The story is told by Phillip Yancey in What’s So Amazing about Grace:
During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods’ appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.”
After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and the Muslim code of law–each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional.
In Isaiah 7:10-16, things were pretty rough for Ahaz. Aram and Ephraim were threatening to invade Judah, and Ahaz and his people were shaking like trees in the wind.
“But have faith anyway,” Isaiah told Ahaz. “Your immediate concerns–Kings Rezin and the son of Remaliah–are just two smoldering stumps of firebrands. Sure, something much worse–the king of Assyria–is coming, but for now you just need to have faith, so you have a leg to stand on!”
But Ahaz continued to exasperate God, wearing God’s patience thin with his people’s “pious, timid hypocrisies” and with his refusal to ask for a sign from God that everything will be okay.
What does God then do? Ignore Ahaz? Nope. He sends Ahaz an important message: “Like it or not, there will be a sign, a baby named Immanuel.” Even though Ahaz doesn’t deserve it, and in spite of the fact that he intentionally didn’t ask for it, Ahaz receives a sign of grace, a prophecy about “God with us.”
This inkling of the future, this intrusion of the divine into Ahaz’s life–and later into Joseph and Mary’s lives–is Grace weaseling a way into human reality.
In Matthew 1:18-25, we read that Jesus was born into a scandal–and grace. His parents were engaged–quite happily, I suppose–but then Mary went and got pregnant. And Joseph married her anyway!
I imagine that neighbors and grandmothers and childhood friends all had something to say to each other about this, that Mary was loose, and that Joseph was a fool for marrying her anyway. I wonder if people questioned Joseph’s integrity, too–wouldn’t they have suspected that he was the father? Maybe they thought Mary and Joseph were ridiculous liars, claiming visits by angels in vivid dreams just to keep their own dating indiscretions under cover.
But that’s not the story that we’re told. We’re told that Joseph and Mary were righteous people who did only God’s will. We’re told that Joseph planned to break up with Mary according to the customs of the day, but that he would do so quietly, to save Mary at least some of the embarrassment she was due.
We’re told that Joseph deviated from the customary response to an unfaithful bride-to-be only after divine intervention.
He married the pregnant girl.
That might sound a bit scandalous, if we don’t know the back story. (Actually, a god impregnating a young girl sounds scandalous to me, too, but that’s not my point here.)
But the social scandal diminished in importance as Joseph took seriously his conviction about what was right for him to do. In the midst of the scandal, Joseph followed the directions that were given to him. Doing what was right meant not defending his image or standing up for customary propriety, but acting with grace towards Mary.
On the other hand, Joseph and Mary did have angels appear and tell them what to do, so perhaps Joseph’s grace was a no-brainer. Maybe his obedience to religious customs of the day was so fierce that he wouldn’t have practiced grace without divine intervention.
Either way, Joseph is the hero of this part of the Christmas story. He showed grace to Mary, and by doing so, enabled “God with us.”
Grace was shown in Isaiah’s prophecy, which we often say is about the coming of Jesus, and by Joseph, towards Mary, and the fruit of that grace was nothing less than a call for even more grace, a spiritual leader who voluntarily spent time with outcasts and children and hailed them as the leaders of God’s new order.
