“Discipleship 101”

Matthew 1:18-25

Before we deal with the subject of discipleship, let us first do a brief review of some basic, historic, orthodox Christian theology. Jesus the Messiah – Jesus the Christ – was born just like every other child is born. His pregnant mother Mary, when she had come to term, experienced labor pains and all the other things that naturally accompany the birth of a child. The baby Jesus was fully human.

However, his conception was far from normal. Mary became pregnant through the agency of the Holy Spirit. God’s very own creative Spirit, in a manner beyond human understanding, caused a young virgin named Mary to conceive. Jesus was and is THE TRUE SON OF GOD. He was Emmanuel, God-with-us, the incarnation of God in a human being. The baby Jesus was fully divine.

The mystery that we call incarnation came about at God’s initiative. He chose the time, place, and circumstances of our Lord’s birth. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves, breaking into kronos, time as measured according to human calculations, with an act of kairos, God’s time. Eternity intersected with history because, and only because, God wanted it to happen. Jesus, a form of Joshua, which means God-is-salvation, came into the world as the truth of God personified to save his people from their sins. Salvation is an act of God and God alone.

God was doing all this through two young human beings named Mary and Joseph. They were willing and obedient participants in God’s creative impulse. In their obedience they totally abandoned themselves to God’s will. They risked the humiliating and self-righteous condemnation of their contemporaries in order to do what God would have them do. As his human agents they joined God in ignoring the conventional wisdom of their day. By faith they understood that God’s will trumps human conventionality every time. God doesn’t care what the neighbors think. He does what he does his way, a way that is often scorned by the world.

Now we turn to the subject of discipleship. And as we do, we will focus on Joseph instead of Mary. He has been referred to as a model of discipleship, obeying God’s law in accordance with the principles of love, mercy, and compassion. He was a righteous man, a godly man, but his was not a narrowly defined self-righteousness. In order to do God’s will he was willing to pay the price of public humiliation and scandal. In obedience to God he chose to ignore whatever it was that the neighbors thought. In the eyes of the world his behavior was foolish, unmanly, and quite scandalous.

He wasn’t the first man commanded by God to do seemingly foolish and scandalous things. Jonah was commanded by God to speak God’s Word to the citizens of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians were vicious enemies of Israel, but God’s desire was that they repent. This, too, flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Jonah didn’t want to have anything to do with this. He tried to run away, ended up quite literally in the belly of the beast, and ultimately, though reluctantly, did as God commanded. He preached. The people of Nineveh repented. God withheld his wrath. Jonah’s response: he pouted because thousands of people he didn’t want to be saved were saved. He was a righteous man, but his self-righteousness got in the way of his willingness to accept and obey God’s will.

Then there was Hosea. His wife, Gomer, left him, committed adultery, and ultimately ended up a prostitute. What did God ask him to do? Go rescue her from prostitution, take her home, forgive her, and resume a normal marital relationship. Not only was Hosea obedient, as a result of his renewed relationship with Gomer he came to a deeper understanding of God’s gracious love and mercy, a gracious love and mercy that he modeled in his own life. He forgave what, for most men, was unforgivable. He went the extra mile, turned the other cheek, and forgave at least seventy-times-seven. This was inconceivable in worldly terms, yet it is the norm of one who faithfully serves God.

Joseph had the Jonah option: self-righteousness, vindictiveness, and gleeful delight in the ruin of a sinner. He also had Hosea’s option: swallowing his pride, ignoring the gossip of his neighbors, and exercising a compassion beyond human understanding.

Joseph chose the latter. Even before God got assertively involved, Joseph decided to do all in his power to spare Mary public humiliation. He could have done the self-righteous thing, publicly condemning and endangering Mary for her seemingly adulterous behavior. He could have demanded his rights as the betrayed spouse. He could have been a total jerk, and done so with society’s approval. Instead he looked beyond his own hurt and sense of betrayal and did what was best for Mary. That, my friends, is love.

But God demanded more than that. At his behest Joseph married Mary, stood by her, and accepted Jesus as his very own. He became the best step-dad in all of history. Because he loved and obeyed God and because he loved Mary, Joseph went against the grain of conventional wisdom. When the chips were down, he did the right thing – and the truly righteous thing. He was more than just; he was merciful. He was more than kind; he was forgiving. He was more than just obedient; he was lovingly so.

That’s our lesson in Discipleship 101 as taught by Joseph. If we are going to faithfully follow in the footsteps of Jesus the Messiah, the One who is our Lord and Savior, we must be willing to obey God even if doing so brings us ridicule, embarrassment, and humiliation. We must do what is right no matter how foolish it might seem in the eyes of the world. We must be willing to swallow our pride, let go of our need for revenge, and avoid the temptation of self-righteousness. We must go the extra mile for even the most undeserving person. We must turn the other cheek even when we have every right to strike back. We must love and pray for our enemies and forgive those people in our lives who have hurt us the most.

We must live as Josephs and Hoseas in a world that better understands, and often even rewards, its Jonahs. We must pray for and work for the salvation of the Ninevites in our lives and in our world. We must seek reconciliation with those who have betrayed us, including when necessary those who are our spouses, our parents, our children, our siblings, our friends, and our brothers and sisters in Christ.

We must never turn up our noses at, harden our hearts toward, or self-righteously walk away from those who fall into sin. We must never cut ourselves off from or feel superior to those in the church whose theology or biblical interpretation does not fit our personal definition of orthodoxy – we’re not all at the same place in our journeys of faith. We must be careful about condemning the so-called sins of the flesh while tolerating within our midst those other works of the flesh that all too often tear churches apart: jealousy, envy, vindictiveness, competitiveness, backbiting, gossip, the need always to be the one in charge, a chronic disposition toward easily hurt feelings, and so-forth and so on.

Let us instead encourage in our midst the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are behaviors modeled by Joseph. They are also behaviors lived out and taught by our Savior. In this season of giving, what better gift can we give to the world and to one another than to imitate the faithful obedience and compassionate righteousness of Joseph? Amen.