Apocalyptic Love: A Reflection for the Fourth Week of Advent 2025

This Advent, we’ve been focused on the apocalyptic quality of the season, and how in times of community, national, and global crisis, we need apocalyptic — unlikely, tenacious, creative, and unapologetic — hope, peace, joy, and love to carry on and plant the seeds for a better and more caring and gracious future that more closely aligned with the ways of God’s Kingdom. Today we focus on the fourth of these qualities, love.

As a general rule, the readings for the fourth Sunday of Advent focus on the story of the Virgin Mary. This time of year, we think of her primarily in terms of the Annunciation or her Magnificat (and indeed those readings are the Gospels for this Sunday the other two years of the liturgical cycle). But while they absolutely fit our Advent themes this year, with their humble yet defiant acceptance of God’s will on the one hand and powerful calls to justice for the oppressed on the other, the lectionary today asks us to look beyond these ‘greatest hits’ of Mary’s narrative arc in the Scriptures. But what we get today is no less profound.

For the Old Testament reading, we have Isaiah’s beautiful oracle of Immanuel (Isaiah 7.10-16). To remind ourselves, the context for this is a national crisis: Judah has been invaded its sister state of Israel and its ally Syria; fields are burning, Jerusalem is surrounded, and the future looks bleak. To make matters worse, there is an even greater threat growing off to the northeast in the Assyrian Empire. Into this hopeless situation, Isaiah tells Judah’s king to have faith in God’s promises: A young woman is expecting a baby, and his symbolic name, Immanuel, means ‘God is with us’. And by the time he’s old enough to know right from wrong, he’ll be dining on luxury foods filled with fat and sugar. In other words, this current threat will be but a distant memory and Judah’s enemies will be defeated within just a few short years, as a powerful sign of God’s presence with God’s people. To my mind, there is no greater symbol of resilience, defiance, and hope for the future than the birth of a baby. And that’s what God offered to Judah during this time of crisis.

While the immediate fulfillment of the prophecy likely had a royal baby, such as the eventual King Hezekiah, in mind, biblical prophecies were always just a little too big for any immediate fulfillment to satisfy, and so the oracle remained a beacon of hope for people of faith for centuries. And as Christians, we believe it was ultimately brought into its fullest completion in the birth of Jesus. He too was born in a time of national crisis, with Rome tightening its grip, national political and religious authorities weak and divided, and imperial officials and local collaborators squeezing every cent they could from the people. And the Temple, the symbol of the nation and God’s presence with them, was under constant threat — a threat that would come to reality just a generation later. Into this context the Angel Gabriel appears to a young and unmarried woman telling her she is pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit. Again, we know from the story of the Annunciation how she lovingly accepts this vocation. And we know from her Magnificat how she understood its importance for her people. (After all, what is a call for justice for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized but apocalyptic love in action?) But again, that’s not the story we get today. Today we get a story that hints at just how tenuous a position God’s choice had placed her in. For today we get Joseph’s story.

It starts like this:

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. (Matthew 1.18-19)

Throughout history there have been few predicaments more dangerous for a woman than to be unwed and pregnant. We get a sense of that here. Upon learning that his fiancée was pregnant, many men would have called for her to be publicly shamed and humiliated, and perhaps even killed in an act of vigilante ‘justice.’  Joseph’s righteous response to the news was to quietly break off the engagement. This is to his credit, but again goes to show how vulnerable Mary was. God had left her completely exposed and subject to the whim and grace of others. But of course, this is not the end of the story:

But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. (1.20-25)

The angel lets Joseph in on the plan, and he changes course accordingly. We can easily miss what this would have cost him. In an honour-shame culture, this move would have cost him the respect of many in his community. He could shelter Mary from the most dire consequences of her unplanned pregnancy, but he could not stop the rumours flying.

There are two ancient and opposite traditions about Joseph. One, popular in the West, is that he was a young man not much older than Mary; the other, popular in the East, is that he was and older man who had entered into an agreement to marry Mary solely to protect her financially and legally once her righteous parents had passed. No matter which story we prefer, Mary ending up pregnant with someone else’s child would render Joseph both a cuckold and a fool. By absorbing the community’s shame in this way, he lovingly protects Mary, her child, and, through who he now knows this child is to be, the community as a whole. This is the work of love — and yes, because it is unlikely, tenacious, creative, and unapologetic, apocalyptic love. It’s the kind of love that looks into the pit of human despair and darkness and chooses connection, while sacrificing personal gain for the sake of a more loving and more just world. This bigger vision is supported by his decision to name the baby Jesus, which, in Aramaic and Hebrew, would be the name we know as Joshua, ‘The LORD saves’.

What a beautiful bow this is to our Advent season! Mary and Joseph’s decisions, both separately and together, to accept the difficult vocations God had placed upon their shoulders is nothing short of apocalyptic: Apocalyptic hope for the future in the midst of a dark present; apocalyptic peace amidst the threat of violence; apocalyptic joy in the face of scorn; and apocalyptic love when it would have been so much easier just to say ‘No’.

May this be the spirit we bring into our Christmas celebrations this year, and may this be our beacon as we enter into a new year. Amen.