With all that excitement that builds up for me, however, I find it necessary to restrict myself with regards to when I can get excited. I really try hard to not think about Christmas before Thanksgiving so that my Christmas excitement doesn't overpower anything before then.
HOWEVER
I've been thinking about Christmas a lot lately. I've been writing a Christmas puppet show for my church, so I've been listening to Christmas music and reading Christmas jokes and just generally spending a lot of time thinking about Christmas. Thankfully, I'm almost done. But since I'm on that train of thought, I started thinking about Joseph today, so I figured I may as well force you all to think about it too.
Thus, I humbly present for your consideration:
REHUMANIZING JOSEPHI'll warn you, this isn't going to be a happy friendly one.
From what I've seen, Joseph has been very romanticized in our culture. Usually, he is viewed as a very caring, loving adoptive father. He's viewed as a very willing parent to the newborn messiah and very open to raising this child that isn't genetically his.
But what if he wasn't?
The Bible doesn't talk much about Joseph. He's seen as being betrothed to Mary, planning to divorce her quietly, being visited in a dream by an angel, and told to go ahead and marry her. He has a couple more dreams telling them when they need to travel, but after that he's pretty much only mentioned with Mary or not at all.
And with ambiguity, I take the liberty of filling in the details as I choose.
Usually, the details are filled in very optimistically, but what if they weren't? What if we take a more pessimistic approach? What if Joseph was more of an absentee parent? This is how I will be looking at the narrative. Sorry.
Joseph is betrothed to a beautiful girl. He's excited about it. Until he finds out she's pregnant.
Obviously, the girl slept with someone else. And really, he couldn't blame her. He was nearly twice her age. But he still cared about her. More importantly, he still cared about his own reputation. If he were to divorce her without anyone finding out, he could keep from anyone making the connection that she cheated on him. Just maybe, they would think that she had simply had sex with someone prior to marriage. Not the best scenario for her, but it was the best he could do.
Then, one night, he's visited in a dream by an angel. This incredibly intimidating figure tells him that he should still marry her. What could he do? He couldn't say no to someone who could transcend all the laws of the universe and enter directly into his mind!
So he married her.
When the child was born, he tried hard to care for the child. He wanted to be a good father, but he felt trapped. He knew the boy wasn't his. By rights, he owed this boy nothing, but he was trapped. He couldn't divorce her now that there was a kid. What would people think? More importantly, what would the angel do?
As the boy grew up, Joseph became more and more aware of the fact that this boy wasn't his. He didn't look like him. He didn't act like him. Joseph had both feet firmly planted on the ground while this boy was flying high with his head in the clouds. This was not his son, and he knew it. But no one else did. So this kid was going to get his inheritance.
After all, the world thought the boy was his.
He had several more sons, and desperately wanted to reveal the truth so that HIS son could get what was rightfully his. But his reputation. And the angel.
He couldn't do it.
That didn't mean he had to treat this boy like a son.
I'm going to leave the rest of this to your imagination, because in my mind, it gets very dark from there. In the modern retelling, following this line of thought, Joseph becomes an alcoholic and eventually dies trying to tell the truth as he does. It's super depressing.
For the record, I HATE this image of Joseph. I think it's awful. Unfortunately, it's something that some people have to go through. Who's to say Jesus didn't have to go through it too? If you notice, the title of this post has an "A" in it. "B" will be coming very soon: REDEEMING JOSEPH. I much prefer the image of Joseph that I will talk about in that one.
But think about it.
What if Jesus didn't have a happy childhood?
It's sad. It should be just as sad that it happens to anyone.
I promise the next one will be happy! It'll melt your heart and make it smile!
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