FAITH













Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and un.willing to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus

Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t know what to do? Well, Joseph must have felt like that, when Mary, the young girl to whom he was betrothed, came to him with a very bizarre story about how she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit and how her child was going to be God’s son. What was he going to do? If he married her, he would have to deal with her obvious mental condition. Not to forget the fact he would be saddled with a child that wasn’t his. He would have to divorce Mary, but this would bring her much shame. And although there might have been a voice in his head that said, “Serves her right”, he was basically a decent man who didn’t want her to suffer public humiliation. 

Did it ever strike him that she might be telling the truth? Since Scripture doesn’t tell us, we will never know. But we can empathize with him, can’t we? We can understand what he thought and how he felt. Would we have thought and felt differently? I sincerely doubt it. In any event, as Joseph sank into a troubled sleep an angel appeared to him and told him that whatever Mary had told him was true; so, he shouldn’t hesitate to take her for his wife. In faith, Joseph took Mary as his wife. And now comes a similar question. Would we have done the same?

It isn’t easy. Both Mary and Joseph were faced with difficult choices. You just have to put yourself in their shoes and see how crazy all this was for them. A young teenager gets told she is going to give birth to the Son of God. Her husband, a simple man, is told the son he would raise would be the savior of the world. How do you wrap your head around these things? How did Mary and Joseph comprehend all this? They probably never did, but they obeyed nonetheless. And this is the essence of faith: trusting God even though none of it makes any sense.

Scripture says that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for” (Hebrews 11:1). We see every great character in the Bible exhibit this faith: from Noah and Nehemiah to Paul and Philip. Chapter 11 of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks about the faith of many of these great and we would do well to read it. These men may have not always understood things, but they went ahead and did what God told them to do anyway. And because they obeyed God, they changed the world around them.

We too may not understand everything God asks us to do, but if we obey, we will be blessed. And we will change the world too.

Watch a video of this reflection by Aneel Aranha here: https://youtu.be/cMAU3zmNipE

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