The Weird and Wonderful Birth of the God-Man
December 10, 2023
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Matthew 1:18–25
18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.
In last week’s passage we read about what Matthew called “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ” (Matt. 1:1). He places emphasis on one life continuing in another’s life: one father having one son. Abraham fathers Isaac; Isaac fathers Jacob, and so on until Jesse fathers King David, and later Hezekiah fathers Manasseh, and later there’s Zerubbabel, the governor in Judah after the exile, and later Jacob fathers Joseph, “the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born” (Matt. 1:16). The emphasis is on life and birth. But we should note that for all of Matthew’s emphasis on life—emphasis on fathers and mothers and births of sons who have sons—we should note that every single person with a name on the list died. All of them. Abraham, David, Jesus. The Bible says, “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). But wait? Is that why Jesus died? The answer is both yes and no. The person named last in the genealogy is wonderfully both the same and very different than all the others, in his birth, in his life, in his death, in his resurrection, and in his second Advent. Let’s pray as we begin to study it together.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
The first chapter of the gospel of Matthew is like a high-resolution photo of Jesus’s family tree, where after seeing the whole picture, the whole tree, Matthew then takes his thumbs to zoom in to get a closer look at Jesus and his parents, particularly Joseph. And the picture of Joseph we see when we zoom in is that he’s a pretty great guy. Matthew calls him a “just man.” Other translations phrase it as a “righteous man.”
But Joseph has a real problem: He’s afraid, and his fear has likely been building for several months. We’ll say more later, but you understand why. He is caught in tremendous cross-pressures. His romantic love and his loyalty to family traditions are all in tension with other desires. There’s his desire to meet the expectations of his culture and friends. Joseph also wants the men who have discipled him to be disappointed in him. And he wants to do his duty to obey God, yet it’s all so jumbled. Every way forward he could imagine, whether with or without Mary, had undesirable consequences. He’s trying to tread a needle that can’t be threaded. He was afraid.
You’ve been afraid before, right? Love, family traditions, cultural expectations, the responsibilities of life, and your duty before God are all jumbled up in ways that make life hard. Not to mention when you throw in a health crisis or a major life decision, like choosing a college or whether to accept a promotion, or whether to move from one city to another, or maybe some of you have thought about whether to leave one church and go to another. For some of you, you are afraid because part of you wants to leave the church altogether. But if I do that, you think, what will my family think? What will my friends think? What will God think? Others of you are coming to church for the first time in your life, and you have all the same fears: What will my family think that I now go to church? What will my friends think? You’re afraid. Tremendous cross-pressures of tradition and our understanding of right and wrong, and following passions, and obeying the will of God, and concerns about what others will think can make us make us afraid. Which is to say, you probably can understand a little bit how Joseph felt.
And the way God meets Joseph in his fear is unusual. God catches Joseph up into the weirdest and most wonderful of stories, the story of the birth of one who is both God and man, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. We can sing of Christmas as the most wonderful time of the year. Now, we all know it’s not always the most wonderful time of the year—but if it is wonderful at this time of year, it’s because the story of the original Christmas is wonderful. But before we see the original story of the birth of Jesus as wonderful, we first have to reckon with its weirdness. So, let’s talk about that.
1. The weird of the birth of the God-man.
Some of you, from the start, will object to my use of the word weird. And that’s fine. By calling the birth of Jesus weird, I’m not meaning to demean the sacred. I thought that the word weird sounded lyrical when coupled with wonderful. Perhaps there are better words, like the unusual birth of the God-man, or the unexpected birth of the God-man. Those words, unexpected and usual, are fine.
But if you object to the word weird to describe the birth of Jesus, it might be because we’ve become too familiar with the story. I actually think those of us who are less familiar with the story of Christmas might actually see the Christmas story better than those of us who are too familiar with it. If you’re new to Christianity, just as Joseph was, you see the weirdness better than many of us. Put yourself in his sandals.
You grow up in a strict religious home where you’re taught to love and honor God. From an early age, your parents pledge you to marry a girl from a family they respect and who respects your family. And for a dozen years you all eat together on weekends, worship together in the same synagogue. And, over time, you actually come to like, even love, this girl named Mary. Then, as a young man, you enter a formal, public, binding ceremony of betrothal—something far tighter than our concept of engagement. And in just one year you’ll have a wedding ceremony before the whole community.
But now all that is jumbled. The complex web of fragile family relationships that have been so carefully manicured for so many years has now been ripped apart—all because of Mary’s few moments of selfish indiscretion. Mary has been, as the passage says, “found to be with child” (Matt. 1:18). You’re Joseph, and you know you’re not the father. And Mary has the audacity to tell you it is of the Holy Spirit.
