Imitating the Virtues of Saint Joseph, Solemnity of St. Joseph, March 19, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Solemnity of St. Joseph
March 19, 2018
2 Sam 7:4-5.12-14.16, Ps 89, Rom 4:13.16-18.22, Mt 1:16.18-21.24

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today on this great Solemnity of the man God the Father chose to raise his Son according to his humanity and to care for the Mother he chose for that Son and that Son chose for us, we’re called to do more than fête St. Joseph by praising God for him or even to pray to God through his intercession: we’re called ultimately to seek to imitate him to the measure we can. Saints are given to us to show us how to live. And Saint Joseph has so many virtues that can inspire us to live the Christian life so much better. Today I would like to focus on seven of his most noteworthy virtues.
• I’d like to say in introduction first, however, that Saint Joseph is far more than a divine afterthought or some kind of ancient “player-to-be-named-later” in a package deal for his young wife. Like the Holy Spirit remains the “great unknown” of the Blessed Trinity (see Acts 19:1-2), so St. Joseph is often the great unknown of the earthy trinity that constituted the Holy Family. As Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies show us, however, 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. Why was St. 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 probably have been wealthy and much more capable than Joseph of providing for Mary and Jesus. It’s obvious, however, that to God the Father the qualities that Joseph lacked were insignificant compared to those he had. God the Father, in whom all fatherhood finds its roots, saw in him the qualities he wanted to raise his Son, to teach him how to be a man — and a man of God — according to his humanity, especially his own Fatherhood, his own service of life and growth, his own protection and providential provision. God the Father entrusted to him his most precious treasures — his only begotten Son and the woman, more, girl, he entrusted to become the Mother of his Son. Let’s focus on some of those qualities.
• Just — Saint Joseph was a good man. St. Matthew writes that he was a “just” or “righteous” man. He was “holy,” a man in a right relationship with God. He may not have been flashy on the outside but he shone on the inside. As Pope Benedict once said in a rare play on words, St. Joseph “ad-justed” his life to the word of God. His whole life was in relationship to God.
• Faithful — Like Abraham, to whom he is implicitly compared in today’s second reading, St. Joseph is a father in faith to us. His example invites us to imitate his loving trust, his total abandonment to divine Providence, to take God “at his word”, that is, without clearly seeing his design. When the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home,” he did as the angel had commanded him precisely because he believed. Pope Benedict said nine years ago today in Cameroon, “Throughout all of history, Joseph is the man who gives God the greatest display of trust, even in the face of such astonishing news.” To say that his is the greatest display of trust of all is something extraordinary, considering he was married to the Blessed Virgin. But that’s a worthy description for his heroic and obedient faith. To trust God does not mean to see everything clearly according to our criteria, it does not mean to carry out what we have planned; to trust God means to empty ourselves of ourselves and to deny ourselves, because only one who accepts losing himself for God can be “just” and faithful as St. Joseph, that is, can conform his own will to God’s and thus be fulfilled.
• Obedient — St. Joseph was “righteous” precisely because he was docile and obedient to God and was “faithful” because he did with trust what the Lord asked him.  We see his prompt obedience in his response to the angel of God’s 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 spouse 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. He was so prone to hear God’s word and put it into practice that at the merest indication of the Lord, he didn’t debate or negotiate, but obeyed. St. Joseph never saw obeying God as incompatible with his own good, but rather as the foundation for his own good. God’s omnipotence was not seen as a threat because St. Joseph didn’t equate freedom with being in control, but linked it to being responsible and responsive to God and others. His obedience made him capable of sharing mysteriously in the fatherhood of God the Father. Joseph 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. To obey — ob-audire in Latin — means to listen intensively, to hang on every word. In Hebrew, there’s no distinction between the words to listen and to obey, because if we’re really listening to God we faith, we listen to do that word. There was no distinction between those words in St. Joseph. There’s the new devotion to the sleeping St. Joseph popularized by Pope Francis, for whom we pray in a special way today on the fifth anniversary of the inauguration of his pontificate, with particular gratitude for his decision to make sure St. Joseph is mentioned in the Eucharistic Prayer of every Mass. Pope Francis normally tucks special intentions under the statue of the sleeping St. Joseph at his bedside with confidence that St. Joseph can hear them as the Pope sleeps. Perhaps I’ll do that too with special intentions over time, but with the statue of the sleeping St. Joseph at my bedside, I always ask to be obedient to whatever God might reveal to me in dreams!
• Chaste and loving — We invoke St. Joseph in the Divine Praises as Mary’s “most chaste spouse.” We see him often depicted with a lily, as we do in the statue in this chapel, as a sign of purity. His life shows us that the full gift of self toward another does not necessarily have to involve genital relations. He loved Mary and that meant that he was willing to dedicate himself to what was best for her and for the divine Son she was carrying. He put all his love and his life at the service of their vocations, and in doing he fulfilled his own vocation. St. Joseph teaches us that it is possible to love without possessing. Chastity is a virtue that helps a person to have self-mastery — to control one’s sexual impulses rather than be controlled by them — so that one can give oneself to others in the way that is best for them. Chastity raises one’s love and attraction up to the dignity of the other. Chastity allows one to see purely (to see God in another) and with piety (to reverence the divine image one beholds). That’s what Joseph was able to do in the case of his Immaculate wife. Chastity in his case and every case is what allows man to be a protector of women rather than a predator. In his chaste love of Mary, he learned how to grow as a man, and in her chaste reciprocal love, he was blessed beyond any husband has even been. That chastity led to his charity. St Joseph lived at the service of his wife and divine Son; for believers, he thus became an eloquent example of what he would learn from his Son, that how”to reign” is “to serve.” Christ fully revealed man to St. Joseph (Gaudium et Spes, 24) and made his supreme calling clear in becoming a servant of all the rest.
• Humble — It takes humility to place ourselves totally in someone else’s hands, to dedicate ourselves totally to the service of someone else. And St. Joseph is a model of humility. One area in which this humility was important was in his day to day life raising the Son of God. He was the one who taught Jesus to pray, together with Mary. In particular Joseph himself must have taken Jesus to the Synagogue for the rites of the Sabbath, as well as to Jerusalem for the great feasts of the people of Israel, because men and women were totally separated. Joseph, moreover, in accordance with the Jewish tradition, would have led the prayers at home both every day — in the morning, in the evening, at meals — and on the principal religious feasts. The great third century theologian Origen writes beautifully that “Joseph understood that Jesus was superior to him even as he submitted to him, and, knowing the superiority of his charge, he commanded him with respect and moderation. Everyone should reflect on this: frequently a lesser man is placed over people who are greater, and it happens at times that an inferior is more worthy than the one who appears to be set above him. If a person of greater dignity understands this, then he will not be puffed up with pride because of his higher rank; he will know that his inferior may well be superior to him, even as Jesus was subject to Joseph.” At the age of 12, Jesus was already capable of dazzling the greatest masters of the law, and yet he went up to Nazareth and was obedient to Joseph and Mary. What an incredible mystery! How could that not fill him with humble awe? How can it not fill us with humility before all those whom the Lord entrusts to us so that we may serve them like we would him?
• Hardworking —  St. Joseph was a tekton, a construction worker, a builder. Everyone knew him as such, asking about Jesus, “Is this not the carpenter’s son?” An outgrowth of his spiritual poverty as well as his love for Jesus and Mary was that he was a hard worker. His spiritual currency was in callouses. John Paul II said about St. Joseph’s work: “In this human growth Joseph guided and supported the boy Jesus, introducing him to the knowledge of the religious and social customs of the Jewish people and getting him started in the carpenter’s trade, whose every secret he had learned in so many years of practicing it. This is an aspect that I feel compelled to stress…: Saint Joseph taught Jesus human work, in which he was an expert. The Divine Child worked beside him, and by listening to him and observing him, he too learned to manage the carpenter’s tools with the diligence and the dedication that the example of his foster father transmitted to him. 

