In today’s readings we have two characters which deserve attention, Ahaz and Joseph, two characters which I have often wondered about their mindsets when they each encountered God in these particular stories.
The first one we heard about was Ahaz, and here is what happened, “The LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying: Ask for a sign from the LORD, your God; let it be deep as the netherworld, or high as the sky! But Ahaz answered, "I will not ask! I will not tempt the LORD!"”
I believe that when I have read this in the past, my thought has always been, “wow, this Ahaz guy is really virtuous, not wanting to tempt the Lord, I know I’d ask for a sign, like let Winter end right now & skip ahead to Spring!” I’m already tired of the snow and the cold!
But in reality, Ahaz was not a virtuous man at all, Ahaz was actually an evil king of Judah, and he didn’t want a sign from God because he didn’t want to trust in God to protect Israel, Ahaz wanted to ally with Assyria to protect them, despite Isaiah’s objections.
Ahaz wanted some plausible deniability, not proof that God was in the world and cared about His people. See, the Kings were supposed to take care of the people, but King Ahaz didn’t, by not trusting in God they ended up losing control of northern Israel, but even worse was that Ahaz adopted some of the Assyrian gods and led the people away from worship of the true God.
As a result of Ahaz’s evil decision, really his poor leadership as a king, God essentially said, “this will be the sign I will give, I’ll send my son to be king, born of a virgin, to be ‘God-with-us.’” We know this to be King Jesus who would truly care for His people, and there would be no doubt about the identity of the true God in the world.
In our Gospel reading, we have that prophecy repeated as the beginning part of this story about the birth of Jesus, but let’s take a closer look at Joseph.
Joseph, when he was engaged to Mary, found out that she was pregnant and resolved to divorce her quietly. Now I believe growing up I always thought about Joseph here as not really believing that this child in her womb had come about through the Holy Spirit, but after he had this dream, he came to believe it was true through this dream, his sign.
Well, here again, I believe my understanding was wrong. It says here that Joseph was a righteous man, and I’ve come to believe that Joseph knew very well that this child was conceived by the Holy Spirit by the virgin and was the one foretold by the prophet Isaiah, it was just that Joseph did not think he was worthy to be the foster father of God.
These two encounters with God were different but related, God asked both Ahaz and Joseph to trust in Him, but only one did. Maybe Ahaz didn’t think he was “worthy” either, but worthiness is not relevant to God.
See, being worthy is a condition, right? It’s like saying “We have to do something in order to earn God’s love, to be worthy or good enough.” But God, our creator, loves us unconditionally. We can tell that He loves us just because we are here and still breathing. He brought us into existence without regard to whether we were worthy of life or not.
This is something that we actually say at every Mass, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” We are not worthy of God’s presence, but that is not a factor, He comes to us and He loves us anyway.
Oftentimes it is hard for us to believe how much God actually loves us, especially considering our past and our sins, but it is true, He came to save us from those very sins.
So it is up to us to decide, today and every day, really every moment of every day, whether we will trust in our God, Jesus the King, to love us and free us from our sins, as well as protect us and keep us safe from the enemy.
As we approach Christmas, we are reminded of this first time that Jesus Christ came into our world, and we are called to choose to allow Him into our own lives each and every day, despite our worthiness or unworthiness, He loves us and wants to be God-with-us.