NOTES for Mat 1:24-25

What is family life? What is each spouse's share in it? Different people answer this question in different ways, and it is hard to find two completely identical families. So much psychological and religious literature has been written about family relationships that by now one could drown in it. Meanwhile, family problems do not appear to have become fewer.

Perhaps this is because in these books, and often even in religious books, marriage is discussed as a union of two people. In fact, it is never a union of two. It is always a union of three. It is a union in which God participates as the third, whether or not the spouses think about Him. Even whether or not they know about His participation. In this respect family life resembles human life in general: we become human beings because of the breath of life that God breathes into us at conception, but we can live our whole life without remembering God even once. God does not force Himself on us. He will not remind us of Himself if we ourselves do not want to remember Him.

And if we do remember Him, we will have to think about how much room in our life we are ready to give Him. This applies fully to family and married life, just as it does to life in general. The more self-will there is in our life, the less room there is for God with His plans and designs. And, accordingly, the less He can influence our life. God can do something in our life only with our consent. There are also things that only He Himself can do in it. In that case all that remains for us is to step aside, yielding the field of action to Him. This applies fully to the birth of the Messiah. He had to be born free from the power of the sin that entered the world with the fall.

Human nature, if it had been directed even a little by human will, could only have spoiled the matter here. It had to be given entirely into the power of God's will. Only He Himself could solve this supremely difficult task. From Mary only one "yes" was required, after which her body was no longer under her own control: it became the place where that breath of God acted, the breath to which everything is subject, even original sin.

And from Joseph, the Messiah's adoptive father, only one thing was required: to be near and not interfere with this action. Such is every conception: God always participates in it, revealing His presence and His action as much as the future parents allow Him to. It depends on the parents how much their child will belong to God. The Messiah had to belong to God absolutely. And the possibility of His birth into the world turned out to be connected not only with the "yes" Mary said to God, but also with the "yes" Joseph said to God's angel. Joseph, who through this "yes" became the Messiah's adoptive father.

Matthew, recounting the Annunciation, reveals to us this incomparable event through the person of Joseph, leaving Mary as if in the background. What moved the evangelist: only the patriarchal mindset characteristic of Israelites at that time, or was the less detailed account of Mary prompted by a delicacy that is hard for us to appreciate after many centuries of deserved glorification of the Mother of God? In any case, while giving thanks to the One who became the Mother of our Savior, let us not forget the one who was protector and provider: Joseph.

The account of the Annunciation lets us see that one can memorize the literal wording of an important text and still not understand its real meaning. For those who awaited the coming of a savior with the name Emmanuel, the sound of the name became more important than its meaning. Yet the meaning of the name Emmanuel, God with us, was revealed with the coming of the One whose name sounded different. Here we see one example of how, by being immoderately concerned with observing the form, one can miss the essence. This, however, does not cancel the importance of properly observing the form.

Today we celebrate a special service, the so-called Royal Hours or Hours of the Eve of the Nativity of Christ. At the Royal Hours we read several passages from the Old Testament, from the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the accounts by the evangelists Matthew and Luke of the Nativity. The most important thing in this unusual service is its emphatically Paschal character. In essence, it is almost an exact copy of those Hours that are celebrated on the day of Christ's death on the Cross, on Great Friday.

The Royal Hours both of Great Friday and of the Nativity of Christ were composed by Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem (d. 644) in the first half of the seventh century; their deep similarity is meant to mark the beginning and completion of God's saving action — the Nativity of Christ and His sacrifice on the Cross. These events reveal to us God's design as God's saving passage through our world, which is completed in the triumph of the Cross and the Resurrection.

And about why the Nativity takes place, St. Sophronius writes this: "As one descended from the line of David, Mariam was once being registered in Bethlehem with the elder Joseph while carrying in her womb the seedless Fruit; but when the time of the Nativity came, there was no place to stay, and the cave appeared to the Queen as a beautiful palace. Thus Christ is born in order to raise up His image that had fallen before." This means that the Nativity is the beginning of the way of the Cross, and this is exactly how the Church approaches it.

The readings before the feast of Christmas return us to the incredible and impossible event that has become ordinary and routine for us. God became man and walked the path appointed for each of us. When we speak about Christmas, the brightness and contrast of this event are too often blurred against the background of the rest of history. The human mind tries to fit the incomprehensible inside itself by simply treating the Incarnation as an ordinary thing. The best thing to do in this situation is to imitate Saint Joseph. That means accepting what is impossible for human beings but possible for God, and at the same time not treating God's incarnation as something self-evident.

