December 21, 2025
The Two Gifts of Joseph
Matthew 1:18-25
Christmas is only four days away and we have come to the end of Advent.
In our house at holiday meals, there is usually more than one dessert. When the person serving asks “which dessert would you like?” the answer is very often “a little of both.”
That’s my approach to Matthew 1:18-25 this morning.
This text offers two gifts we can receive as we conclude Advent. One is pastoral and spiritual, one theological and historical. Both are anchored in Joseph’s story, both inform our life of faith.
So, let’s have a little bit of both. Pray with me.
We’ll begin with Joseph’s story.
Mary and Joseph are betrothed. They are not yet living together, but their relationship is legally binding. Mary is pregnant. Joseph knows he’s not the father. It is a scandal and a disgrace in that small, religious, traditional town.
Matthew tells us Joseph is a just man, and that shows up in his response. He doesn’t ignore what he believes is sin. He is no doubt crushed, humiliated, and takes it very seriously. But neither does he press the law to the fullest extent and seek the ultimate penalty.
He’s merciful and compassionate and plans to “dismiss her quietly” to protect her and maintain his own integrity.
Joseph wrestled and deliberated and prayed. He has turned it over in his mind. He has weighed justice and mercy, law and love. He resolved. Decision made. He finally fell asleep.
Matthew 1:20 – “Just when he had resolved to do this.” The Greek word means a completed mental action. He’s done deciding. Not wrestling anymore. Then – only then – the angel appears in a dream. The scene is so beautifully depicted on the cover of the bulletin, as a young girl appearing to an older man who has fallen asleep in his chair.
I wondered reading the story this week, why did God wait until then? Why not spare Joseph this agony, this feeling of betrayal and humiliation? Why not rescue him from the complexity of this discernment?
John Calvin asked this question too, and Calvin perceived God’s goodness in this timing. That this timing was for us, so that Joseph would be a reliable witness for us.
Had Mary told Joseph she was pregnant by “divine intervention,” it’s so absurd he would have been a laughingstock. Had it been a public debate, then Joseph’s motives for believing a divine message himself would have been suspect. People might say he claimed to have a dream so he could save face.
So Joseph wrestled alone, out of sight of neighbors, unaware of Mary’s knowledge. Then he changed course by divine messenger. Unpressured by public humiliation, he is a more reliable witness to us that this is how it happened.
God was not late in getting to Joseph…but neither was God too early.
It is very rare that God spares us from the work of wrestling through. I have wrestled through difficult decisions, as have you. You know how it feels, how hard it can be. I’ve had times when I deliberated, weighed options, made lists of pros and cons, talked with others, prayed, fell asleep and woke up again in the middle of the night. And finally had to decide, without ever feeling like God had spoken clearly. You too have been there.
Yet even when we struggle and wrestle and agonize, even God is out of sight, God is there. God sees. God is in the wings with God’s own purposes… not too early but never too late. God comes to our help at just the right time.
Sometimes it is only when we have exhausted ourselves with debating and wrestling that God speaks. Sometimes it only when we have come to the end of our own wisdom, that God speaks.
“When Joseph awoke…he did as the angel commanded.” It’s a complete pivot. A complete change of direction. His obedience is immediate. No hedging, no delay, no more wrestling.
I think this is where Joseph’s righteousness shines brightest. His initial plan was merciful and kind, and that was good. But it his willingness to be redirected by God that shows us what a faithful person he is.
People of faith can sometimes be rigid. (Presbyterians?)
Faithfulness means we must be open to God intervening in our reasonable decision making. We must be open to the Spirit’s unfolding revelation that turns our well-settled opinions and judgments upside down. “I know it adds up to this, but now do this.”
Some doors close, other pathways open. The ground shifts after we thought we had decided, and the Spirit says otherwise.
We must travel by faith – it has always been so, from Noah, to Abraham, to Joseph, to us.
Joseph models for us a faithful, nimble, attentive posture with God.
Joseph’s discernment is the first gift on our plate. But like a good holiday dessert table, there is more one good thing in this text. Now let’s move to the second gift, and have a little bit of both.
Joseph had a powerful encounter with the living God. Joseph changed his mind because of what the angel revealed. Who was Joseph encountering that night? What was God offering him? And why does it matter what Joseph believed about this child?
Notice Matthew’s emphatic repetition. Verse 18: “she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” Verse 20: “the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Plus, the prophetic fulfillment: “Emmanuel – God with us.”
Matthew is insisting on this. He knows it sounds scandalous and suspect and irrational. So, he emphasizes, repeats, underscores. He wants to say something theological.
God is entering human existence. This is incarnation.
If Jesus is merely a good man blessed with divine inspiration, well he’s in a long line of prophets and we can try to follow his moral example. If Jesus is God wearing a human costume, but not really human, then he never really entered our situation and can’t reach us where we are or understand our suffering.
Only if Jesus is both – fully God and fully human – can he be God with us. Only one who is human can reach us where we are. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God.
