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Church of the Resurrection Insights

12.18.24 Matthew 1

Amy Oden

Mary bravely steps forth to carry the God of the cosmos in her womb and birth the Holy into the world!  Yet our human headline is: “woman pregnant out of wedlock.” This both saddens and angers me. A cosmic event has broken into the world and our human eyes can only focus on petty judgments. We just don’t get it!

I’m angry at the very real record of Christianity doing harm through judgments and stigma, even persecution, on sexual matters. Women have been especially harmed by these standards that try to control women’s bodies.

I’m sad that we humans are so eager to make judgments about others’ sexual behavior. Sad that Mary had to endure such judgments. Sad that Joseph was caught in them, too. Sad that people can be so sure of their own righteousness while completely wrong about the facts of the situation, me included. And I’m weary that this pernicious sin of shaming others still exists.

The good news of Matthew offers another way. The story of Jesus’ birth upends our righteous assumptions about sexual behavior, revealing that we don’t always know what we think we know. It takes a 2,000-year-old text to remind us of the folly of such judgments.

The holy is being birthed into the world every day, in ways spectacular and mundane. Yet we refuse to have “eyes to see” and instead choose to focus on making judgments about others. What if, instead of jumping to conclusions, we paused to wonder? To imagine that God might be up to something, seemingly impossible? What might our eyes become able to see?

Give me eyes to see You being birthed into the world even now.