One person we hear a lot about during this season is St. Joseph, husband of Mary. My students are by turns impressed, amazed, and befuddled by this strange and remarkable man: impressed that he refused to “put away” Mary and subject her to shame; amazed that he could live with a woman as his wife and not have sex with her (indeed, for some of them, this seems harder to believe than the Virgin Birth itself); and befuddled at how and in what sense Joseph could be considered Jesus’ “father.”
The question is not an unimportant one theologically. In fact, because Jesus is called “the son of David,” and according to both Matthew and Luke, it is through Joseph that Jesus’ lineage is traced back to David. “How can that be?” my students want to know, when he wasn’t Jesus’ real father. “Define a real father,” I tell them. And from there the conversation usually gets pretty interesting.
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