When we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate the newborn Savior. Around the events of the Savior’s birth, leading up to it, at the time of it and in the events that follow, we encounter a marriage. As unique as this married couple and their circumstances are, there are some lessons to be gleaned from the marriage of Mary and Joseph.
First, Joseph and Mary, both made God the center of their marriage. Granted, they had little choice since God the Son was going to be literally growing up in their household. But they still offered some examples of giving God His rightful priority in their lives even before Jesus needed their assistance in His development.
God sent the angel Gabriel to Mary with an outlandish announcement. Her response was exemplary. Even though she asked for an explanation of how it would come about that she would be pregnant and birth a child as a virgin, she ultimately – and immediately – submitted to God’s plan. Let it be to me according to Your word, she told the angel.
As for Joseph, his obedience was also key and his directive from God through a dream was as unheard of for an engaged bridegroom as Mary’s was for a bride. Yet his immediate, decisive and criticized obedience was the example he set for all men for all time to follow, including the men who are husbands in our day.
To sum up this point, Mary and Joseph were obedient to the will of God even when His will was more than countercultural., as is almost always the case, but also counterintuitive. I didn’t even make sense on a sheer natural human level. Yet, they submitted to God. As we apply this lesson to our marriages, may the same be said of us.
The second lesson comes from Mary following the lead of her husband, Joseph. Remember one of the least popular commands in the New Testament is that wives submit to their husbands. Here’s Mary presenting a model for that command some fifty or sixty years before it was written.
She literally followed her husband to Bethlehem for the Roman census even though she was in the most uncomfortable phase of being great with child.
Later, we see her following Joseph to the pagan land of Egypt, trusting completely his interpretation of God’s message to him (in another dream).
The principle set forth for a husband decades later in New Testament Scripture, as head of the wife, was to love his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. Joseph risked his reputation (by marrying a pregnant girl) and process of establishing his livelihood (by taking a hiatus to Egypt for a time to protect his family).
So, there we have it. The family of the first Christmas have more to offer us than the inspirational Nativity to beautifully decorate the season. Another gift they bring is a helpful picture of a Godly marriage. May we unwrap and enjoy.
Merry Christmas!!
