Advent – Relationalrealities

Image: The dream of St Joseph. Bernardino (Bernardino de Scapis) Luini (c.1480-1532)

This year, we return to Matthew as the gospel of choice in the three-year Lectionary cycle. Thus, Advent IV’s gospel opens with Matthew’s account of the events leading to the birth of Jesus. Matthew structures his birth narrative around themes specific to him. I want to offer a very personal take on Matthew’s understanding of the significance of Jesus’ birth.

For most of us, our sense of the nativity narrative emerges from an often unconscious compilation of Luke and Matthew, giving us the typical manger scene depicted in countless churches and nativity plays. In doing so, we miss the significance of each Evangelist’s distinctive portrayal of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.

Luke’s focus is on Mary. His birth narrative is Mary’s story, depicting a birth in farmyard conditions surrounded by sheep and cattle and witnessed by ordinary shepherds – representative of those on the margins of society – and of course, let’s not forget the angels.

Matthew’s version of events gives us Joseph’s story – the story of Jesus’ birth told from Joseph’s perspective. Matthew does not mention the setting. Here, there are no shepherds, no cattle or sheep. This is a birth witnessed not by ordinary people but by foreign emissaries – the Magi – representatives of the wider world’s homage to the infant king of the Jews. Matthew also has an angel, but Matthew’s angel appears not to Mary, as in Luke’s account, but to a dreaming Joseph.

The first point to notice in the Matthew chronicle is the importance of establishing Jesus’ identity within the long genealogy that extends back through Jewish mythological time to Abraham. Matthew spends 17 verses of his 25-verse first chapter to do this. So we notice from the outset how intensely a Jewish story this is.

The second point to note is that Matthew’s story is highly political, situating the birth of Jesus within the turbulent political context of 1^st-century Palestine. Here we have all the ingredients for a tense political drama – a brutal ruler in Herod the Great, the puppet of Roman occupation, whose murderous intent drives the Holy Family into exile as political asylum seekers. The Holy Family escapes, but every other-year-old male child born in the region of Bethlehem is slaughtered as Herod, alerted by the indiscretion of the Magi, endeavors to neutralize Isaiah’s prophecy of the birth of a rival king.

Matthew’s is a rich narrative, one that sets the birth of Jesus within a political context entirely familiar to us today in a world where literally millions of fathers and mothers with young children are daily forced to undertake the perils and dangers as refugees escaping in fear for their lives. And, Matthew’s birth narrative provides a contemporary flavor of the political and humanitarian themes embedded in his account. Matthew sets Jesus’ birth within the context of political oppression and of a ruler’s desire to seek out and punish anyone who poses a threat.

Matthew’s birth narrative also hints at the societal complexities of Joseph and Mary’s predicament. Matthew will go on to describe the holy family’s displacement and flight from political violence, but he must first skillfully navigate 1st-century Jewish societal reactions to surprise pregnancies out of wedlock.

Matthew’s approach to the Jesus story is told from within the Jewish patriarchal worldview of the men in charge. I have an intense personal unease with this feature of his approach. As a gay man, I learned early to fear the power of the patriarchy and to be deeply suspicious of the presentation of scripture through the exclusive lens of the men-in-change, in whose worldview there was no place for someone like me.

Richard Swanson is – at least to my way of thinking – a delightfully provocative biblical commentator who never misses an opportunity to take the patriarchal voice – that is, the traditional interpretation of scripture from the restrictive perspective of the men-in-charge – down a peg or two. Swanson coined the delicious phrase Holy Baritones to describe scripture’s patriarchal voice. My not infrequent uneasiness with Matthew’s voice is that, at times, he seems to me to epitomize the role of section leader in the Holy Baritone chorus.

It’s only in verse 18 that Matthew turns to the birth of Jesus. Having, as I’ve already noted, spent the first 17 verses of his 25-verse first chapter establishing Jesus’ identity at the heart of Jewish patriarchal transmission. Matthew writes:

When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child.

In a society with a strict prohibition against sex before marriage, which by the way is a central convention in all patriarchal societies, including our own until relatively recently, Matthew chooses to introduce the birth of Jesus by telling us that Mary was found to be with child.

