Advent 4A: When Fear Comes Knocking
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Today we light the final candle on our Advent wreath, and our focus turns toward love — not as sentiment or spectacle, but as presence: love that chooses to dwell, to stay, to be born into the real conditions of the world.
In a week that has held both tenderness and sorrow, gathering and fracture, we are invited to look for God’s quiet, steadfast coming in vulnerable places and ordinary lives — such as that of Joseph.
Joseph is one of the most understated figures in the Christmas story. He doesn’t speak a single recorded word. He performs no miracles. He sings no songs. And yet Matthew places him right at the centre of the story.
Matthew tells us that Joseph was “righteous” — a word that clearly does not mean rigidity — because Joseph’s righteousness is revealed not in rule-bound obedience, but in his refusal to bow to social expectation, public pressure, or the privileges available to him.
When Mary is found to be pregnant, Joseph has every legal and social right to protect himself. He could expose her to scandal. He could turn her into the cautionary tale that secures his own reputation.
Instead, Joseph takes time for discernment. He pauses. And before an angel even appears, Matthew tells us that Joseph intends to protect Mary’s dignity — to act quietly, mercifully, without spectacle or retaliation. His instinct is restraint and compassion.
This is the first important point in the gospel today: crisis does not invent Joseph’s character - it revealed who he already was, and what has been forming in him over time.
Joseph has clearly been shaped by long habits of faithfulness — by Scripture, by a life lived within God’s story, by a moral imagination capable of holding justice and mercy together rather than forcing a choice between them.
That kind of spiritual maturity doesn’t appear overnight. It is formed slowly. And with that inner work already underway, the angel reassures Joseph that he need not be afraid to follow through on the path of love he has begun to walk. God’s word meets a life already inclined toward mercy, and the fruit of that meeting is courage — and a devotion that will carry Mary and her child through all that lies ahead.
Joseph’s story reminds us that our faith is a slow, daily work of becoming — shaped by the stories we are told, the practices we repeat, the communities that hold us, and the values we give space to find expression.
This is part of the Church’s vocation: not simply to react when the world fractures, but to form people capable of responding with faithful love when fear comes knocking.
Advent in particular zooms in the importance of:
the hope that remembers what’s worth doing amid on our dark days
the peace that teaches us to seek wholeness rather than victory
the experience of joy that affirms goodness without denying our sorrow
and the kind of love that teaches us to stay — to choose presence over withdrawal when fear would draw lines between us.
These are very difficult practices - but disciplines of resistance in a fractured world. They provoke us to live beyond the temptation of binaries — beyond us and them, innocent and evil, pure and impure - they teach us to hold complexity with courage, to listen to individual stories without turning whole peoples into enemies.
This week, fear knocked very loudly in our own nation. At a Chanukah celebration in Bondi, a moment of light and joy was turned into terror. Lives were lost. Families and a community already living with rising anxiety were targeted in an act of violence and hatred.
Moments like this rightly leave us with painful questions. How did it come to this? Isn’t Australia meant to be a sanctuary for all of us? A safe place for people to call home?
These are good questions, but if we are wise, we will ask not only what happened, but where this will take us. How will this experience form us? Because violence always attempt to dominate the narrative — falsely equating fear with justification, and narrowing the story of whom we can trust, and who we hope to be for each other.
And when it does, it is important to remember this - those executing violence do not reveal who we are. The people who shielded others do. The civilians who confronted the attackers do. Those who light candles in solidarity with a grieving and frightened community do.
That distinction matters deeply, because it will shape how we live on — how we speak, who we reach out to, and how we teach our children who belongs and who does not.
Joseph helps us here. Joseph shows us that faithfulness in dangerous times is not hasty, reactive or loud. It is prayerful, discerning. It waits for more information to emerge. It listens for wisdom to speak. And it refuses to abandon compassion when fear would have us denounce each other.
Joseph could have stepped away quietly and preserved his own future. Instead, he takes Mary into his home. He takes responsibility for a child who is not biologically his own. He gives the child a name — and in doing so, gives him a place, a lineage, a future. Jesus becomes “son of David” not through power or bloodline, but because Joseph chooses love — claiming the child, giving him a name, and carrying God’s promise forward through faithful presence.
Joseph’s righteousness is a love that stays in solidarity. And that, too, is part of our calling in moments like this.
Our world constantly pressures us to take sides quickly — to flatten complexity into tribes and certainty into slogans. But the Christian faith is not about a solution to the problem of suffering; but about a presence within it. A child. A name. Emmanuel — God with us. Our Christianity gives no simple answers to complex questions, rather it teaches us to live faithfully with complexity. Which is why we can be for Jewish life without abandoning compassion for Gaza. We can be horrified by a terrible act conducted by two people without collapsing into blame or suspicion onto an entire population.
When Joseph wakes from his dream, Matthew tells us, and acts — faithfully, quietly, decisively. And then, once his work is done, Joseph fades from the story. Which may be a final lesson for us.
Good formation is not about recognition. It’s not about virtue signalling, politicking or performing the things that will earn us applause. It is about becoming the kind of people who are defined not by the worst that happens to us, but by the best hopes we can imagine and enact for one another.
So this Advent season, as we wait for the coming of Christ, the question before us is not only what do we believe? It is what will we allow to shape us — as a nation, as a community, as people of faith?
Where do we need God’s word to speak into our lives — reminding us not to be afraid to choose love?
May we be a people formed deeply enough by love — that when fear comes knocking, we answer with the quiet courage of Joseph.
Amen.