Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Hail, Joseph, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among men. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
To be honest, if I was putting together readings for the Feast of St. Joseph, I would have chosen neither the Old Testament nor the gospel passages the lectionary gives us. In its place, I would have selected a passage from Genesis which highlights St. Joseph’s namesake, Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob through whom God would, through a series of extraordinary events, save his people. And for the gospel I would have chosen a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, not Luke, where Joseph plays as important a role as Mary. The through line in each of these texts would be that both hold up men divinely chosen through whom God works God’s plan of salvation; both involve righteous men with extraordinary patience and self-possession; and both were dreamers.
The story of the Joseph of Genesis is arguably the greatest narrative section of the entire Hebrew Bible. Thrown into a pit and sold into slavery by his jealous brothers only to later find himself imprisoned—all to no fault of his own—Joseph’s misfortunes have a stunning turn around when, through his special, divinely inspired gifts, he finds himself as Potiphar’s chief steward giving advice to Pharaoh. This story of the reversal of fortune serves to highlight that no matter how desperate we as God’s people may become—no matter how dark our prison cell—if the Lord is with us—we can expect the extraordinary. There’s no limit to God’s saving power. God’s plan cannot be thwarted no matter how hopeless our circumstances may seem. It’s like Abraham hoping against hope and having a baby when he was 99 and Sarah his wife 100!
The Joseph of Genesis was also a man of great integrity and self-possession. When Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him, he resists and flees the temptation only to be falsely accused by her which is what lands him in prison. But the Lord was with righteous Joseph and brought him out of his prison and exalts him to become the prince of Egypt!
The Joseph of Genesis was also a dreamer. As a young boy he has intimations in dreams about being a famous ruler, and later in prison his gift of interpreting dreams is what leads him, and, in turn, his people, to freedom. All because the Lord was with him.
The characterization that Matthew gives to St. Joseph in his Gospel never has the Joseph of Genesis far from mind. Beginning with the genealogy of Jesus, Matthew intends to highlight the promise of Abraham and David alike as being fulfilled through the line of Joseph. God was present all along, from generation to generation, however hidden, only to be revealed at this precise moment in human history. Joseph and his wife Mary stand, then, at the greatest turning point in human history and are the chosen vessels through which God’s greatest, most extraordinary work will occur.
This all happens, at least in part, because Joseph was a righteous man. He could have acted completely within the legal parameters of Israelite law by exposing his pregnant betrothed. Rather, “not willing to expose her to shame, [he] decided to divorce her quietly.” And after being informed in a dream of the truth, he humbly follows God’s instructions. What quiet fortitude…what self-possession on display here in St. Joseph! Rather than shaming another, he chooses to be shamed. Rather than acting by the strictures of the law, he chooses to act in the fullness of grace. Rather than protect himself, he protects his betrothed and her unborn child.
How does all this come about? How does he find such a fund of grace? Matthew is clear…because he was a righteous man, God would encounter him in his dreams and give him the grace to continue doing the righteous thing. On four separate occasions, Joseph has divinely inspired dreams where he is directed by “the angel of the Lord” to protect his family from destruction and to assure that the Savior of the world would grow and become who he was destined to be.
Much more than a simple carpenter, then, St. Joseph plays a vital role in salvation history as the chosen man—the chosen righteous man—a model Jewish man—whose ears and heart are wide open and attentive to the voice of God. His vocation as husband and father are quietly but forthrightly lived with unwavering integrity. St. Joseph is much more than St. Joseph the Worker whose humble occupation was building things and teaching Jesus how to build things. The true work of St. Joseph was ultimately to do the work of God which was the work of fidelity, obedience, and becoming the vessel through which God’s saving power flows.
Like father, like son! More than just learning the techniques of carpentry, Jesus, no doubt, learned fidelity, obedience and how to become God’s instrument of salvation through his parents, not just through the One he would later come to call “Abba, Father.” In fact, can it be that Jesus, at least in part, came to know God as “Abba, Father” so easily and quickly precisely because of the model given to him by St. Joseph? I think so.
My brothers, have we considered St. Joseph as a model for our monastic vocation? We, too, are summoned to quiet fidelity, to listening carefully to God’s voice calling out to us, to courageously obeying that voice, and to becoming vessels of the extraordinary. We, too, are called to create a family where, through our mutual love for one another, we find God manifest in our midst. We, too, are called to be protectors of God’s pregnant presence allowing God to come to birth in all the open hearts that come here seeking to be reborn. And we, too, are called to be dreamers—to dream of a world, and through God’s grace, to make alive and tangible a world straight from the heart of God—a world where each of us is the first to show respect to the other—where each of us supports the other with patience and listens to the other with tender concern—where no one pursues what he judges best for himself, but instead, what he judges better for someone else—where pure love is shown from brother to brother and where nothing is preferred whatever to Christ. Through such quiet, yet zealous, fidelity and obedience to the rule of grace, might we not expect to become, all of us together, like St. Joseph, vessels of God’s extraordinary, saving presence? Indeed, we may!
St. Joseph, pray for us!
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