Sunday, 12/22/13
Gabriel told Mary
she was to conceive of the Holy Spirit, then, she conceived just when she said,
“Le it be done to me according to your word.” Immediately afterwards, she
travelled south to the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth. She returned to
Nazareth after Elizabeth had borne her son six month later.
The people of
Nazareth, seeing Mary to be with child congratulated her spouse Joseph on becoming a father. And
Mary, for her own reasons, did not tell Joseph how she came to be pregnant.
The Bible described
Joseph as being a just man, and he was just in every way. For one thing,
presuming the child to be the son of another, as a just man, he could not take
that stranger’s son as his own.
But, knowing Mary to
be good through and through, as a just man, he could not subject her to the
pain of a public divorce.
For someone caught
between two such unsatisfactory choices my mother used to say, “You are damned
if you do, you are damned if you don’t.” Another way of expressing such a
predicament is to say you are “in a bind.”
When you are in a
bind just do what Joseph did, namely, leave it to God.
Once, teaching grade
school. I asked each kid to describe a time when he of she was in a bind. One
kid wrote, “My parents got divorced, and I love my dad, but he put me in a bind
when he was marrying again. He asked me to be his best man.”
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