Our Saviour will come

Joseph learns in a dream that Mary has conceived her child by the Holy Spirit

My sermon for the 4th Sunday in Advent, Year A:

"This is how Jesus Christ came to be born," says St Matthew, half way through the first chapter of his gospel. The events that he goes on to describe - St Joseph's dream, Jesus' miraculous conception and, later, the visit of the three wise men from the East, King Herod's murder of all the male children of the Bethlehem area and the Holy Family's flight into Egypt - are some of the most familiar images of the Christmas story.

The images are familiar, but they also make up a part of the whole gospel story which a lot of people are inclined to doubt or to regard as "myth". They think the events have a fairy-tale quality about them, rather than the quality of accurate historical reporting. And nowadays, especially, quite a few Christians share those doubts.

To try to answer or counter those doubts maybe the first thing we have to think about is Matthew's motives as a gospel-writer.

It would be wrong to assume that St Matthew sat down one day with the intention of writing a bit of interesting fiction about Jesus. He didn't compose his gospel out of the resources of his own imagination. The task he set himself was to faithfully commit to writing what the Christian community, which he belonged to, already believed about Christ.

And what the community already believed was that the coming of the Messiah, the whole life and mission of Christ and the beginnings of the Church was a period of very special activity by God, when he intervened in human history far more directly than he usually does. Jesus' arrival was the culmination of his whole plan of salvation, and in many ways it's more difficult to believe that this would take place without God bringing about, and acting through, some unusual or extraordinary events.

One of the most important of these extraordinary events, to go back to today's gospel reading, was the "Virgin Birth" as it's often called - more accurately, the fact that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Many people find this aspect of the story difficult to accept.

But, again, it's a mistake to assume that God, in working out his plan of salvation, has to be confined to what we regard as plausible or compliant with the laws of nature. If we applied that standard consistently, there's a lot in the story of Christ's mission that we would have to get rid of.

It makes much more sense to believe that from the events leading up to Jesus' birth - Mary's own conception, which we also celebrate as a great feast during Advent, and the news that her cousin Elizabeth was pregnant with a child who would later become the great herald of the Messiah, right through to Jesus' resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost - God was guiding events, and acting directly, in a way that he doesn't normally do. (I would include in all that the unique way that God brought about St Paul's conversion, because where would the Church have been in the first few decades of its life without Paul's great missionary efforts? God intervened directly, during a crucial period in salvation history, to bring Saul of Tarsus into the service of the new gospel message.)

But in saying all this, let's notice as well that the gospels don't just tell the story of God's actions. Everything connected with Jesus' mission shows God acting in a special and extraordinary way - but he doesn't act unilaterally. He also acts with us and through us, inviting his creatures to cooperate with his plans. God doesn't save us without us, as St Augustine put it.

With that in mind we could say that part of the significance of today's gospel passage is the unhesitating response that Mary and Joseph gave to the mysterious invitation they sensed they were receiving from God.

The gospels don't give us much information about Mary and Joseph. There isn't the mass of detail about personality and background that we would expect in a modern biography. All we're told about them, in a sense, is that they were models of faith and trust in God, offering complete assent to God even when they were uncertain about where it would lead and what it would involve. And it's for their faith and their unhesitating response that Mary and Joseph have been venerated down through the centuries of Christian history, and celebrated every year during Advent and Christmas.

Hopefully these reflections can help us approach Christmas this year as a celebration of our own faith: recognising St Matthew's real purpose in writing his gospel; recognising the special activity involved on God's part in the coming of the Saviour, and recognising the great faith and trust shown by Jesus' parents in their cooperation with God's will.