we see that kind of deep faith, we should be moved by it.

00:16:45:14 – 00:17:10:42
Clint Loveall
All human relationships have their complexities, but if you’re fortunate enough to have had a good experience with your own mother, just think for a moment of those realities in Jesus life, the Savior of the world, the incarnate Son of God. She made him lunch. Yeah. She tucked him in. She gave him a bath. Right there. Is this again?

00:17:10:42 – 00:17:42:27
Clint Loveall
This humanity in this story that is sometimes overshadowed by the the star and the miracle and the the crucifixion and the resurrection. But in between there there is a time where Mary and Joseph are the caretakers of God, the caretakers of the incarnate one. And, you have to be careful because you can get you can probably take some of those ideas too far, but they are profound when you give them a little thought.

00:17:42:32 – 00:18:10:55
Michael Gewecke
And it’s striking, Clint, that the very little we know about Joseph from the Christmas story and the little bit more, I think you’d argue we know about Mary from The Christmas Story. If you want to put all that in conversation. What we know about the baby, the actual baby, the physical description of that baby, the actions of that baby, friends, when you want to talk about the child who’s in the manger, the scriptures do not have interest in telling us about that.

00:18:11:00 – 00:18:29:00
Michael Gewecke
You can look at other throughout all of history the birth of princes and the birth of kings. And there’s always a description about how good looking they are, how much color they have. You know, how healthy of a baby they’re. The scriptures are not interested in that baby in that description.

00:18:29:13 – 00:19:05:42
Clint Loveall
Other than the spiritual parts of the story. His name Joshua, God saves what we call Jesus. The Emmanuel God is with us. The the, the one and really only significant thing we get told about Jesus, the baby he got wrapped in cloth. Yeah, that’s the one detail that we actually know from the story. And and again, in an era where the second a child is born, we have 150 pictures, right?

00:19:05:54 – 00:19:41:11
Clint Loveall
We’re sending videos, we’re posting it on Facebook. It it’s probably unfathomable to us how little this scripture gives us in regard to the physical child that was born. What that child means and who that child is in the grand narrative is very important to the Bible, but the details curly hair, straight hair, have a mole. Eyes open, cried a lot, didn’t cry a lot.

00:19:41:16 – 00:19:56:51
Clint Loveall
Stubborn. We just. And the church has been fascinated. So people have written stories and but we we just don’t know. And nor really do we need to. It’s fun to think about, but ultimately not something we, we need to be aware of.

00:19:56:51 – 00:20:22:12
Michael Gewecke
Well, but but that’s the final point I want to make here today, Clint, is that we might think to ourself, well, that’s a really big, glaring missed opportunity church. But you might be surprised to know that amongst the early, early Christians there were accounts of the baby Jesus written and disseminated. Christians had in front of them many things that were written that that didn’t make it in your Bible.

00:20:22:12 – 00:20:45:52
Michael Gewecke
The Christians knew of these things, and when it came down to asking and discerning and praying, it was decided remarkably early in history that we didn’t need that stuff, that those accounts were either left out or they were discounted in their origin, that this is intentional. What we’ve received and the little that we know about Jesus should be.

00:20:45:57 – 00:21:08:57
Michael Gewecke
When you think about what Christmas is in the 21st century, when you when you think about the how monumental it is in stores and traditions and rituals and practices of all kinds, and then you learn, nope, this is it. This is all we needed. This is what they intentionally left in and also left out. This thought provoking.

00:21:09:01 – 00:21:32:54
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And as much as we love the narrative of, you know, some special person and some parent or relative saying, oh, we could tell they were special when they’re born. Babies are babies right here. We do. You know, you can’t. Yeah. I mean, you’re your own kids. They’re beautiful, of course, but realistically that they’re babies and and that’s where we start.

00:21:33:09 – 00:21:59:30
Clint Loveall
That’s where we start with this story, which is in itself the greatest detail and the most surprising detail. Whether Jesus had a lot of hair when he was born or not pales in comparison to what Luke and Matthew want us to know about this Christ child, the Messiah child, which again itself is a strange combination of words.

00:21:59:34 – 00:22:22:30
Michael Gewecke
Babies are vulnerable today. Babies were especially vulnerable in the first century, but also, Matthew wants you to know that Herod had it out, for Jesus in fact sought him out. And so the fact that we don’t know a lot about Jesus, but that the gospel writers want us to know explicitly, God took on the most vulnerable human form for us.

00:22:22:35 – 00:22:33:21
Michael Gewecke
That’s when you start getting to the heart of what Christmas is trying to tell us. It’s not about the description of the baby. It’s about what God is willing to do to enter into this life, into this world.

00:22:33:21 – 00:22:36:15
Clint Loveall
And this baby’s going to change things.

00:22:36:19 – 00:22:43:39
Michael Gewecke
Never goes back. Yeah. Thanks for being with us. Look forward to seeing you as we, conclude this series tomorrow. Give this video a like it helps others find it in their own study in the future.

00:22:43:42 – 00:22:44:31
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.

00:22:44:36 – 00:22:45:05
Michael Gewecke
See you later.