A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Readings: Isaiah 7:10-14 Romans 1:1-7 Matthew 1:18-24
We call it science fiction, though very little science goes into it. And given how closely it hews to the desires of the human heart, fiction is not all that apt a moniker either.
Consider, for example, the “Vulcan mind meld.” It was introduced in the first season of the original “Star Trek” series. The episode was entitled “Dagger of the Mind.” No one can understand what has happened to a stowaway who has escaped from a suspect treatment center for the criminally insane. Not until Mr. Spock melds his own mind with that of the troubled intruder.
Not really science, but the notion of a mind meld says a lot about the human soul. We wish that it stood open, that it could directly access other souls without the use of words, gestures or signs. Even more so that it could rid itself of pretense or the need for protection.
Interestingly, St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that this is how angels communicate with each other. “Intuition” is the term he used. One angel only needs to will that another angel should know the same, and it does.
We cannot do that as humans. Whether we are speaking, writing or gesturing, we must share what we will with others by means of signs. And we must seek each other out to do the signaling. Nothing passes from the interior of one of us to that of another except by way of signs.
Joseph desperately needs a sign. He and Mary are more than engaged to be married. They are betrothed, which is the first stage of marriage in first-century Jewish Palestine. They are already legally bound to one another, although another year will pass before they live together as man and wife.
The Scriptures (Dt 22:13-24) dictate that a woman found unfaithful in this or any other stage of marriage should be stoned, though Roman law will not permit such a punishment. Instead, Joseph must divorce his betrothed yet unfaithful wife. His only decision is whether to do so publicly, which will damn her to infamy, or to do it privately. Either way, she will never be able to marry again.
St. Matthew tells us that Joseph is unwilling to do this. The evidence could not be clearer, yet it does not conform to what he knows of her soul.
This man desperately needs a sign from God. But none of us, not even the angels, can meld minds with God. The interspace is infinite. We can open our own minds to God, make them at least transparent to God as they are to ourselves. We call this prayer.
But God does not respond to prayer by speaking directly to us, as we do to each other. The adventure we call life would not be possible if we shared divine consciousness or could access it this readily. Divine communion is proper to the Most Holy Trinity and then to angels and saints whom God summons into its life. This is what we mean when we speak of heaven.
It may seem as though God melds minds with Joseph by means of a dream. Most dreams, however, are not supernatural. And they do not need to be because they already speak to us as a string of signs, drawn from our conscious life.
One could say God never stops giving us signs. Everything that happens to us, the good and the bad, is meant to be a message for us, a call to communion with the consciousness that stands beneath and beyond the world.
Can we misinterpret such signs? Yes, we can err here as we can in any other venue. How do we know when we have read the signs rightly? The Gospel gives us the criteria: by our fruits (Mt 7:20).
The Gospels are manuals of discipleship. They do more than report history. They tell us how to live our lives in Christ. So what are we to learn from Joseph? The signs do not add up; the circumstance is dire. He can see what is evident, yet he knows the soul of his betrothed. And he must do something.
St. Matthew tells us that Joseph is a righteous man. He cannot doubt that God is speaking because he knows that God is present. As a faithful son of Israel, he understands that God has entered our history. So God must be at work in his story, however unsettling it is.
St. Matthew, as an evangelist, faithfully delivers to us the truth that Joseph learned from his dream:
Joseph, son of David,
do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.
For it is through the Holy Spirit
that this child has been conceived in her.
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins (1:20-21).
Whether we would deem Joseph’s dream to be supernatural or purely natural, we cannot reconstruct the deeply personal process by which God made known his designs for this man, his betrothed and their people.
What we must learn, what we must not forget, is that God was already speaking to this righteous man in the circumstances that had seized him, in the sum of the signs that surrounded him, even those that wounded and confused him. Joseph already knew this. Prayer taught and readied him to interpret those signs.
In her lectionary, her prescribed Scriptures, the church contrasts the righteousness of Joseph, this lost scion of Israel, with the unrighteousness of his ancestor Ahaz. When the king of Judah says that he will not tempt the Lord by asking for a sign, what he really means is that he does not believe that his reality stands open to that of God. He thinks he must connive and calculate his way through this cruel world on his own terms. Ahaz sees no need for puppy-eyed prayer to the heavens, awaiting a sign.
Joseph is righteous. That does not mean that he immediately knows what to do, where God is, what God wants. No, it means that he expects God to speak, to signal his will by a confluence of signs, whether supernatural or not. But what is true in our human relations is all the truer in that most foundational relationship with God. You cannot hear if you are unwilling to listen. You cannot see if you are unwilling to seek.
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From “Dagger of the Mind,” Star Trek.
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