Imitating the Virtues of Saint Joseph, Solemnity of St. Joseph, March 20, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of St. Joseph
March 20, 2023
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: [to be filled out]

• One of the great joys of my priesthood has been to see how the Church has been growing in devotion to St. Joseph. From December 8, 2020 through December 8, 2021, the Church marked a Year of St. Joseph, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the December 8, 1870 declaration by Bl. Pope Pius IX of St. Joseph’s being declared patron of the universal church. At the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis extended St. John XXIII’s decision to include St. Joseph in Eucharistic Prayer I to all of the other Eucharistic Prayers. Many, helped by Fr. Donald Calloway’s book, have been consecrating themselves to St. Joseph and his protection. In an age in which authentic manliness and the importance of fatherhood have been underappreciated not just in popular culture and education but in various pockets of the Church, devotion to St. Joseph is a very healthy remedy. Today is an opportunity for us to express our gratitude for, and receive more deeply, the protection and provision God wants to give us through Saint Joseph, entrusting ourselves to his spiritual fatherhood and intercession. The best way, however, to mark this great feast — like the feast of any saint — is to seek to imitate St. Joseph in his holiness. As Pope Leo XIII wrote, “There is no doubt that [Joseph] approached nearer than any other to that super-eminent dignity of [Mary] by which the Mother of God surpasses all created natures.” For Pope Leo, St. Joseph is second on the hierarchy of holiness right behind his immaculate and sinless spouse. Today we can ponder ten special features of his holiness, ten virtues that he contagiously and helpfully exemplifies.
  • First, St. Joseph is just — St. Matthew writes that St. Joseph was a “just” or “righteous” man, a synonym for “holy,” a person in a right relationship with God. He may not have been flashy on the outside but he shone on the inside. St. Frances de Sales once said about him, “He was ‘a just man,’ and so his will was at all times attuned, conformed and united to the will of God.” 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. He shows us how to attune our lives fully to God’s will.
  • Second, he is faithful based on total trust in God— 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. Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet commented in his famous 17th-century panegyrics, “The Bible commends Abraham to us as the pattern of perfect faith (Rom. 4:11), but Joseph’s faith was greater: Abraham is praised because he believed that a barren woman would bear a child (Gen. 15:6); Joseph believed the same of a virgin, and in simplicity accepted that inscrutable mystery of child-bearing maidenhood.” Pope Benedict said 14 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 faith. He wants to help us live by faith too.
  • Third, he is 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. When along the journey, the angel appeared a fourth time and told him to head to Nazareth, he likewise 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 after 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 repeatedly sacrificed 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 or dreaming St. Joseph popularized by Pope Francis. The Holy Father 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. But we also can pray to the sleeping Saint Joseph that we will be able to obey God as St. Joseph did.
  • Fourth, he is chaste — We invoke St. Joseph in the Divine Praises as Mary’s “most chaste spouse.” We remember what St. Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Thessalonians: “This is God’s will for you, your sanctification,” and he immediately says thereafter, “Therefore, avoid all porneia,” or unchastity. Sexual sins take us in the opposite direction of holiness, since lust is the opposite of love. To grow in holiness, we not only have to avoid all unchastity, but to be chaste. St. Joseph is holy because he is “most chaste.” He is often depicted with a lily, 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 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. He’s interceding for us that we might become “most chaste” like him, regardless of our state of life.
  • Fifth, he is humble — It takes humility to dedicate ourselves totally to the service of someone else. And St. Joseph is a model of humility, in the way he cared for Jesus and Mary. 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 Joseph 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? St. Joseph wants to help us place ourselves at the service of the vocation and mission of Jesus to save the world and of Mary, who seeks to support that redemptive work.
  • Sixth, he is diligent —  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?” His spiritual currency was in callouses. John Paul II said about St. Joseph’s work: “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. 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, to sanctify our work, sanctify others through our work and sanctify ourselves through our work. I always have a statue of St. Joseph on my desk to inspire me to do my work as he did his.
  • Seventh, he is 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), how easy it is to see a similar heart in St. Joseph. I used to say, with many others, that St. Joseph never said a recorded word in Sacred Scripture, because he was treasuring everything inside. Once I received series of holy cards of the saints with their images on the front and some of their famous words on the back. On the Saint Joseph card, there was nothing on the back and I initially thought someone just forgot, until I realized he was speaking through silence! Nevertheless, I said about that I “used to” say he never said a recorded word because a year ago, a Sister of Life dedicated to him reminded me that there is one recorded word of his in Sacred Scripture. We see it referred to in today’s Gospel: namely, the word Jesus. The angel instructed him, “You are to name him Jesus,” which the father was to do at the circumcision on the eighth day. We have every confidence that Joseph would have obeyed that command of the angel just like all the rest. And so he is the man of one word, the word “Jesus.” His whole life spoke God the Father’s definitive word, “God saves.” He used it as a vocative. He used it in his quiet way to evangelize. He used it all the time in prayer. Holiness comes through imitating his prayerful contemplation and his speaking the name of Jesus.
