Do you think he believed her? Of course not. Would you have believed her? If Joseph was flesh and blood, a real person, as chocked full of suspicions and jealousies as the rest of us, then of course he didn't believe her.

But maybe he wanted to. Maybe he really wanted to believe that she wouldn't betray him, wouldn't be intimate with another man. Maybe he wanted to believe her only because he needed to believe that she loved him, still loved him. The psychologists would call it denial, I guess, but there was no denying that he loved her. Even if he couldn't believe her, he loved her. That's why he couldn't even think of having her stoned. That's why he decided to put her away quietly -- he loved her.

And then he had the dream. An angel of the Lord came to him in a dream and told him that everything was true, just as Mary had said, and that he could marry her anyway.

Proof, right? All he needed to hear, right? Have your dreams ever proved anything to you? I think not, not unless you already wanted to believe what your dream told you. And maybe when he awoke it occurred to Joseph to wonder if he had had the dream because he really wanted to believe her, or if he now was going to believe her because he had had the dream. Who can tell, except that upon waking, he followed the dream, and the rest is scripture.

III

W. H. Auden calls Joseph the "first Christian" because he had to accept the Incarnation -- the coming of Jesus -- without understanding it. I guess what strikes me about that is his definition of Christian -- one who accepts, without necessarily understanding. There's some truth to that, because even during this season of the year, even when we celebrate the coming of Christ, we do not really understand all that it means.

We read the prophecy scriptures -- the wolf lying down with the lamb, the lion and the ox feeding together, the child playing over the adders' den, and what does that mean? It's not that way anywhere I know about. Or how about the one that says, "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light," when about all we see in this second millenia after the birth of the Child is the darkness growing darker by the day.

There's really no good reason to believe that His coming made any difference at all in the world, no proof that anything has really changed; no evidence that Christmas is such a big deal. That may even be why it's almost always the children, who act out the story -- that's a way to keep it cute, enjoyable, and not terribly important. There may be no good reason this Advent, or any other, to look at the manger and say anything other than "Big deal ...."

There was no good reason for Joseph, either. But there was his dream. And what did that dream change? Did his dream change the world? No. Herod was still crazy, and the Romans were still in power. Did the dream change his situation? Only to make it worse, in one way. He still faced the taunts of his friends and the looks of his family, and not only that; now he faced the long and uncomfortable trip to Bethlehem with a pregnant fiance.