In my father's house

Christmas is a time of homecoming. And a time when the pain of not being able to come home is particularly sharp. The other day, at the Christmas lunch edition of the monthly meal served at St Nicholas’ for fifty of the more vulnerable folk in Sunderland, one man, originally from Australia, told me with real sadness that he doesn’t think he'll ever be going home for Christmas again.

Matthew’s Gospel starts the Christmas story in Nazareth, in the home of Mary’s parents. Joseph is also there. They are quite likely distant cousins, and, following their betrothal — which makes them husband and wife — they are living with Mary’s parents while Joseph offers a length of service working for his father-in-law, in fair recognition that they will thereafter lose the productive hands of their daughter.

Luke (has already told us something of Mary’s story, but) takes up the account of Mary and Joseph at the point where Joseph completes his service to his father-in-law and brings his wife home to his father’s house, where they will begin the next season of their life together. (This is referred to as ‘accompanying one another,’ and becomes a metaphor for all the years to follow. Mathew’s account is of events before they accompanied one another, badly translated as ‘before they lived together’ in the same home.)

So Luke’s account is of a husband taking his wife to his father’s home.

Years later, on the night before he died, Jesus told his disciples that he was going ahead of them to his father’s house to prepare the room he and his disciples — metaphorically, his bride — would share together; and that he would then come back for them, to accompany them to his father’s house.

[Note that Jesus and the Church are already betrothed at this point, husband and wife. Jesus has been living with his disciples for three years now. When, on one occasion, he is told that his mother and siblings had arrived to take him home, he asked, ‘Who are my mother and siblings? Those who do the will of God.’ In this, he was not dismissing the family he grew up in, but identifying with his bride’s family — and saying, it is not yet time for me to return to my ancestral family home; I have not yet completed my bride-price service.]

In other words, Joseph models for us at the start of the Gospel what Jesus says he will do at the end. In his death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus completes his service, his bride-price, and inaugurates the next stage of the marriage between Christ and the Church, which will be fulfilled when he comes again in glory.

Christmas is all about homecoming.

Welcome home!