By Carl Hoover
He stands near the center of countless creches, watching the Baby Jesus over Mary’s shoulder, with the stable behind him and flanked by shepherds, animals and wise men.
Other players in the Christmas story told in miniature seem frozen in motion — shepherds arriving and adoring, wise men presenting gifts, an angel hovering in mid-air, normally restless animals awed into silence — but Joseph just stands.
Presumably, his work is done. Matthew’s gospel, the only nativity account that describes his part in Jesus’ birth, relates that after an angelic vision, Joseph changed his mind about breaking his engagement with Mary after she became pregnant. He later took her cross-country to a family census registration in Bethlehem, unsuccessfully sought admission to an inn as she began to have her child, then got her to a stable where she gave birth to Jesus.
A creche offers a tidy summation of the Christmas story, much like the version we mentally compress into a smart phone calendar: Friday, find no room in inn, check into manger. Check. Friday night, have baby, receive shepherds. Check. Saturday, wise men over to bring gifts. Sunday, head home to Nazareth.
We assume Joseph is a character who quietly plays second fiddle. A decent guy, religious, simple, steady, but maybe a little boring. He’s not like a scruffy, angel-bedazzled shepherd, nor educated in the stars, geography and politics as are the magi nor murderously jealous of power like King Herod.
Yet in a present Christmas time of gnawing uncertainty for millions still without jobs and millions more worried about debt or college educations or career prospects or aging parents, I find myself drawn to that figure standing in the middle.
The daunting, terrifying part of Joseph’s role in the story is only beginning.
A second angelic vision tells him to take his new family to Egypt to save their lives. Save his and his family’s lives? Really?
When Joseph obeyed the first angel’s message, did he foresee that would later put his own life at stake? That he’d have another journey ahead, far longer than the trip to Bethlehem, and one ending in a strange land with a strange language and culture? That a career and customers put on hold for the census would have to wait for years instead?
That’s what faces Joseph once he leaves the safe, comfortable semicircle of the creche, a dark world of uncertainty with no guiding star.
How he and Mary made it through their next few years is one of those tantalizing, open-ended mysteries. I wonder: Did those first Christmas presents of gold and spices provide, perhaps, a worried parent the means to pay for a new, different life yet ahead?
Christians focus on joy and celebration at this time of year, which sometimes makes it a difficult season for the sad, the fretful, the weary. Maybe the quiet Joseph standing in all those nativity scenes suggests there’s more to Christmas than what the creche embraces, that hope also exists in the unknown land outside its figurines.