That’s why Matthew stresses “from the Holy Spirit” twice. That’s why the church has stood on this ground for centuries.
This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, where bishops gathered in 325 AD to settle a fundamental question: Who is Jesus? Can we spend a few minutes on a history lesson?
Christianity had just become legal in the Roman Empire. But the church was fracturing over this question, who is Jesus?
Arius of Alexandria had a compelling answer. He was learned, charismatic, had a very high view of God the Father. God the Father, he said, is singular, transcendent, almighty, absolutely unique. But then, he said, God the Father is so unique and almighty, there really can’t be two Beings like that.
So Arius came to this conclusion: Jesus must be a step down from God. A step up from us to be sure, but a step down from God and still technically a creature. Arius’s followers famously said that this meant: “There was a time when he was not.”
This seemed attractive to many. It was clear, monotheistic, and easy to understand. Many bishops were sympathetic. But a man named Athanasius and others saw the deeper problem. If Jesus is merely a creature, how can he save us? Can a created being unite us to an uncreated God?
So Athanasius argued: “Only God as a human person could restore the human race to communion with himself.”
The controversy came down to one Greek letter: iota, like our letter “i.” The Greek word without that letter meant that Jesus was God. But when you put that little letter in, it meant Jesus was almost God. They fought over an “iota’s” worth of difference.
The Emperor Constantine personally considered this “extremely trivial,” “a very silly question.” He just wanted a deal. He just wanted Christians to agree so they could the empire grow. But the bishops knew this was not trivial. The debate was so fierce, it came to blows.
Nicholas of Myra punched Arias of Alexandria in the face. You know Nicholas of Myra. We call him “Jolly Old Saint Nick.”
After a fierce debate, the Council of Nicaea adopted what became the Nicene Creed. They invented words and searched for new ideas to express this central thought that God can be Three in One, not a hierarchy but a relationship.
The Council adopted this statement: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” No one even knows what “begotten not made” even means, except it means this mystery: that Jesus is God and has been from the before the beginning.
The Nicene Creed, in my opinion, is too long. When I see it show up in worship, I brace myself because it reads like a legal document, and it was legal document at the time. Every phrase was crafted to close a theological loophole. But this 1700th anniversary gives us chance to celebrate it, and to understand what our forebearers in faith were fighting to say.
What they were fighting for is what Matthew insists on, what Joseph encountered that night: that Jesus’ divinity goes all the way down. God entered human existence at the cellular level. From the moment of conception, the son of Mary is God-with-us.
He is God-fully-with-us, without ceasing to be God. Only one who is fully God can unite us to God across the gulf of our brokenness. Only one who is fully human can reach us where we are and understand as we are.
Why would you give your life, your soul, your future to just another prophet, to just another inspired person? Jesus can’t be just human. Why would you trust and worship, in the face of all the suffering and evil of the world, a God who just dressed up to look a person, just another avatar?
Jesus must be the One who is fully human and fully God – that’s the only way he can be the Savior we need.
God does not send help from a distance. Not eternal principles to live up to, or timeless values to take to heart, or thoughts and prayers to get through the struggle. We are promised a God who is with us, who enters our human vulnerability.
We are promised God who accompanies us into the depths of brokenness. A God who goes into the depths of human hell. A God who comes in his own self to befriend us, and lead us, and bring us through.
Joseph put his future in the hands of God with us.
Here at the end of 2025, amid all the complexity and brokenness of our world, amid the pain and disorder in our own lives, this is still the promise: Emmanuel, God with us, as hellish as the world may ever become.
Here, on the winter solstice, when the night is longest, maybe like me you sit in the early darkness keenly aware that our terrible fears and our desperate hopes live side-by-side in the small human heart. This is still the promise: God is with us, all the way down.
How can we make the same reasonable calculations about what’s possible when this is the promise?
How can we forgive when rationality says they don’t deserve it?
How can we risk love when the math says the cost is too great?
How can we serve others, when the culture says just serve yourself.
How can we keep hope alive when the facts say it’s hopeless?
How can our calculations stay the same when Jesus is God with us?
If we believe what Joseph believed – if we confess what the church has confessed for centuries – that the divine entered human existence at the cellular level, that we are accompanied into our darkness and out of it – that when we see what Jesus says and does and undergoes, we see the very face of God – then we too must calculate differently.
One of my very favorite Advent hymns, one not in our hymnal, and one most have never heard, captures this so beautifully.
It tells us how to live like Joseph, as we await the coming of Christ.
For Christ to come again in glory and put everything right.
For Christ to come into our world and bring justice.
For Christ to come into our lives and bring peace.
View the present through the promise,
Christ will come again.
Trust despite the deep’ning darkness,
Christ will come again.
Lift the world above its grieving
Through your watching and believing
In the hope past faith’s conceiving,
Christ will come again.
Match the present to the promise,
Christ will come again.
Make this hope your guiding premise,
Christ will come again.
Pattern all your calculating
And the world you are creating
To the advent you are waiting,
Christ will come again.
Let it be so.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina