Joshua, The Good News
Author: Bobby Valentine | Filed under: Christian hope, Jesus, Jewish Backgrounds, Matthew, Women
The Gospel of Matthew is the literary hinge between the so called “Old Testament” and the New.” Jesus’s story is the goal of Israel’s long history. Matthew opens with a “book of genesis” (1.1) of Jesus. Jesus is the inheritor of the treasure of Israel. He is not the father of but he is the “son of …”
Every Jew knew Jesus’s name. That is because Jesus’s name is Yeshua. Yeshua is “Joshua.” In fact, many Jewish parents named their son “Joshua.” It was as common as “Bob” in our North American culture. The name itself is both a statement of faith and a prayer. As the Jewish sage Jesus, the son of Sira tells us,
“Joshua son of Nun … became, as his name implies,
a great savior of God’s elect … so that he might give
Israel its inheritance” (Sirach 46.1).
People in Joshua/Jesus’s day named their sons with this great name because they were praying that Yahweh would save them in their day as God did in the days after Moses.
And the angel told Mary (whose name is actually Miraim) that this particular Yeshua, this one who is inheriting the entire history of Israel, is the One. “He will save his people” (1.21). He is the “son of” David, he is the “son of Abraham,” he is “born the King of the Jews” (2.2, messiah means king).
This Jesus/Joshua story has surprises. Unexpected scandal. There will be things that are going to be hard to believe, just as Israel’s history always had strange and unexpected twists. The presence of women (!) in the book of origins (i.e. Joshua’s genealogy) lets us know that the cast of unusual, unexpected, of scandal, of hard to believe will find expression in the Messiah. But again the “book of origins” lets us know that it is all according to how Yahweh has always worked.
Matthew prepares us for the biggest of all scandals (so far). The messiah comes from an unmarried young woman (Miriam was likely around 14, young in our world but not in hers). We pious religious folks like that language “with child.” It sounds almost religious. But no one talks like that in real life, the common English Bible translation tradition protects our religious sensibilities.
But Matthew had no such qualms and did not do that. And no one in Israel or Greece or Rome would have been reading the King James Version or the NIV. Some alternative renderings that say in regular English the meaning.
“Mary, his mother, was engaged to Joseph, but before they were married it was found that she was about to become a mother” (Goodspeed’s NT).
“His mother Mary was engaged to Joseph, but before they were married she found out she was going to have a baby” (Today’s English Version).
“His mother, Mary, was engaged to Joseph; but before they came together she turned out to be pregnant” (Kingdom New Testament).
“His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. Before they came to the marriage bed, Joseph discovered she was pregnant” (The Message).
The unmarried teenager was pregnant. Often, in my experience anyway, religious people today would not have been as kind as Joseph was to Miriam. Joseph wanted to get rid of her (divorce her!) but not shame her. Churches in my lifetime have engaged in lots of shaming of girls who were pregnant and unmarried. Mary/Miriam, on the first page of the New Testament, is both.
But the King came through an unwed mother. Now this subverted every notion of the Messiah but it actually has precedent throughout the history the Messiah inherited. The biggest surprise is that this Messiah from the unwed Mary (who believed her that she was a virgin? Joseph did not until he had a dream. I wonder how many people suggested to him his dream was merely ‘wishful thinking?’ Now we believe in the virgin birth, but these people lived in real life and I know how real life is) is Immanuel.
God has not only come to save his people but to LIVE WITH THEM. Just as God always desired to do.
Joshua is Good News … the Gospel is Good News.
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