Daily Reflection Feast of Saint Joseph

On this feast of St. Joseph, the husband of Mary and the patron of the universal Church, we naturally contemplate the life of this most holy of all mortal men, who God willed to be the father of Jesus on earth from the Lord’s birth as well as the husband of Jesus’ mother. However, almost everything we contemplate about Joseph is but a deduction, that is, a speculation, from the nature of his role, since we know almost nothing about him. 

Other than a few oblique references to him by name or by his job as a carpenter (“Is this not the carpenter’s son.” Mk 6:3; “Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Jn 1:45) in other gospel accounts, all we know of Joseph is from the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. But even there, the totality of it is quite small and even contradictory (in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus- which is actually the genealogy of Joseph- Joseph’s father is said to be Jacob whereas in Luke’s version, his father is Heli- a name found only in Luke). In neither account does Joseph ever say a single word. In Luke’s account he basically disappears, appearing only in relation to Mary. At least in Luke the shepherds find the child with “Mary and Joseph” whereas in Matthew, the Magi find Jesus only with his mother Mary, with Joseph nowhere to be found in that scene.

The fact is that the very little we know about Joseph is almost all found in Matthew’s shorter infancy narrative. The striking difference of the two infancy narratives (other than the fact that they agree on very little) is that Luke’s is all from the perspective of Mary, while Matthew’s is from the perspective of Joseph. There, in Matthew, Joseph is depicted as the obedient servant. There, the angel appears not to Mary, as in Luke, but to Joseph (albeit unnamed and only in dreams and several times, unlike Mary awake, we assume, in Luke with Gabriel but once), telling him to go ahead and marry Mary even after he learns she is pregnant and not by him (and also telling him that he is to name the child Jesus whereas in Luke, Mary is told that she is to name him such), and then again to take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and then to return home to Israel, where he has yet another, final dream warning him against returning to his hometown in Judea (not Nazareth where Luke says he was from) and only after that does he finally settle in Nazareth, as if by happenstance.

After all these dreams, Joseph awakes and immediately does what he had been told to do by the angel in his dream. Matthew also tells us that Joseph was a “righteous man.” The one thing Luke does tell us about Joseph (other than that he was from Nazareth) is that he was still with Mary and Jesus when the Lord was twelve years old in the one and only story we have in the gospels from Jesus’ so-called hidden life. Interestingly, neither infancy narrative tells us that Joseph was a carpenter. That little yet beloved detail is found only in Mark 6:3.

Joseph, silent, so very humble and obedient, willing to fade into the background, but the loving guardian of both Mary and her child Jesus. He had the extraordinary privilege and blessing to be the father of Jesus on earth as well as the husband of the Blessed Mother. By the time of the Lord’s public ministry, he seems long gone and never to be mentioned again accept as a memory. Yet, at his death bed, we must very much assume, each holding one of his hands and weeping, were Jesus and Mary. No one else in all the world has ever ended their life like that. But I very much believe that at all of our own deaths, there will be Jesus and Mary in spirit, along with their most beloved Joseph also, together again to take us to that place prepared for us. Jesus, Mary and Joseph; the three greatest intercessors we have before God. St. Joseph, pray for us.