Walking the Thin Line
Joseph, her fiance, was a good man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly. ~ Matthew 1:19 Imagine that you're a young man about to get married to a young woman. In today's world, you can decide to get engaged or even "hitched" in a matter of minutes on a whim to anyone you want. In Joseph and Mary's world, marriage was not entered into lightly. First, the families talked and came to an agreement. Then when the time was deemed right, a public announcement of your intention to marry was made. At this point, you were engaged, but it wasn't like being engaged in our day. If you were a young Jewish couple, being engaged meant that except in cases of death or divorce, you were committed to each other, but you were still not doing married people things. Eventually, you would be married, but from my understanding (which is shallow, I'll admit, as my understanding is second-hand from Father McCloud's