Was found to be is a grammatical structure known as the divine passive. It’s a way of telling us that so and so happened while obscuring causality. For the Hebrew writers, it was a way of indicating that something had occurred by the hand of God without invoking the name that could not be spoken. Matthew makes clear that Mary’s pregnancy is the result of God’s hidden hand. Still, unlike Luke’s portrayal of a direct encounter between Mary and the Archangel Gabriel, in which God addresses Mary directly and respects her primary decision-making agency, the thrust of Matthew’s narrative suggests that, once Mary’s pregnancy is discovered, she no longer has any agency, with all decision-making reserved to Joseph.

Matthew presents Joseph in a predicament. His reputation, through no fault of his own, is endangered by this turn of events. A kindly middle-aged widower with a teenage betrothed, he is resolved to end the engagement quietly. What a mensch! But here’s my problem with Matthew’s Joseph-focused version of events. In a religious society with draconian laws against sex before marriage, Joseph’s risk is one of public disgrace. Still, Mary risks honor killing by being stoned to death – in the first instance by her father – and if he could not bring himself to do the deed, then by another male relative – an uncle, or brother, or male cousin conveniently waiting in the wings. The reality of honor killing is a nasty detail that the Holy Baritone voice skips over in silence.

So how is Joseph to be extricated from his predicament of being betrothed to a girl who has now been found with child. Matthew rescues Joseph through the tried and trusted literary device of an angel appearing to him in a dream, telling him not to be afraid. Afraid of what we might ask? – if not a reputational disgrace. The angel instructs Joseph to proceed with the marriage because it is God who has caused Mary’s pregnancy. On waking, Joseph dares to do as the angel had commanded him. After all, what’s social opprobrium when compared with divine displeasure?

We might expect Matthew to end his chapter here. Joseph the mensch rescues his betrothed by marrying her. But as a cheerleader for the Holy Baritone voice, Matthew is not done yet. He rather tellingly – to my mind at least – mentions that while Joseph married Mary, he declined to consummate the marriage until after the child was born.

Why does Matthew feel the need to tell us this? Well, one of the pervading themes of the Holy Baritone voice is a preoccupation with genital penetration and sexual purity. As today’s conservative obsession with the restriction of women’s reproductive, queer, and transgender rights continues to demonstrate, this preoccupation continues a story older than time.

Let’s listen again to Matthew’s voice:

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 borne a son, and named him Jesus.

Although Joseph did as he was commanded, we will never know how he actually felt; however, we have a hint of how Matthew thought he might.

Picture: St John’s Church, Little Gidding

Advent begins with a strange invitation. It’s an invitation not to hurry, to pause, to savor the stillness of the moment at the point where time feels different – where the past and future seem to lean in on us at the same moment.

We have the prevailing idea that time flows in a linear, one-way direction – from the past into the future. This idea of time normally serves us well in everyday functioning, yet it’s nothing more than a convention of thought that enables us to organize our lives.

At points of crisis, however, we often find ourselves in moments of stillness akin to the eye of a hurricane. Here we have an uncanny sense of timelessness – not of the unidirectional linear flow of time, but of something more akin to convergence. We sense the past and future converging into the stillness of the present moment.

On a bleak, grey, winter’s afternoon, the poet T.S. Eliot arrived in the out-of-the-way hamlet of Little Gidding, deep in rural Huntingdonshire, northwest of Cambridge. That quiet visit became the seedbed for the fourth and final section of his Four Quartets, which he completed as London burned under the steady rain of German bombs.

The village of Little Gidding resonates in the English High Church imagination. In 1625, after the loss of much of their fortune with the collapse of the Virginia Company, the Ferrar family retreated to their estate at Little Gidding. In 1626, Nicholas Ferrar was ordained deacon by Archbishop Laud. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud led the extrajudicial suppression of the Puritans, and it was only by the skin of his teeth that one Roger Williams managed to embark for Massachusetts with Laud’s commissioners hot on his heels.