Many of us often simply fail to notice Joseph the Betrothed. Sometimes we pray to him together with Mary, the Mother of God. And we understand that, since he was the foster father of Jesus Christ, he is of course a saint, yet we may never consider why he is a saint.

There is one thing that is hard not to notice: he listens to God and hears Him. This means that Joseph is constantly ready to obey God, wants to do His will, and prays a great deal, listening in prayer to what God will tell him. He takes Mary into his home, although doing so is shameful and dangerous, for people may think that she conceived a child by another man and was unfaithful to him. He agrees to the name Jesus, although the father usually chooses the name. He continually goes wherever God directs him.

We can ask Saint Joseph the Betrothed to teach us the listening prayer of a disciple, obedience, and trust in God, for he knew how to practice them.

Does origin matter for spiritual life or not? At first glance, the answer is obvious: of course not. Indeed, when we are talking about a person's relationship with God or with a neighbor, how important is it who his parents are and what nationality he is? Everything here is determined only by these relationships themselves. And the Kingdom is open to everyone who is ready to receive it, regardless of race, nationality, or religion.

And yet the evangelist gives a detailed genealogy of Jesus, beginning with Abraham. Of course, what matters here first of all is precisely that it begins with Abraham: the history of the people of God begins with Abraham. But on the other hand, through Abraham, according to the word of God, "all the clans living on the earth will be blessed." The Messiah was born a Jew, becoming the One through whom the promise God gave to Abraham was fulfilled.

And here the question of origin becomes precisely a spiritual question, not because God has favorites, but because someone must take responsibility for being God's helper in carrying out His purposes, and someone had to be born as the Messiah so that the Kingdom of God would become a reality. One people, one Messiah - for the salvation of all and of each person. And here origin turns out to matter: it obligates. It obligates one to take part in carrying out God's purpose. And to stay on the path that leads to the Kingdom.

Compared with Mark's Gospel, which we have already read, this Gospel brings completely new information: Jesus did not come from heaven already grown and immediately begin preaching; He was born into this world just as every human being is born. The Son of God truly became human, taking human flesh upon Himself in exactly the same way we receive it. That is precisely why everything He will later do will concern all of us, because everything will be done in human nature. And His name, Jesus, means God's salvation for all humanity. To illustrate and explain this absolute humanity of Christ, the apostle Matthew gives His genealogy, built from several sevens, the number of fullness, and placing Him in the context of all sacred history, the whole chain of Covenants between God and humanity. And the quotation from Isaiah completes it, and with it, all the Old Testament prophecies.

Today at the liturgy we read the whole first chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, which includes Christ's genealogy and the account of His Nativity in Bethlehem. The whole structure of this chapter is determined by a distinctive movement of the plot from Abraham, the forefather of the people of God, to the moment when Joseph gives the newborn Child His name: Jesus. On the feast day itself we will once again read the account of the Nativity from this chapter, and then the account of the adoration of the Magi. But today it is important for us to see this whole human history contained in the long list of names from Abraham to Jesus.

The evangelist Matthew, with his characteristic desire to systematize the information he presents, offers us a fairly conventional scheme of the movement of history, dividing it into three periods of fourteen generations each. It is clear that the numbers he gives are symbolic in character. In its details Matthew's genealogy differs from Luke's genealogy; this is connected with the features of the Jewish system of kinship and fatherhood. But these details are not what matters to the evangelist. Strictly speaking, he gives the genealogy of Joseph, the husband of Mary, who receives the Child born of her as his own and, to the end of his life, protects Him and serves Him. To a certain degree, this is the calling of each of us.

In speaking of the Nativity, the evangelist Matthew leaves the Annunciation outside the scope of his story and directs our attention first of all to Joseph's faith. Having believed the Angel, he rises above human weakness and limitation and becomes a participant in God's saving action. And in the person of Joseph, as later in the person of Christ's disciples, all humanity receives the Child Christ. For the Nativity is the finale of the whole history of falling away from God and seeking paths of return, the history of resisting God and the history of salvation. All human loneliness, helplessness, and mortality come to an end for us in the cave of Bethlehem, where the One is born who will remain with us always, to the end of the age.