NOTES for Mat 1:24-25
What is family life? What is the measure of each spouse's participation in it? Different people answer this question differently, and one can hardly find two absolutely identical families. So much psychological and religious literature has been written on the subject of family relationships that today one could already drown in it. Meanwhile, it does not look as though family problems have become fewer because of this.
Perhaps because in these books, and often even in religious books, marriage is discussed as a union of two. But in fact it is never a union of two. It is always a union of three. A union in which God participates as the third, regardless of whether the spouses think of Him or not. And even regardless of whether they know about His participation. In this respect family life resembles human life in general: we become people thanks to the breath of life that God breathes into us at conception, but we can quite well live our life without remembering God even once. God is unobtrusive. 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, 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 correspondingly, the less He can influence our life. In our life God can do something only with our consent. There is also something that only He Himself can do in it. In that case we can only 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 were directed even a little by human will here, could only spoil the matter. It had to be given entirely into the power of God's will. Only He Himself could solve this super-task. From Mary only one "yes" was required, after which Her body was no longer in Her own power: it became the place of action of that divine breath to which everything is subject, even original sin.
And from Joseph, the adoptive father of the Messiah, 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. It depends on the parents how far 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 the angel of God. Joseph, who thanks to this "yes" became the adoptive father of the Messiah.