What about Joseph?

THE SLEEPING JOSEPH, DREAMING OF HIS MISSION

Today about Joseph, the steady and quiet Joseph.  A dream moves Joseph to take care of Mary and become the legal father of her child Jesus.  He is told quite distinctly in the dream that this child is to save the Jewish people from their sins. 

Pope Francis keeps in his own bedroom a statue of St. Joseph reclining in sleep as a reminder that the Spirit of God sometimes speaks with us in the quiet solitude of our rest or our prayer.

I dream every night.   Once in a dream a few years ago, Pope John Paul ll appeared to my mother and me in her kitchen and we were supposed to provide him with breakfast.   We were totally unprepared.  (To be clear, no other recognized saint ever appeared to me in a dream.)

IN THIS MULTI-MEDIA ON BROWN PAPER, JOSEPH IS SCRATCHING HIS HEAD IN WONDER!

(From the Brady Collection at Wernersville, artist unknown,  Dated likely in the 1920's)

Notably Matthew depicts Joseph as silent even when he is not asleep.   He has none of his own lines in this drama of Jesus’ birth and growth.   He comes on stage and does his duty fully and generously.   But we never hear him say a single word.  In fact after the young family settles in Nazareth, there is only a brief mention of him, years later, when the townspeople refer to Jesus as the carpenter’s son.

But think of the possibilities.   Jesus’ Mother Mary is the one who finally voices the possible and asks Jesus to do the extraordinary at the Wedding Feast of Cana where she pushes the adult Jesus to change the water into wine.  

But what was Joseph thinking all those years before in his carpenter shop?  Typically a son like Jesus would have helped in the shop and would have been a student at a school in the town synagogue.   But Joseph kept it a secret that his son was destined to save his people from their sins.   Joseph accepted patiently the role he was given.   The father in heaven asked him to live an ordinary life with an extraordinary son.   He did not use this relationship to boost his own standing in the community.  He must have been happy to have his son recognized as a good student and a young man with excellent social skills.   But he himself stays in the background.   There is no evidence that Joseph even lives to see their son as a recognized religious leader.

I think of Joseph as a patron saint of shall-we-say ordinary fatherhood if we can even think of fatherhood as ordinary.  He protected his wife and child.    He accepted the gift of his wife and loved her.   He taught his child the skills that he knew, even the social skills at which Jesus excelled.  And his patient love helped to build a world best defined by his son, the gift of God with us.

What place Mary in our saving Hope?

What place Mary in our saving Hope?

Nativity image from the Brady art collection at the Jesuit Center in
Wernersville. 

It fits the season of Advent to pepper the daily readings and feasts during these four weeks before Christmas with references to the Mother of God, Mary.    And we celebrate in this season both the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and that of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.   As a memory of popular devotion to Mary, I recall celebrating Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, built where it is said that the Mother of God appeared to an Aztec native, Juan Diego.   Even as we celebrated Mass on the main altar at an early hour young couples approached prayerfully at a side altar to present their new-born children before the same image of Our Lady that Juan is said to have found imprinted on his cloak.

There is such an outpouring of affection among the faithful for Mary that Protestants sometimes accuse us of worshiping her or praying only to her as if she were the Incarnate God.   

We know that we do not worship her but look to her as a saint in heaven, indeed as a disciple of her Son, a mother who can help us grow in the graces of discipleship ourselves.   Our love for her, however, does raise the question about why indeed she herself could not have come to us as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.    So I ask God why Mary is not our Incarnate God instead of Jesus.   God in Three Persons could certainly have arranged for that.   And any child that Mary, as our Incarnate God and Savior, might have conceived could have been born to be a disciple to her rather than the other way around.

We cannot question the freedom of God to arrange our salvation in any way God desires.   We know that the Second Person of the Trinity comes as Jesus.  This has been revealed to us.  There are, indeed, some cultural reasons why God might come to us as a man instead of a woman.    One of them, I conjecture, is that women were far less likely to be crucified in the Roman Empire.    And God in the crucifixion of Jesus wanted us to know the greatness of divine love for us.     Jesus showed us such great love by subjecting himself to the worst possible humiliation and suffering that the so-called civilized world has devised: Crucifixion.

Mary as the Incarnate God could have suffered the same fate but women were almost always protected from crucifixion.  We have in the history of lynchings in the United States something similar.   The victims of lynchings were sometimes women but this was exceptional.   Crucifixions and lynchings, public shows of power, are used to humiliate, intimidate and eliminate opposition and they typically fall on men.   Women within the cultures that tolerate crucifixion and lynching suffer humiliations and abuse in other ways and Mary suffered at the foot of Jesus’ cross to represent them.

God chose to come as the man Jesus to take on this responsibility of sharing the worst effects of human sin that any one of us could suffer, humiliations and abuse of any kind.   Jesus wanted all of us and especially all those who suffered like pain and humiliation to be strengthened by the fact that God chose to suffer in the same way.  The sufferings of Jesus and the pierced heart of the Mother of God are 100% sufficient to strengthen and comfort men and women who have suffered atrocities of all kinds.    It is with this man Jesus and his Mother that we will be saved from our darkness.   So we celebrate in this season the beginning of our salvation in the birth of the Child and in the generous willingness of His Mother to follow him in hope.   They become our hope even as the world rejects them.

2019 Christmas Card by Sr. Mary Bur, IHM, one of an annual series!