Manhood is the new black

God can do without human fatherhood – he managed to bring the Messiah into the world without even needing to use one of us as a sperm donor.

But just as Joseph’s story in Matthew 1-2 provides us with a deliberately humiliating reminder of how dispensable we human fathers are, it also gives us an extraordinary example of how God uses us and our fatherhood in his plans.

When God breaks the news to Joseph that Mary’s child is from the Holy Spirit, he immediately gives Joseph two commands:

First, he tells Joseph not to be afraid to marry Mary. Unlike his ancestor Ahaz, whose decisions were ruled by the fear of men, Joseph is to fear God and despise the social shame that he will incur by marrying Mary.

And second, he tells Joseph that when Mary’s child is born, ‘You shall call his name Jesus’. The main emphasis in that command (as the rest of the verse goes on to explain) is on the last word: You shall call his name Jesus. But the first word in the sentence is significant too: You shall call his name Jesus. Joseph is to name the child, and take on the responsibility of fathering him. Which he does (verse 25).

And then, in the following chapter (vv. 13-14, 19-21) it is Joseph’s actions as a husband and father that God uses to save the life of the Saviour of the world. All we know about Joseph’s life from the gospels is that he chose to marry Mary when God told him to, that he worked a job as a carpenter (Matt. 13:55) and that he acted to protect his family when they were in danger.

Marrying, working, protecting a family – nothing fancy or religious here, just the basic, secular, ordinary realities of human fatherhood as God created it to function (under the pressure of some extraordinary circumstances and assisted by the odd dream) lived out by a man who feared God and trusted his word, and used by God as part of his plans to save the world.

This is the first in a series of five short(ish) posts on human fatherhood in Matthew’s gospel. (There’s also a lot in Matthew about God’s fatherhood, but that would be another whole series…).

The first thing to get straight about human fatherhood, according to the gospel of Matthew, is that God doesn’t need it.

Matthew begins his account of ‘Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’ with a genealogy that is all about fathering – sixteen verses about who was the father of whom, all the way from Abraham down to Joseph, as God put together the family line of the seed of Abraham and the sons of David. And then, having laid out that long chain of human fathers and sons, God suddenly snaps it at the very last link, and causes Jesus to be born of a virgin.

The virgin birth is never explained in Scripture as some sort of device to avoid passing on original sin – as if the sin gene was carried on the Y chromosome. But it is explained, right back in Isaiah, as a sign of judgment on faithless, blustering, self-reliant, fearful men, like Ahaz and the house of David. (Have a read of Isaiah 7-8 and you’ll get the picture.)

At the very centre of the story of how God chose to save the world is a man who was conceived without a human father and who never became a father himself. That has to have implications.

David is married to Nicole and is the father of Jacob, Rebecca and Elsie. For work he lectures at Morling College in Sydney.