IN HIS GRIP: MAKING MY STAND

For me, one of the hardest parts of being a Christian is sharing your faith with the people like your close friends.

When I was in high school, I was a cool girl with a group of cool friends. I had a good reputation. Even my male friends have high respect for me and my barkada. At those times our male friends would talk about cartoons and girls. Some would even count girlfriends. But the nice thing was they never treated me or my best friends like those girls. In college, one of them even discouraged his bloc mate to court me because he knew his friend was a player.

That was the time when I wasn’t a Christian yet. We attend church, but we were just attendees and didn’t get involved in any kind of fellowship. But somehow it helped mold me to be a good child and it helped me a lot growing up as a teenager. When I transferred to a public school, I was like a new born. There were a lot of things I didn’t know. It was like a culture shock for me. But I adapted well. It was nice to belong and have many friends. The negative part of this was I learned to swear or use bad language as an expression when talking with friends (good thing my parents scolded me early), and I had my share of gin and beer.

In this world, swearing, drinking and maybe indulging in order kinds of vices make you “in,” make you accepted. But in my experience, I sensed that it was wrong. So I controlled myself from drinking (telling myself that as a girl it’s embarrassing to be drinking when my dad doesn’t even drink), and controlled my lips from saying bad words. When I did this, I thought my peers would find me corny, religious, and intimidating, and would distance away. But what happened is I had more friends, good friends who respected me and looked up to me (well, some did avoid me but their respect remained)
In college, I had more freedom. I went to wild parties, and rock concerts but I still tried my best not to swear or drink any alcoholic drinks (I failed several times I think during my sophomore years). But as I became active in church, I knew I had to take my stand and bare any negative reactions the world would give. In a world of wild teenagers this is not an easy work. This was a big sacrifice for me.

Christianity Today once featured about one character in the Bible who is usually, not ignored, but less talked about. But what we don’t know is that he had his share of sacrifices. When talking about the birth of Jesus, we talk about the virgin Mary, the three kings and their gifts, and King Herod’s evil plans against the baby, but we barely took notice of Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father.

The Bible describes Joseph in Matthew 1:18 as a righteous man. In a deeper sense, a righteous man during this age is called a “tsaddiyq” (pronounced as tsad-deek) or someone who is very obedient to the Law of Moses – the Torah. So that means Joseph didn’t eat unclean food, he didn’t mix with the wrong kinds of people, and he kept the day of the Sabbath holy. As a righteous man, Joseph is admired and looked up to. This must have been a hard work for Joseph to maintain this title.

But now he has a problem. Mary was pledged to marry Joseph but he found out that she was pregnant and he knew he wasn’t the father (maybe Mary told him this).
Nazareth was a small town and pretty sure that everyone’s going to find out about this sooner or later. Joseph’s reputation as a righteous man was at risk. In the Bible, in the book of Deuteronomy says that if a woman pledged to be married she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and she shall be stoned to death. In the Law this is the righteous thing for him to do. But Joseph couldn’t bear to do this.

Imagine how this issue had troubled Joseph. He must have felt betrayal, uncertainty, pity and maybe even anger. They were only arranged to be married so it’s possible that he didn’t know Mary well enough. So Joseph decided to cancel the engagement silently. This way, he could lessen her suffering and at the same time, maintain his title as a tsaddiyq.
Then God sent an angel and spoke to Joseph in a dream saying, “don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Why did God wait and let Joseph struggle first with the situation before sending an angel to remove his anxiety?

God wanted Joseph to learn something, for his faith to grow. He was afraid of losing his reputation. If he married Mary, and the townspeople would find out about Mary’s situation, he wouldn’t be invited to their homes, he would not be given their businesses, he would never be admired and respected as a lover of the Torah. This would be a great sacrifice in Joseph’s part.

Joseph learned a new kind of righteousness here. To the eyes of his friends, of his townspeople, he made a big mistake for marrying Mary and committing himself to baby Jesus. But he gave up his identity and his reputation for Jesus. Looking at the eyes of his people, they never looked at him with the same respect and adoration. But when he looked at the eyes of the child Jesus, he knew he had done the right thing.

In this event in the Bible, certainly God has a purpose. When Joseph decided to marry Mary, he thought it was the end of his being known as a righteous man. What he did not know is that the child he would adopt was the one who would bring to the human race a new kind of righteousness.

A friend called. He laughed at me and said, “E di hallelujah, hallelujah ka na rin? (so you’re singing hallelujah, hallelujah now). Proudly I said “Yes.” I know it would be hard to talk about Jesus to these kinds of people. Surely I would be laughed at. But as a Christian, I have to stand up for what I believe in even if it causes me my reputation of being cool or anything. One step that I could do now is pray for them, live a righteous life, and show my peers that I can have Jesus in my life and still be cool. After all, I don’t care what they think about me, what I matters is what God thinks about me.

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