4 Sunday of Advent
Life does not always follow the plans we carefully schedule, and the Gospel reminds us that unexpected moments can become places of grace rather than failure. St. Joseph shows us that trusting God, especially when our plans fall apart, allows God to work in ways we could never have imagined. When we surrender control and trust that God is guiding our lives, even detours can lead us to something greater than our original destination.
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I can oftentimes be an unorganized person, and because of that, I live by my Google Calendar app. Now, I don’t want to make this an advertisement for Google this evening, but I do find that app incredibly helpful. I can schedule my week, plan out my whole year, and use different colours to distinguish between appointments. Without it, I would truly be lost. I rely on it. I think many of us are the same way.
We like to schedule things. We like to plan. We want to know where we are going in life. And yet, we also know from hard experience that when we make strong plans and carefully map things out, life sometimes gently laughs back at us and tears up our calendars.
Today’s Gospel is really all about this. How do we react when life throws us curveballs? How do we respond when unexpected situations arise and our plans don’t go the way we had hoped?
The Gospel teaches us that when we trust in God, God can take those unexpected moments and work something truly remarkable through them. Sometimes it is precisely when our plans seem broken or changed that God is working in the most powerful way.
St. Joseph in today’s Gospel is almost like the patron saint of plans gone awry. Just put yourself in his shoes for a moment. He is engaged and preparing for marriage, and then something completely unexpected shatters his expectations. His fiancée is found to be with child and he is not the father.
Joseph must have wrestled deeply with what to do. Should he cast her aside? Should he flee? How should he respond to this new and bewildering situation? Eventually, he hears the message from the angel—but should he trust it? Should he listen? He is faced with a profound and unsettling change of plans.
The same thing can happen in our own lives. Our schedules and plans can be torn up in an instant. Unexpected situations can enter our existence. We might receive a troubling medical diagnosis—our own or that of someone we love—that changes everything in a moment. Perhaps we have immigrated to a new country and found that our hopes and expectations have not come to pass. Maybe we struggle to find work, or a relationship we depended on is now at a breaking point.
These unexpected moments can become sources of anxiety, pain, and uncertainty.
St. Joseph is our guide in moments like these. He shows us how to respond with trust. In the end, Joseph chooses to trust the message of the angel and to believe that God is in charge.
Trust, however, does not mean being naïve or unthinking. I’ll admit that I struggle with trust when I’m not the one driving. If I’m in the passenger seat, I can be a terrible backseat driver—tense, flinching, nervous when someone doesn’t drive the way I would. And if the driver truly isn’t competent, then perhaps concern is justified.
But in the car that is our life, the driver is not inexperienced. It is God. And God knows what he is doing. Even if we don’t always know the destination, God does.
Joseph’s trust did not appear out of nowhere. We can imagine that he learned to trust God first in small ways, little by little, until that trust grew strong enough to carry him through this extraordinary moment. He believed that God was in charge of his life and that God would bring good from it.
For this reason, St. Joseph is such a powerful model for us. When we trust God in unexpected moments—when our plans fall apart—God can truly work. God needed to work in an unexpected way in Joseph’s life because God was bringing something radically new into the world.
In our first reading, we heard the prophet Isaiah proclaim that God would send Emmanuel—“God with us”—to guide the people during a time of turmoil. For Isaiah’s audience, this referred to King Hezekiah. Ultimately, Jesus Christ is the full fulfilment of that promise. In Jesus, God is not merely working through a human being; God has become human and remains close to us in every joy and struggle of life.
God could not have done this without working in an unexpected way in Joseph’s life. And often, it is in the unexpected that God does his most remarkable work.
Perhaps you are experiencing such a moment right now. Perhaps your plans have not unfolded as you hoped—or perhaps that moment lies ahead. Can we trust then? Can we be like St. Joseph and believe that God remains in control?
I’ll close with one more Google reference. My apologies for all the advertising! Think of a GPS or a maps app. We enter a destination and follow the directions, but traffic, accidents, or road closures force a reroute. Life is very much like that. We may set our destination and make our plans, but God sometimes redirects us. And more than that, God may even set a better destination than the one we had in mind.
Let us, like St. Joseph, trust that God is always at work in our lives—especially in moments that are unexpected—because it is there that God can bring about something greater than we ever imagined.
