The Just Man Who Named The Savior
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - December 21, 2007
The most extensive Advent preparation of all was done, not by John the Baptist, not by Mary, not even by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Zephaniah and the other famous Advent prophets. It was done by God himself.
When the fullness of time had come, God would not send the Archangel Gabriel to find any young virgin, but rather he would go to a specific village in a precise nation to greet a particular girl espoused to a given man. God had intervened preveniently in that girl's life many years before, preserving her free from all stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception in her mother's womb. He did this, as the Fathers of the Church used to teach, so that she would be free from all bondage to sin and therefore capable to assent fully to the plans God would later announce, and so that nothing sinful would ever touch Jesus in her womb. But God had also prepared her people for centuries for the coming of the Messiah. Through the covenants, the saving miracles, the law and prophetic utterances, this young girl would grow up with a heart as prepared, pure, fertile as her womb.
Likewise, the man to whom she was espoused was not some divine afterthought or "player-to-be-named-later" in a package deal for his young wife. As Matthew's and Luke's genealogies show us, he was the penultimate piece in a divine cascade stretching all the way back to King David, to Abraham and even to Adam. It was through him that Jesus, under Jewish law and mentality, would be a descendent of David.
Sacred Scripture does not tell us how this chosen man and favored woman met, but in the designs of his providence, God brought Mary and Joseph together. Very soon afterward, the long Advent would be over.
It is customary as we celebrate Christmas to spend most of our time centered on the baby Jesus, the eternal Son of God, lying in the manger, adored by angels and animals, wise men and shepherds and this hand-picked man and woman. Many of us will also naturally turn to his mother, holding him in swaddling clothes, nursing him, loving him, treasuring all of these miraculous events in her contemplative heart.
St. Joseph, on the other hand, generally gets scant attention. Without a doubt this relative obscurity pleases him very much, since he more than anyone would want our focus on Jesus and Mary, just as his always was. But it would be good for us to spend some time meditating on the third person of the "earthly trinity" that constituted the Holy Family, because he, more than anyone, will teach us how best to relate to Jesus and Mary in Bethlehem and beyond.
Why was Joseph chosen to be the foster father of the Son of God? One reason was clearly because he was a descendent of King David and therefore any foster child would, according to the law, be a son of David, too. But there would have been many eligible descendents of Israel's greatest king alive at the time. Doubtless some of them would have been scholars of the law and capable of training Jesus according to his humanity to be a rabbi rather than a carpenter. Some others would likely have had much more clout and been able to avoid being treated as nobodies by the innkeepers when Jesus was about to be born. Others would likely have been wealthy and much more capable than Joseph of providing for Mary and Jesus, so that at Jesus' presentation, for example, they would have been able to offer a lamb instead of two pigeons.
But it's obvious that to God the qualities that Joseph lacked were insignificant compared to those he had.
First, Joseph was a good man. St. Matthew writes that he was a "just" or "righteous" man, someone who was moral. He may not have been flashy on the outside but he shone on the inside.
Second, he was "righteous" precisely because he was docile and obedient to God. We see this when he was prepared quietly to divorce Mary upon discovering that she was pregnant by some other agency than his own. Without question he loved Mary deeply and this action would have crushed him, but he loved God and his law even more than he loved Mary.
We see his obedience even more clearly in his response to the angel of God interventions in his dreams. When God sent his angel in a dream to tell him not to be afraid to receive Mary into his home because the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Joseph awoke and "did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him." After Jesus' birth, when the angel appeared to him again and instructed him to "rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you," he rose, awakened them, and began their journey that night. A few years later, when the angel appeared to him in Egypt and told him to return with them to Israel, he did.
It would have been easy for Joseph, even in a pre-Freudian age, to deconstruct these dreams according to the standard of his conscious desires. Each dream was asking him to do something totally life-changing: to alter completely his notion of what his marriage would entail, so as to be the chaste guardian of the Virgin and the foster father of the Son of God and savior of the world; to leave his job and his relatives completely behind and journey through the desert to an unknown land; to return once life was settled. But in each of these circumstances, Joseph acted immediately.
Joseph, a man of action and no recorded words, was humble enough to sacrifice whatever his own plans might have been to fulfill God's plans, embracing his vocation to help Jesus and Mary accomplish theirs.
As we prepare for Christmas, we ask his prayers so that we might center our lives on Jesus, be obedient to God's plans, and help him to fulfill his mission of the salvation of the world.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
