Bulletin Articles
“A Just Man”
Categories: Iron sharpens ironOne of the major failures of our society’s moral and ethical standards is that nearly everything is presented as a struggle between abject evil and unblemished righteousness. This arises from a well-meaning attempt to shun all that is bad, and at the most basic level it is simply the recognition that there are standards—that some things are right, and other things are wrong. But it leads toward the mistaken notion that there aren’t behaviors that are acceptable but ill-advised, or others that are good but not compulsory. The Bible provides us with a great many examples of people who demonstrate the value of going above and beyond, and the reason they deserve our respect, admiration, and imitation is precisely that they chose to do something better than the bare minimum of God’s expectations.
One such example is Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus. Although he appears in only a short segment of the Gospel story and we’re left to speculate as to exactly why he vanishes after Jesus’ childhood, his contribution to God’s beautiful plan for the salvation of man should leave an imprint on us. The first thing we learn about Joseph is that he wished to divorce Mary when she turned up pregnant—an understandable desire, given that he had every reason to be confident this child was not his!
“Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly” (Mt 1.19). We could shorten this sentence easily to simply say, “Joseph resolved to divorce her quietly,” and this raises the question: why include the bit about “being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame”? What does it add to our understanding of the events in question? It’s an explanation, telling us the cause of everything else. We may paraphrase the sentence thus: “because Joseph was a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, he resolved to divorce her quietly.” Many of the less literal and more interpretive Bible versions render the verse just about like this.
But we’re still not there—how is Joseph’s righteousness the cause of what followed? Does it explain his desire to divorce her? Yes it does. He knows God’s standards, and has what in any other case would amount to absolute proof of his bride’s unfaithfulness. There are individual ramifications, of course, but it goes even beyond that. The Law of Moses made it very clear that God intended for each tribe’s land to be passed down from father to son, and not to permanently change hands from one tribe to another, one clan to another, or even one “father’s house” to another (as an even smaller division is labelled throughout the Law). Without knowing the parentage of this child, Joseph would risk violating this part of the law. Did the Jews generally bother to keep those commandments anymore? No. Consider that Joseph and Mary—of the tribe of Judah—lived in Nazareth, in the territory originally allotted to another tribe, Zebulun. Clearly, at some point along the way, those rules were mostly abandoned. Perhaps being conquered and deported a handful of times had a little something to do with that shift.
Nevertheless, we can tell from events a few months later in the story that Joseph still does his best to adhere to even this defunct portion of the Law.
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. (Luke 2.1-6)
He took his full-term pregnant wife all the way to his ancestral hometown of Bethlehem to be counted among the sons of David. Contrary to some interpretations, Augustus was not concerned in the slightest with each subject’s birthplace, nor did he require them to take a break from their lives and travel there for the census. A couple of Bible versions insert at least an implication to the contrary, but it’s just not in the actual text. What Luke says is that each man went “to his own town”—not his birthplace or ancestral home, but the local polling location. Joseph is the one who decided he ought to make the 90-mile trip on foot with a heavily pregnant wife to be counted in the city of his ancestor David. That’s going above and beyond, and not to please the emperor, but to please God!
That brings us back to our question from earlier: how is Joseph’s righteousness the cause of his wanting a divorce? We’ve now answered that. It was out of extreme respect for God’s law, and not just a selfish—if reasonable—concern for his own heritage. But there’s one more detail we’ve neglected. If all of this is the case, why do it “quietly?” The answer is right there in the verse: he was “unwilling to put her shame.” Why shouldn’t he put her to shame? Leave aside that Mary hadn’t actually been unfaithful—Joseph didn’t yet know that, and drew the most reasonable conclusion based on the evidence before him. But even though all the signs pointed to his bride being untrustworthy and unfit to be his wife, he still planned not only to respect God’s law by protecting both families’ heritage, but to hush the matter up, enacting the principle Peter would later remind Christians to observe: “love covers a multitude of sins” (1Pe 4.8).
Joseph is one of the final shadows and types, however faint, of Christ himself. The child he and Mary would soon raise in their home would eventually take that kind of sacrificial love to its extreme, actively pursuing the redemption, forgiveness, and salvation of billions who have broken faith with him. He went above and beyond, agreeing to give up his rights and suffer harm—even death!—so that you, who have been unfaithful to him, might not be put to shame.
Jeremy Nettles