This too is a great lesson…: if the Son of God was willing to learn a human work from a man, this indicates that there is in work a specific moral value with a precise meaning for man and for his self-fulfillment. St. John Paul called St. Joseph the “very epitome of the Gospel of work.” He made not only tables and chairs and houses, but formed himself and his family in virtue in the process. He’s an icon of the synthesis of faith, life and work. In the rhythm of the days he spent at Nazareth, in the simple home and in his workshop, Jesus learned to alternate prayer and work, ora et labora, and to unite the two into one continuous “work of prayer” in which he not only offered to God his labor but earned the bread the family needed. He is perhaps the greatest intercessor of all to help us consecrate ourselves to God through our work. I always have a statue of St. Joseph on my desk, and here in New York, on my two desks at the Mission and at the Rectory, to inspire me to do my work as he did his.
• Contemplative — If we think Mary’s heart was contemplative, piecing together everything as a mosaic and holding on it with all her strength — what it means that she pondered these things, treasuring them in her heart (see Lk 2:19, 2:51) — how easy it is to see a similar heart in St. Joseph, who never says a recorded word in Sacred Scripture! He was treasuring everything inside! I loved the Holy Card you gave me for my birthday about a month ago, in which you put his image on the front and his most famous words on the back: a white sheet. But he was speaking volumes in his body language and actions. We have a lot to learn from the contemplative way with which he did, better, he prayed, his work. I think that in his contemplative work, he is a great patron saint for the Church’s new evangelization against secularism, because secularism is living as practical atheists, living as if God doesn’t exist, separating faith from life. Insofar as we spend most of our lives working, he is one who can help us work together with God as he did in his construction shop in Nazareth. One particular prayer I like to say to help me be more contemplative throughout my work and life — and that we can use for this intention of the new evangelization — is the Memorare of St. Joseph, based on the Memorare of the Blessed Virgin: “Remember, O most chaste spouse of the Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession were left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto you, O Guardian of the Redeemer, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy, hear and answer me. Amen.”
• Ite ad Ioseph is the ancient aphorism placed on so many statues and altars to St. Joseph. “Go to Joseph.” He is, par excellence, the “wise and faithful servant whom the Lord put in charge of his household (Lk 12:42). As we prepare to receive the same Son he used to hold in his arms, as we prepare to be nourished by the divine child who in his humanity was nourished by the work of St. Joseph’s hands, let us ask go to Joseph to ask him to intercede for us for the grace we need to consecrate ourselves to the divine plan as he himself did, so that as we adore and receive Jesus here at Mass with similar sentiments to how he adored him in the manger in Bethlehem and at the carpenter’s table in Nazareth, we may come through the grace of a happy death to adore that same Jesus with him, with Mary, and all of the members of God’s holy family in heaven!

The readings for today’s Mass were: