According to Matthew, the whole grand experiment hangs on what happens with Joseph…

The child is Joseph’s until he says otherwise…the issue at stake is not a biological one but a legal one… Will he believe the impossible and give it a home or will he stick with with what makes sense and let the miracle go hungry?

According to Matthew, Joseph’s belief is as crucial to the story as Mary’s womb… It takes both parents to give birth to this remarkable child: Mary to give him life, and Joseph to give him a name: Jesus, son of David, from whose house the Messiah shall come.

…The heart of the story is about a…righteous man who surveys a mess he has had absolutely nothing to do with and decides to believe that God is present in it… He owns the mess–he legitimates it–and the mess becomes the place where the Messiah is born.

Do I need say more? …[Joseph] is the one in the story who is most like us, presented day by day by day with circumstances beyond our control, with lives we would never have chosen for ourselves, tempted to divorce ourselves from it all when an angel whispers in our ears: “Do not fear. God is here. It may not be the life you had planned, but God may be born here too, if you will permit it.”

That “if” is the real shocker–that God’s “yes” depends on our own, that God’s birth requires human partners…willing to believe the impossible, willing to claim the scandal, to adopt it and give it our names…

And not just each of us alone but the whole church of God, surveying a world that seems to have run amuck and proclaiming over and over to anyone who will hear that God is still with us, that God is still being born in the mess and through it, within and among those who will still believe what angels tell them in their dreams.

from “Believing the Impossible,” in Gospel Medicine