We often think too low of ancient people, as though virgin births were the sorts of events that are weird to us but not to them. Have you considered that perhaps Joseph wants to divorce her quietly because he loves her but also because he wonders if she’s gone crazy? The story is just so strange, so unusual, unexpected.
When we put the gospel of Luke alongside Matthew’s account, we get a bit more of the timeline, but still not quite enough to figure out exactly the sequence of who tells what and when. When the angel visits Mary and tells her what is going to happen, and then it does happen, we know Mary leaves town for three months to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth, while she had had no child her whole life, she’s now miraculously going to have a child, the son we’ll call John the Baptist. And Mary leaves to help. All this really happened, of course—Mary does visit Elizabeth. But the visit also provided a good cover story, or at least it bought more time. The thing about being pregnant, however, is that eventually people notice, and people are about to notice Mary. And it’s this moment, the moment of decision, that I suspect caused Joseph fear. Note the phrase in v. 20, “as he considered these things.” Let me read it again in context.
19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. (1:19–20)
While we’re talking about strange aspects of this story, I’ll say that Joseph himself is unusual, too. He will “divorce her quietly”? “This woman has ruined my life,” he could have said. “Everything I imagined about my future, everything about our future together, she took from us—took from me.” Yet he’ll divorce quietly? I mean, he’s so loving and honorable that he’ll flush his reputation down the toilet with hers? No paternity tests can tell his small, tight-knit, rural community that he ain’t the father. “Don’t be quiet, Joseph,” someone in the village would probably tell him. “Be loud, Joseph; post it on Tic Toc. Don’t be afraid to control the narrative.” Joseph is unusual.
This birth of the God-man is all very strange, perhaps you’ll even permit me the word weird. It’s also, when rightly understood, wonderful.
2. The weird is wonderful in the birth of the God-man.
Let me say it even more pointedly. It is the very weirdness that is actually wonderful. It’s not just that it’s both weird and wonderful, but that the weirdness is wonderful. And this unusual, unexpected story of the birth of the one who is both God and man was God’s very plan from the beginning, and God wouldn’t change a bit of the story.
You pick up on that, don’t you? If God inspired Isaiah, some seven hundred years beforehand, to tell his people about the plan, it’s because God is happy with the plan. I’ll read again what Matthew wrote in vv. 22–23.
22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).
Again, God committed to this plan, this sign, of bringing the Son into the world.
Yet in our world, people often wish they had the chance to do things over, to do them differently. Surely you’ve done something, likely many things, you’d want a chance to do differently. Often, people create a plan, but when they see how it plays out, when they see the reaction from the masses, when they see how they are misunderstood, they wish they had a chance to do it differently.
All this thinking of doing things differently got me thinking of the story from this last year about Bud Light and their marketing choices and the internet transgender personality Dylan Mulvaney. Back in the spring, the company gave Dylan a gift, and he posted it online, and it became a story. Some consumers liked seeing Anheuser-Busch’s support of LGBTQ issues, while many other consumers, apparently, didn’t like Anheuser-Busch going that direction. Or maybe they just don’t like the idea of corporations going in any social directions. Regardless, if you followed the story at all, you’ll know sales have been down. Just a few weeks ago the chief marketing officer resigned (CBS News, here).
Now, normally I consider this story the kind of story that I don’t care all that much about. But I like to be somewhat aware of what’s going on around us. And more importantly, I think of Dylan, and he is made in the image of God and will spend eternity in either heaven or hell, and so the story matter. People matter.
But I think of all this scandal and gossip and backlash and online uproar in the context of marketing decisions, and that story makes me think of the Christmas story. Let me explain. Their marketing team would love a chance to do this over. They’ve scrambled for 9-months and still can’t seem to make it right, whatever “right” is to them.
Now, this would never happen, but let’s just say you had the chance to be part of God’s marketing team. And you had the chance to hear about the way in which the birth of Jesus would go down. You heard about the scandal that it would be and all the ways this story would be mocked by people on earth. Might you have at least suggested there could be a better, less controversial way to begin the story of the God-man? It wasn’t just Joseph and Mary in the scandal. It was Jesus too. I mean, some thirty years later, we read in John’s gospel that the religious leaders were throwing this perceived scandal in his face. They told Jesus, “We are not born of sexual immorality” (John 8:41; cf. 6:42 and 7:27), which of course was their dig at the scandal of the virgin birth.
