Mary and Joseph

I have been pondering Mary, the mother of Jesus, and it was pulled together a wee bit by the sermon I heard today. She is totally amazing in what she endured and yet so little is known about her or mentioned, which I suppose for the early readers didn't need to be said because it was known.

Here was a young girl, probably barely 15, who gets a visitation from an angel and becomes pregnant. God has put her with an awesome fiance who can understand dreams and is obedient to God. Following on from hearing the Jewish guy the other day with the key factor of Jews being they obey God this makes these 2 people pure Jews, totally ready to parent the Son of God.

But what must these 2 people endure. Did anyone suggest to Mary she have an abortion? Did anyone encourage Joseph to get her to get rid of the baby? We know he considered "putting her aside quietly" but as for what had been suggested to him about the baby we will never know.

I have been pondering on the whole thing of there being no room for them in Bethlehem even though she was heavily pregnant. The usual bit at the moment is that this was wrong and the couple would have been welcomed in by Joseph's family and she would've had the baby in the place in the home surrounded by Joseph's female relatives. But what if they had decided that she was duping their man, and that he was a bit of an idiot to still be hanging around with her. Maybe when they turned up at his family home he was told that he could come in but not the trollop and that if he was going to stay with this awful woman who had duped him into taking her on as his wife even though she was pregnant with someone else's child they he was not entering their home. This makes Joseph even more amazing than at first glance, being willing to be rejected by his family to obey God, but also makes the birth of Jesus even more of a place of rejection. It was not that the inn keeper would not let them in but there was no room for them in Bethlehem with anyone and that they were seen as total outcasts.

Wow! Again as I ponder the birth of Jesus I do wonder if I could obey God that much to be rejected by my family and be totally alone. Not such a great fluffy, fun story as most of our nativity plays and sermons make out.

As someone was saying the other day "Your God's not fair" meaning how only those who believe will get to live for eternity with Him, but I do wonder just how fair God is to allow His only son to be born not just into such poverty but into such rejection and for Him to have not emotional scars. He couldn't have done because He was still willing to lay down His life for us!