On Monday, we will commemorate Nicholas Ferrar. Under his leadership, the extended family forged a brave experiment in spiritual community centered on the disciplined life of prayer, work, and pastoral care grounded in the Daily Offices of the Book of Common Prayer.

Although Nicholas died in 1637, the community continued under the leadership of his brother, John, and their sister, Susana Collet, until their deaths in 1657.

King Charles 1^st visited the community three times. The king made his final visit to the community where he sought refuge following the defeat of the Royalist Army by the Parliamentary forces at the Battle of Naseby in 1645.

Chilled to the bone by that miserable dampness that is the unique characteristic of the English winter, after his long and taxing wartime journey from London, Eliot, stood in the little church dedicated to St John the Evangelist, and sensed a timeless moment. Eliot opened the second stanza of his final quartet, aptly named Little Gidding, capturing his memory of that moment when wave met wave, past touched present, and present opened towards the future. He wrote:

If you came this way, taking any route, starting from anywhere, at any time or in any season, it would always be the same: you would have to put off sense and notion. You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid – here, the intersection of the timeless moment is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Eliot here is speaking of the experience of a moment in timelessness – when the past and future converge in the real-time of the present moment.

Timelessness, interrupting the linear flow of predictability – past touching future in the present, is precisely the spiritual landscape to be explored in Advent.

Advent is where time bends to flow back on itself —
where memory and imagination meet,
where under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present,
and God’s future leans toward us with urgency.

The voice of the prophet Isaiah conveys a sense of this divine urgency leaning into temporal time. In a vision of a future where swords will be beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and where nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

Isaiah is not describing a dream to admire. He is describing a future that demands our present-time participation!

He beckons us with: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

He does not say, let’s wait while we dream of a future better than the present. He commands us to walk now, conveying the divine urgency, leaning in to transform the future dream into something already shaping us in the present.

And here we are in 2025, a year when Isaiah’s vision feels both desperately needed and painfully elusive.

Wars continue to erupt and smolder. Political rhetoric grows sharper, more fearful, more chaotic. We face unprecedented technological acceleration with insufficient moral wisdom and the lack of a protective legislative and legal framework. We feel the low hum of climate anxiety amidst the quiet ache of rising social isolation and loneliness.

In such a world, Isaiah’s invitation is no abstraction. It’s invitation and instruction – it’s hope with boots on.

Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

Walk now before the world feels ready – before we have our act together – before we see the way ahead clearly enough to wrest its direction from God’s control.

Advent is a season of preparation. Yet, this is paradoxical. Jesus reminds us that there is nothing we can do to prepare ourselves to be ready. He invites us to simply remain awake, for we cannot know on what day the Lord is coming.

We wake up and stay awake, aware of the dangers of hardening our hearts against hope and allowing despair to shrink our imagination.

To be awake is to be alert to God’s urgency, leaning into the present time – in the moment we live in between Jesus’ birth and his return as the cosmic Christ in end-of-time glory. Here, past and future enfold in real-time punctuated repeatedly by acts of mercy and moments of courage, as the steady persistence of love is realized in the small actions of everyday life.

Traveling back to a drab and battered London, Eliot had felt the echo of Nicholas Farrar’s brave spiritual experiment. For him, the past leaned forward as the future leaned back. Right there, in that moment, something timeless broke through.

He wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

This is what it feels like when God’s future leans in upon the present and makes the ordinary shimmer with possibility.

At St. Martin’s, we catch glimpses of what it means to walk in hope before we fully see the way ahead. We are learning — slowly, steadily, faithfully — that hope is made real through service rooted in worship and prayer. Hope is something we make real, together.

We know what it is to rebuild community, deepening in worship and the renewal of ministries; to welcome newcomers with warmth, and to carry the flame of faith forward even when cultural winds blow cold.

Here, week after week, between font and altar, we open to the experience of that still place where the richness of tradition reconfigures to meet the challenges of the future. As we listen for God’s whisper we embrace hope as the antidote to the poison of despair.

Because even now, even here, in this community, with these people, in this moment, God’s dream, long promised, is already leaning in to take shape in us!

Tag: Advent

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