You and I may have written the story differently. But that’s because we don’t understand that the scandal was part of the point. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase before that something is “a feature, not a bug.” Well, from God’s perspective, the strangeness of the virgin birth is a feature, not a bug. In other words, that this story would feel strange to us is part of the point. God begins the story the very way he’s going to continue the story: God chose the scandal of the virgin birth because he’s telling a scandalous story, the story of the scandal of his forgiveness of sinners. Indeed, one word used of the cross in the is Greek is the word skandalon. The apostle Paul writes,
22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews [a skandalon to Jews] and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:22–24)
What seems a scandal or foolish or weird is, for the believer, wonderful.
It is weird that God would come to dwell with his people and that that story would begin in a lowly manger, not a kingly palace. And it is wonderful that God would come to dwell with his people and that that story would begin in a lowly manger, not a kingly palace.
It’s weird that God would come from a family with a crooked family tree, full of scandals and faithlessness and outsiders. And it’s wonderful that God would come from a family with a crooked family tree, full of scandals and faithlessness and outsiders.
It’s weird to me that the very name of the savior would be “Immanuel,” meaning “God with us.” It’s weird that our name—the us—would become part of the very name that is God’s name. And the “to us” is wonderful to us.
Conclusion
We talk about the virgin birth of the God-man a lot, and we say it’s important. Why is it important? Jesus is born in this way so that he can be like us, meaning human. But Jesus also must be more than us. To be our Savior, to be the one who is not a sinner but who can save sinners, Jesus must also be God. And the birth in this way does that.
I’ll use an illustration. Ben Bechtel and I were talking about this passage. He’s preaching this same passage at Midtown Church today. And he mentioned he was going to use the illustration of a “chase scene” in a movie where someone is running away and gets trapped in a dead-end alley. The person is all frantic and looking over her shoulder at whatever or whoever is chasing them. She’s trying every doorway in the alley, and they are all locked. There’s just nowhere to go. It’s a dead end.
That, Ben told me, is a picture of humanity apart from God. If you think back to the genealogy—the Abrahams and Jacobs and Davids and Rehoboams and Zerubbabels—they all die. They all run into an alley from which they cannot escape. The wages of sin is death. But then comes along Jesus. Who is born in no ordinary way. He’s born both like us and not like us at all. He is God, and he is man. And only in this way, as Matthew points out, can he do what his name means. Only as both God-and-man, only in a birth that was different and the same, can he save his people from their sins. His strange birth is the only way to save those in the alley of death. That’s why the virgin birth matters. And that’s why it’s weirdness is wonderful.
And this message changed Joseph. The passage begins with him afraid. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s caught in all kinds of cross-pressures. He wants to follow God, but he’s likely not sure even the best way to do that, and a quiet divorce was the best he could come up with. Yet look how the passage ends. Look at vv. 24–25.
24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.
The wonder of this story, the wonder of knowing God was with him, took away his fear.
And this idea of “God being with us” still changes people. Matthew begins his gospel with the theme of “God with us.” Do you know how he ends his book? Let me read to you the last lines of Matthew’s gospel. After his death, after his resurrection, Jesus says,
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (28:18–20)
Joseph and Mary had a lot of danger ahead of them. Obedience would be wonderful and it would be costly. Knowing that God was with them changed them.
Here today—in light of the end of Matthew’s gospel—God is sending us out too. He’s sending us into obedience will be wonderful and costly. But knowing that God is with us to the end of the age makes all the difference.
I don’t know the shape your obedience needs to take today. Perhaps you need to take that book about Christmas that Pastor Ron talked about, with the flyer of invitations about our Christmas party and services, and you need to share those with a friend or family member. You might be afraid to do so because you don’t know what they will think of you. So what! Do it anyway. Hear God say over you that he is with you.
For others, you might need to keep that booklet for yourself because you don’t actually know the Jesus story and what you believe about it. I remember many years ago when I was at a Christian event, and they handed out some Christian material about the good news of Jesus, and we were supposed to give it away. I was afraid to tell anyone, but I actually needed it for myself because I didn’t understand the gospel. Maybe your obedience is not to give it away but to read and consider it yourself.
As we close, I want to use a line from a song as a prayer. There’s a musical group called Shane & Shane; we sing their songs from time to time at church. They have an older song that has a line I often pray: “forbid familiarity would keep me from your majesty” (“Holy,” Upstairs, 2004). I’ll invite the music team to close us in song. Would you pray that with me now? “Dear Heavenly Father. . .”
