EMBARRASSING SITUATION RESOLVED A few months after my mother returned back to Nazareth, it eventually became obvious that she was pregnant. Her fiancé, Joseph, knew that the baby wasn’t his, since he hadn’t been intimate with her. Naturally, he assumed that she had been with another man. “No, I haven’t,” Mary insisted. “God is the one who made me pregnant!” “Yeah, right!” thought Joseph. He didn’t believe her for a second. Being older than she was, he couldn’t be fooled. Based on God’s law, if a man found something disgraceful in his wife’s or his fiancée’s conduct, he could write her a letter of divorce, hand it to her, and send her on her way. Legally, he had no obligation to marry her. But Joseph was a kind man. He realized that an unmarried pregnant teenager could be judged by the religious leaders and stoned to death immediately. The holy books said that if an engaged or married woman slept with another man, both she and the man were to be put to death. Joseph loved God and wanted to be kind like God; he also loved Mary too much to make a public spectacle of her and force her go through such a cruel and painful death. At first he thought he would be discreet and privately release her from the engagement; but as he was strategizing about his predicament, he had a dream. In the dream, a glowing angel of the Lord appeared to him. “Joseph, descendant of the great King David, don’t be afraid to marry Mary,” the angel said. “Go ahead and have the wedding ceremony! The baby she is carrying is not a man’s baby. Mary is telling the truth. The breath of God himself conceived this baby. This child is the long-awaited Holy One who is supposed to be born to a virgin. This is an excerpt from the book, Your Letter From Heaven, by Helen Hunter.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 16:31:00 +0000