Thursday 21 December 2017

Not Forgetting Joseph At Christmas

When it comes the Nativity scene there are several main characters but Joseph is not amongst them, his only role was to hire a donkey and get Mary to a stable in Bethlehem in the first place.
No songs sang by Christians about him centuries later and the only line said by children with tea-towels wrapped around their heads in school plays is to ask if there is any room in the inn.    
Other than that he is the silent, forgotten member of the cast while angels bring heavenly greetings, his wife is exalted to the highest, wise men turn up with presents and even the shepherds are higher up the chain than him.
To be fair you could understand if he was a bit grumpy, considering his 14 year old virgin wife had told him nine months earlier that while he was out buying a new hammer, God had came down from heaven and splashed his Holy seed at her and what-do-ya-know, impregnated her with man's Saviour. Oh, and he needed to get her to Bethlehem pronto.
Luckily for Mary, she was shacked up with probably the only man in the entire history of mankind who went 'I'm okay with that' and then went about hiring a donkey.
So despite being the 'dad', Joseph is only a minor role in the whole nativity thing and to rub the poor blokes face in it, everyone gets a carol or a hymn, even the donkey gets its own song, while he is just the guy stood at the back of the stable wondering what's he going to do with several pounds of myrrh and more importantly, how to approach that conversation with the boy about who his real father is.

4 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Falling on a bruise said...

You don't have to over analyze things, just noticing them is a start.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Falling on a bruise said...

You shoehorned all that in on a post about no Christmas songs about Joseph. You should have kept it for at least a post about something close to it.