Joseph is in the middle of a crisis, and Matthew lets us watch how he handles it before any angel speaks. Mary 18"was found to be with child" before she and Joseph had come together. Matthew calls Joseph 19"a just man" and adds that he was "unwilling to put her to shame." Those two things pull in different directions. Justice, as Joseph understood it, pointed toward ending the betrothal. Mercy wanted Mary spared public disgrace. So he "resolved to divorce her quietly," the one course that honored both. Nothing in the text suggests he was doing wrong. He was doing the best a righteous man could with what he knew.
What he knew was wrong, and only God could correct it. While Joseph 20"considered these things," an angel appeared in a dream with the truth: "that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit." Revelation solved his dilemma.
The angel addresses him as 20"Joseph, son of David." Matthew has just spent seventeen verses tracing the line from Abraham through David to this man, and now that line rests on what Joseph does next. A child brought into Joseph's house and named by Joseph belongs to David's house. By the end of the passage Joseph has done exactly that: 25"he called his name Jesus."
Two names are spoken here, and Matthew wants us to hold both. 21"Jesus" says what the child will do: "he will save his people from their sins." The name is the Greek form of Joshua, which means "the Lord saves." Sin is named as the deepest trouble, deeper than the shame that had Joseph tied in knots. 23"Immanuel" says who he is: "God with us." Matthew comes back to that promise at the end of his Gospel, when the risen Jesus says, "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). The whole book stands between those two statements of the same promise.
Then look at Joseph, who never speaks a word in this account, or anywhere else in Matthew. 24"When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife." He brings Mary home, honoring what the angel said about her child, and he gives the child his name. Matthew records each step in the angel's own verbs: he took her, and he called the child's name. A prophecy centuries old and a command from heaven land together on one ordinary act of getting up and doing what he was told. God's presence enters the world here through a man's plain yes.
You may be reading a situation this morning with all the right categories and still be wrong about it. Joseph was. The promise of God with us moves forward through the next thing you have been told to do, and that thing is often smaller than you fear. Joseph received a name to give and a wife to bring home.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you meet our impossible situations with truth that changes everything. Thank you for Jesus, who saves us from our sins, and for Immanuel, who is with us still. Give us Joseph's kind of obedience, quiet and prompt, even when we cannot yet see what you are doing. In Jesus' name, amen.