In a few hours we will celebrate the birth of Christ, God's appearing in flesh among us. But now, liturgically speaking, he is still hidden within Mary, still undergoing baptism in her womb, though both of them probably can't wait for it to be over. In any case, for now we can still see only Mary and her husband Joseph. So let's look at them, as they sit quietly having breakfast in Bethlehem perhaps.
“Son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife,” Joseph was told by an angel a few months before. Joseph was afraid back then because, as well as being “son of David”, he was also a just man. And taking Mary did not seem just, it looked like she was somebody else's. King David would certainly have not been afraid to take Mary as his wife. After all, he wasn't afraid to take Bathsheba, somebody else's wife, and then have that somebody else murdered. His passions usually swamped any fear that he might or should have felt, and Mary was more beautiful than Bathsheba. King David was a man after God's own heart alright, but he wasn't a just man, he was a man of blood, driven by passion. Joseph is called his son because he was of the same lineage, but more importantly because he inherited David's heart, the king's defining and saving quality. In fact, Joseph is the finest fruit of this long line, stretching from Abraham to David, and then through all the kings of Judah up the Exile, and then through many humbler ancestors after that, sidelined by history, but very much included in God's plan. It took some forty generations to achieve Joseph, the perfect human father for Jesus, now sitting humbly in front of us, having his breakfast. David's heart was a great accomplishment of this programme, it became one of the key components. It was passed on from father to son, but after David it remained a largely dormant family trait. It resurfaced with Joseph, however, together with the faith of Abraham and all other good qualities carefully grafted into this rugged lineage by God's interventions in history. The human father for God's own Son had to have a heart after God's own heart. Joseph and Jesus are thus related by having the same heart. This connection is stronger than any blood connection could have been. But Joseph also needed to be just, because like the rest of us, he inherited original sin. God's Law had to be allowed to do the work. Because of Joseph's inborn justice, the Law achieved its purpose in him. It acted as a guardian for his conscience, preventing him from acting out the original sin present within. Thus a human heart after God's own heart would love the boy Jesus, thus God would be a human father to Jesus through the holy man Joseph, without the interference of sin.
So Joseph was “both-and”, both “son of David” and a just man. And Mary? Like her husband, she is also “both-and”, both the Law and the Spirit. On the one hand, as a Hebrew woman of the same clan as Joseph, there is nothing strange about Mary being there. On the other, she belongs to this seemingly much less glorious category of mothers, wives, concubines and lovers who forced their way into God's royal line. So just like Joseph, Mary is bringing two worlds together, though in a different way. Rivers of ink have been spilled over Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba, the four other women mentioned in Jesus's genealogy. Humanly speaking, they don't have all that much in common, and yet together they represent, symbolize God's interventions in history. They stick out in the genealogy as signs of God's direct involvement, of the careful preparations for the coming of the Messiah, stretched over centuries. These four women were all inspired by the Holy Spirit to interfere with the steady flow of generations, from father to son, because God wanted them included for his own good purposes. They brought in foreign blood, they grafted themselves in by sheer will-power, driven by a desire which prefigured the future faith of us, the gentiles. Famous lines from St Ephrem come to mind:
“Since the King was hidden in Judah, Tamar stole him from his loins; today shone forth the splendour of the beauty whose hidden form she loved. Ruth lay down with Boaz because she saw hidden in him the medicine of life; today her vow is fulfilled since from her seed arose the Giver of all life.”
St Ephrem suggests that Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba loved God's Son hidden in the people they had met, without realizing it. They are probably great friends with Mary Magdalen in heaven now. But whereas they were inspired, Our Lady was totally overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, and so her interference was also much more radical than theirs. She “stole” her Son directly from the Holy Spirit and thus completely broke and ended this steady flow of royal generations. She was both entitled to be there and forcefully inserted at the same time. The four women were turning points, Mary is a new beginning. In her God achieves something of a contradiction, he both respects the promises he had made, Israel's entitlement to inherit the Kingdom, and does radical violence to it, effectively replacing the line of David with the line of the Holy Spirit, David's kingdom with the Church, David's descendants with sons and daughters of Mary. This new line will never become a patriarchal line. The Kingdom from now on would have to be taken by the force of desire, of longing inspired by the Holy Spirit.
“From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force”, Jesus would say some three decades later. But this violence was already prefigured in the Old Testament. Joseph strands the two worlds, as both David's son and a husband of Mary. As strange as it may sound, Mary is the mother of the violent, mother of us the barbarians who take the Kingdom by force, but “the force” consists of love for and faith in the One who is about to leave her womb.
DSP