  • Eighth, he is charitable — St. Alphonsus Liguori preached about him, “On the last day our Savior will say to the elect: ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; naked and you covered me …’ (Matt. 25:35). These will have fed Jesus Christ, lodged or clothed Him, in the persons of the poor; but St. Joseph found food, shelter and raiment for Christ in His own person. Furthermore, our Lord has promised reward to whoever gives a cup of water in His name. St. Joseph can say to Jesus Christ that ‘Not only did I furnish you with food, house and clothing: I saved you from death at the hands of Herod.’ What then must be his reward?” Holiness is the perfection of charity and we see that selfless outpouring in him.
  • Ninth, he is Marian — St. Joseph is a model of how to relate to Mary. It’s traditional to relate to Mary as the model disciple. It’s natural for us to relate to her as spiritual Mother given to us by her Son on Calvary. But St. Joseph shows us how to relate to her as virginal spouse. In the recent book of meditations In Sinu Iesu by an anonymous Benedictine monk, in which the priest hears Christ and Mary speaking to him during adoration, Mary says to him, “I want to reveal myself to priests as Virgin Bride and Mother. This is a secret that I have held in my heart for this time of trial for the Church. To every priest who desires it and asks me for it, I will give the grace of living in my presence as Virgin Bride (this was the vocation given to Saint Joseph) and of living in my presence as Mother (this was the vocation given to Saint John when, from the Cross, my Son entrusted me to him and him to me).” This special vocation for priests, I think, to love Mary with the chaste spousal love we see in St. Joseph is an indication of the type of committed love each of us is meant to have with her. St. Joseph teaches us to treat her with reverence, to help her fulfill her vocation as a disciple, apostle, and mother, as she seeks to help us to grow in the likeness of her holy, holy, holy Son.
  • Lastly, he is Eucharistic — St. Joseph is a a model for us for how to approach the Eucharist. This connection between Joseph and the Holy Eucharist has been growing in the Church; as I mentioned earlier, we invoke him now in every Mass, as well as should, in prayers for the Church. Fr. Frederic Faber, the great 19th century British priest, author and sacred lyricist, compared Joseph’s care of the Holy Family to the priest’s care of the altar. “The priest, who has most reason to deplore the poverty of his attainments in humility, is humble at least when he comes to consecrate at Mass. For years Joseph lived in the awful sanctity of that which to the priest is but a moment. The little house at Nazareth was as the outspread square of the white corporal. All the words he spoke were almost words of consecration.” He lived perpetually in the real presence. If Simeon rejoiced to hold Jesus in his arms once, St. Joseph was able to do it every day for years. St. Joseph’s life was a commentary on the words of consecration Christ would utter later. As St. Paul VI once preached on this feast day, “This is the secret of the greatness of St. Joseph…: [he] made his life a service, a sacrifice, to the mystery of the Incarnation and to the redemptive mission that is joined to it; [he gave] his total gift of himself, of his life, of his work; having converted his human vocation to domestic love into the superhuman oblation of himself, of his heart and of all his abilities, into the love placed at the service of the Messiah conceived in his home.” He shows us how to make our lives Eucharistic, giving our body and blood, our sweat and tears, our joys, our whole being to God and with him for others.
• Today as we celebrate with Mary, Jesus and the whole communion of saints the feast of this just man and our great and virtuous patron, we do so mindful of the ancient aphorism placed on so many statues and altars dedicated to him: Ite ad Ioseph (Gen 41:55) based on the words by Pharaoh about his viceroy to the Egyptians  when they were in need because of the famine. Since the 800s, St. Joseph has been called the “Nutritor Domini,” the nourisher of the Lord, because he was the one who put food on the table for the Holy Family. Today he leads us to the greatest nourishment of all. 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 go to Joseph to ask him to intercede for us, so that we may imitate his righteousness, faith, obedience, chastity, humility, diligence, prayer, charity, Marian love and Eucharistic way of life, and, thereby growing in holiness, we may, like him, serve Christ with love and come through a happy death to experience eternal joy with Joseph and Mary and all the saints around Jesus, to whom Joseph’s whole life points.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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