They’ve already started doing promos for season 20 (20!) of The Bachelor. Ugh. I can’t stand the concept of this show or The Bachelorette. The shows are demeaning, mean-spirited and just plain creepy. I really don’t understand how they’re even legal (seems a case could be made for prostitution). If I could ever muster the anger or time or energy to protest a television show, it would have to be this franchise.

With Advent hitting just about the same time these new promos started, I started thinking about what would happen if the producers of The Bachelor got ahold of the nativity story?

I can just hear the promo now. “We’ve assembled 10 eligible bachelors and told them that each are going to get a marry a beautiful younger woman. What they don’t know is that the woman is 8-and-a-half months pregnant, and the baby belongs to someone else. They’ll be asked to marry her anyway, trek 80 miles through the desert and then deliver the baby with no mid-wife, physician or epidural drip in a barn full of livestock. The man who is able to secure a donkey for the trip, deliver the baby without passing out, throwing up or calling for a life line and can commit to raising the child as his own will win a two-year trip to Egypt and a life of uncertainty.”

And if this actually did make it into production, would anyone who was watching it place their bets on a poor peasant teenager and a carpenter from a little town no one had ever even heard of actually making a go of it?

Joseph was a prize catch if ever there was one. One could argue that it was Joseph, as much as Mary, who made possible the first Christmas. If Joseph had not cooperated with God’s action in human history, the birth of Jesus might have turned out quite differently. After all, according to the laws of the land, Joseph was perfectly within his rights to call for Mary’s stoning once he found out that she was pregnant with someone else’s baby. But, instead, Joseph decided to cooperate with God’s work in the world. He decided to do more than law and custom required. He elected to do more than was expected of him.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone’s going to find the kind of man who’s going to love you enough to risk life and limb to raise some one else’s baby. You certainly won’t find that in a television script. No one would believe it.