While he was trying to figure a way out, he had a dream. God’s angel spoke in the dream: “Joseph, son of David, don’t hesitate to get married. Mary’s pregnancy is Spirit-conceived. God’s Holy Spirit has made her pregnant. She will bring a son to birth, and when she does, you, Joseph, will name him Jesus—‘God saves’—because he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20-23)
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Understandably, Joseph was fidgeting and plotting. How to get everyone out of this mess that centered around a pregnant fiancé with a story that made no sense?
I’m imagining his internal dilemmas:
“She said Gabriel visited her.” (I’ve heard about Gabriel; does he make house calls?)
“She said that she has never been with a man.” (I didn’t do so great in Biology class, but I at least know how ladies get pregnant.)
“She said I’ve got to believe her!” (Do I even know her that well? Our parents arranged the marriage. Whether that was the way the marriage came to be or not, we don’t know, but it was likely.)
And on it went.
Maybe he was laying on his mat, and his mind turned over the basics regarding where people come from. People didn’t happen by accident. There was an event that started an undeniable, verifiable process, as old as the human race, that brought these people into being. And the fruit of that process was all around him. He could see in his mind’s eye the crowds teeming and bustling for feast days. He could see a mother cuddling a young baby. He noticed that his neighbors had 10 children! In every situation, he knew where they came from. And as a young man, engaged to be married, he hoped soon after his marriage to “start a family”, as they say. But Mary said that their family was already started? And yet “the process” that he and every other adult knew about, was not in play? Did she seriously expect him to believe that?
While I can imagine that his mind and heart were filled with various ruminations like these, including the great ‘whodonit’ question, he has a dream. Not just a ‘normal’ nighttime dream, where he’s talking with a boyhood friend he hasn’t seen in a while, or he’s running away from his first-grade teacher because he hasn’t done his homework. This is a dream that God uses to speak to him. A prophetic dream. A word-from-God dream. A dream in which an angel delivers a message.
An angel!? You mean, a messenger-from-God angel? Yes. And that’s what ‘angel’ means, ‘messenger.’ Come to think of it, Joseph might have said, “That’s how Mary said this all started. An angel visited her.”
We aren’t told the details of the physical appearance of the angel nor of how Joseph recognized that this being was an angel. The text simply says that an angel appeared to him. And from his ensuing response, there was no doubt that Joseph understood who this was.
The angel’s appearance was startling and attention-getting. The message even more so: Mary’s pregnancy is Holy Spirit-conceived.
God intervened at just the right time. While Joseph was shaking his head over her insistence of where this baby came from, and while he was making plans to divorce her, God Almighty sent a messenger with news regarding the most important upcoming birth in the history of the world.
Aren’t we glad that God confirmed his actions? The record of Scripture is that God does this over and over. In this instance, God didn’t just present a pregnant virgin to the world, and expect her husband-to-be to accept this joyfully, and then immediately start drawing up woodworking plans for the crib, that he the carpenter-father will build. God knew that this far-fetched, one-of-a-kind conception would be hard to swallow. So, he sent an angel to the scared husband to make a sacred announcement, and that announcement shattered his doubts: the baby has been formed by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary.
Joseph did not receive a thorough explanation as to how that happened. He was simply told that it had, and he was to act without hesitation to move the relationship process from engagement to marriage. Banish any thoughts of divorce.
Don’t doubt, Joseph! God is at work here! The One who has conceived the baby in Mary will take care of the details that lie ahead.
“Father, help us to trust you at all times. We confess our need for your help when you show up with something that seems so hard to get our heads around. Thank you for reminding us that you work in ways that are higher than our ways, and that sometimes you do so with a bigger purpose in mind than just our personal well-being and comfort. As in Joseph’s case, it was a purpose that would literally change the world.”
Freddy Boswell 