March 19, the feast of St. Joseph: deep in Lent. But more to the point, a week before the Annunciation. Recall what we said at the beginning of Lent: the real deepest mystery here is not the Cross, but the Incarnation, God-with-us. God has entered into our life, with all its sufferings. The Cross is the fulfillment, but the Incarnation is the beginning – and indeed, if God does not fill man with his presence, the suffering of the Cross is meaningless.
In short, it is right, here, deep in Lent, leading up to Good Friday, to have a little reminder of Christmas. Emmanuel: God is with us.!
So a few Biblical reflections on St. Joseph, largely culled from a Christmas sermon by Msgr. Ronald Knox.
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“Her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.” At first glance, and in most of our translations, the picture we get is this: Joseph is law-abiding. He finds out his betrothed is pregnant, presumably by another man. He wants none of her – but fortunately the angel convinces him it’s okay.
Did Joseph really distrust Mary? Was Joseph, the “just man,” that obtuse? Was Mary’s goodness so unclear that he thought she was sleeping around?
As happens surprisingly often, the King James is a more literal, better, translation: “not willing to make her a publick example, he was minded to put her away privily.”
First: the word is not necessarily “divorce.” (How could he divorce someone he hadn’t married?) The Greek is more like “let her loose,” send her away.
His reasoning – not willing to “put her to shame” or “make her a publick example” – is a Greek word that just means he doesn’t want everyone looking at her. Far from publicly rejecting her (which a divorce would surely have done), to the contrary, he wants to get her out of sight, to preserve her dignity. This is from Matthew, but it’s interesting that in Luke, she runs away to her cousin’s house for six months.
The just man knows the dignity of Mary, and wants to preserve it. The just man wants to do it all right.
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The angel tells Joseph, “you shall call his name Jesus.” Joseph has a task. Joseph is the namer. He is not the biological father, but he does need to act as foster father. The genealogy of Jesus, which Matthew has just given, traces his descent from King David through Joseph.
Msgr. Knox points out something funny about the census that drove Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. Today, a census determines how many people are in each house on a given day. But back then, the census was done genealogically. What Joseph needed to do was to go at some point to Bethlehem – to City Hall, as it were – and say, “I am Joseph, the son of Jacob son of Matthan; I live in Nazareth with my wife Miriam and one child.”
But that picture of the census changes the story a bit. It’s not clear Mary even needed to go to Bethlehem with him. There’s no indication in the text – and lots of indications to the contrary in the history – that Joseph needed to be there on a particular day. In short, it was not Caeasar’s fault that they were in Bethlehem when Mary gave birth. It was Joseph’s choice.
But Joseph is the namer, and the descendent of David – how proud a lineage! How much he might have considered the importance of his task! No, it’s not an unfortunate accident that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Joseph wanted that to happen. The just man, attentive to detail, made it so. He wanted everything to be just right.
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Finally, if there was no mad rush for everyone to be in Bethlehem on December 25, the “no room for him in the inn” looks a little different. Translated literally, it says, “there was no place for him at the journey’s end.” Or as John says, “he came to his own home, and his own people received him not.”
When the heir of David came home, it was not the busy inn that turned him away. It was his friends and relations who made no space for him – or had nothing better to offer Joseph and Mary than the shed where they kept the cattle.
I don’t think it bothered Joseph and Mary much: they had Jesus. They did “receive him, and believed in his name.”
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This Lent and Holy Week, let us imitate St. Joseph. Let us receive Christ, make him the best space we can, do our best to love his holy name. Let us welcome him into our human family, and accept the poverty and work and suffering that come with him, not so much because God wants us to suffer as because we count the suffering as nothing, for the joy of being with Jesus.
Are there earthly comforts you value more than the presence of God in your life?
