Joseph, the Broken Hearted
On the moment God almost ended a romance and our adult wounds of love
“Joseph was a good man and did not want to embarrass Mary in front of everyone. So he decided to quietly call off the wedding.” Matthew 1:19 (CEV)
“We had a kind of love, I thought that it would never end
Oh my lover, oh my other, oh my friend
We talked around in circles, and we talked around and then
I loved you to the moon and back again
You gave everything this golden glow
Now turn off all the stars 'cause this I know
That it hurts like so
To let somebody go” Coldplay (Listen here)
Christmas is far gone, blown away by the shifting winds of the new year. But before I give it my last wave goodbye, I wanted to share a thread in the Christmas story that absolutely tied me up and still won’t let go. It seems each year, God arrests me with some new shimmer in the story of Jesus’ birth. It’s not like I predict this or even anticipate it. But then wham-o! And this year, those two sentences above from Matthew 1:19 cut me to the heart.
There is a whole massive story in those forgettable lines. These two young lovers almost lost each other, a whole love story dashed upon the rocks, because God showed up. Can you hear their heartbreak? Joseph in the agony of apparent betrayal and Mary beside herself to reach him with the truth. My God, their pain and shame and isolation. All because of an illegitimate child. It’s a whole unbearable hell of a scene. Before the angelic fanfare, the sound of heartbreak heralded this coming king. God nearly became love’s executioner.
I just had to see this scene for myself. So I wrote it. And when I saw their break up, this ending of an engagement, I wept for them. It’s nearly unbearable because they still deeply loved each other. Because I write to men on sexuality, I want to bring attention to how Joseph handled this pain. We as men have a lot to learn from him. But I hope what I wrote honors just as much Mary’s own broken heart and the unbearable pain of not being believed.
You may pick at the details of my stage notes on this drama. Please do. Just don’t miss these young lovers in the agony and beauty of love. It’s the love story that birthed our Jesus.
“Just go.” Joseph said. He could not look at her face hot with tears for fear of risking his own. And of all the worst things, Mary listened and left. He just wanted the story, to know one thing: Whose passion child was this? But she’d spent her words and so she walked.
Oh, people noticed—of course they did. For weeks now, they mumbled and stared and wagged their heads, not looking but looking. Who’s sleeping with whom? The baby bump screamed a story as did the distance between these otherwise cooing doves. He could have cleared his name and his shame. But he held his tongue. He never loved the taste of revenge.
Square in his chest, despite those broken pot shards, his blood red heart still beat fast when she came near. But that beating broken heart was drowning in an ocean of shame. He felt every bit the sting of being tossed aside. To go from betrothed to betrayed split his insides in two.
His brothers cornered him to get the real story. “So is it you? Or is she just like that now?” He fisted his hands and took away his eyes. They did not know this Joseph with muscles tensed to pounce. Their brother never loved the taste of revenge. When he relaxed his white knuckles and walked away, they knew to let him go.
His pulse drummed loud in his ears. He did not like his balled up hands but he had to save face. How do you speak words you don’t have? How do admit you’ve been played a fool? You got discarded for another man and you can’t even get the real story. The woman who always gave him wise words, which he heeded endlessly, could only speak wild ones. He was losing her and her mind.
He gave his face to the night. In the hours when jackals howled, he writhed and sweated out this fever dream, wrestling no one for nothing. There was truth in the night. And the darkness brought her to him, the feel of her hand, the smell of her hair. She laughed her dancing laugh, she swayed and played and pulled him close, in those witching hours.
But this night, the dark that always echoed empty spoke back. A voice. “She is not your terror. This brave one is safe. I am here. Risk your love.”
He woke to the heat of the day, the sun already in high arch. He hunched over to the same boiling chest, trying to shake the night as he always did. But today the tears bled into the light. He could not shake them. And those words thundered back to him. “Risk your love.”
He found her eventually. And again, the air held its breath between them, a moment destined to fail like it had for weeks. “Will you say it to me one more time?” he asked. But she had spent her words and her tears on this man. She could only sit in the air that wasn’t breathing.
He kicked the dust. “Brave one?” he said.
“Who told you that?” She had held that name for herself. She even clung to it now as her only stability. And though he never mocked her, she feared his tone.
“The night. The night told me.” He looked up and tapped his chest. “Can I try to be brave with you?”
Nobody stopped jeering. Nobody stopped wagging those heads and not looking but looking. The town all but ignored the wedding. And family shut the door to their visits, leaving them to the cattle barn. But people eventually ran out of words to explain or extinguish the fire between these two. Because no one saw a woman’s words believed and a man’s broken heart mended, this first Christmas miracle, the day God saved two young lovers in love.
If you leave with just one thing from this story, please see a God who cares about your wounds—all of them, including the wounds you’ve suffered in your journey of sexuality and romance.
God is a hopeless romantic. He cared to rescue a romance and the broken hearts of these young lovers. He cared about the weight of love. God did not coldly shove a man aside to use his bride to be. God did not borrow the womb of a woman and treat her as an incubator for some ego child. God cared about her heart and his heart and the romance our savior was born into.
In a word: God has a heart. Indeed, when God describes through the prophets the impact of Israel’s idolatry, he reaches for the language of broken love, betrayal and infidelity and being cheated on. He describes it as the wounds of romantic love. God understands these wounds. And he longs to win Israel back like a lover (Hosea 2:14).
Missing Conversation
Several readers noticed I left something really, really important out of my book on masculine sexuality—a conversation on the adult wounds we suffer in sex and romance. There simply was not space in the book. And too, the book focused most on the sexual formation from childhood that shows up in our adult life. But adult wounds are something I wish I had spoken about more. Men (and of course women too) carry these wounds of love.
I hear it when I sit with a man as he heals from the trauma of his wife’s affair. Those deep guttural tears will rip your heart out and you will never wonder again if a man is a lover at heart. I hear it too in men who lament sexless marriages, because it always becomes a conversation more about the romance and passion and connection that died with it. I watch men in the agony of marital fights go from being defensive to getting brave with vulnerable desire. When single men grieve break ups in my office, the room fills with all their lost dreams and desires for connection and companionship and family.
Of course I hear it in all kinds of little ways too. A friend once told me how poorly he sleeps when he and his wife are at odds or even when she’s away for a trip. “Oh, limbic resonance,” I said. “Huh?” he said. “Your body just misses being near her as a lover. Your brain is tuned into her even when you’re not conscious of it. It’s how we connect with each other. Long term lovers even have their heart rates sync up over time. It shows how deeply you’ve let her in your heart.”
We men are lovers through and through.
We often say men want sex and women want romance. It’s a trope that hurts everyone. It makes romantic love into an act of bartering. A trade off. It reduces men down to urge based animals and cordons off sex as being unwomanly. It’s a terrible deal where both lose. I have never met a man who just wants sex.
Unburied
I think the wounded lover is the very first thing men will hide within themselves. These wounds get buried pretty deep. We will readily show the world our anger or our withdrawal or our unflappable stone cold endurance.
And that’s what moved me so much about Joseph. He didn’t power up. He just let Mary go and sat in the pain waiting for God.
So much of my own romance story came back to me. All the woman I had ever fallen in love with and the ways these relationships ended or never even started. I thought of the time Amanda and I broke up while dating. I thought too of how hard it had been for me in marriage to get brave with vulnerable desire and all the fights that ensued because of it. So much of that had been kept deep inside. I grieved all that isolation, but too, the immature ways I’d handled these women and that pain.
Gosh, the human heart is so skittish. God knows he made your heart to fall in love with a lover, with beauty, with the world. He knows that’s too much to hold alone. This rescue of Joseph and Mary show me He cares about even this.
Thanks for reading!
Want to talk with me about this post? Monday, January 27, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, I am hosting a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers, where I teach a little more and answer all your questions. These are such rich conversations for me! To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The Zoom link can be found here.
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I took a really needed break (mostly) from podcasting and speaking over the holidays. But I am back at it and excited to do some speaking events. Here are a few you can join me at:
Jan 21-25 - Broken to Beloved Summit Live Q+A on purity culture recovery | Virtual
Feb 15 - Valentine’s Coffee Date | RockPointe Church, Dallas, TX
Mar 7,8 - Men’s Advance | Louisiana Assemblies of God, Woodworth, LA
May 9,10 - Marriage Night & Father/Son Breakfast | Faith Church, Pella, IA
The wounded lover … thanks for pointing this out and putting language around it.
With your words you paint a beautiful picture of this often overlooked moment in the Christmas story. The wild heart of God invites the lover heart of the everyday man Joseph to risk it all. That courage is astounding! What a picture of wholehearted masculinity in action. Makes me wonder who (other than God) had spoken into Joseph’s heart to nurture and grow this masculine maturity? Who had long before undertaken to walk with Joseph in his journey of masculine initiation?