“Saint Joseph Discerner and Sharer of the Word”

By BJ Brown, M.Div., writes from Philadelphia

We know very little about Joseph. In the Gospel of Luke, he seems barely more than part of the scenery of the first two chapters. He is mentioned as betrothed with Mary and as taking her to Bethlehem for Quirinius’ census. The shepherds find Joseph with Mary and the newborn child Jesus. He brings Mary and Jesus to Jerusalem for the rites of purification and again when Jesus is twelve, when Luke records the only insight his Gospel offers into the man. Joseph, like Mary, is said to be anxious when the couple lose track of their son and find him three days later teaching in the temple.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph plays a greater, if still inscrutable role. In Matthew, Joseph receives dreams that become turning points in Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth. A dream prompts Joseph to take Mary into his home. Another dream leads him to flee with her and their child to escape from a king’s murderous rage. Later, two dreams prompt Joseph to bring his family back to their country. And yet there is no insight offered into why Joseph did as his dreams prompted him.

Pope Francis calls Joseph a “man hidden in the shadows,” and he does seem a solitary figure, alone with his dreams. And yet Pope Francis invites us to dedicate a year to Joseph, to increase our love for him and our imitation of him, to see in him “concrete proof that it is possible to put the Gospel into practice.”

Joseph seems to be an unlikely exemplar for Pope Francis because his writings call our attention again and again to what he calls “the social meaning of existence.” In his 2018 Apostolic Exhortation about holiness in today’s world, Pope Francis says, “we are never truly ourselves unless we belong to a people” (Gaudete et Exsultate 6). And what does the Pope mean when he talks about belonging to a people? In Let Us Dream, his 2020 book of reflections arising from his experience of pandemic lockdown, Pope Francis says that a people is not a “mere sum of individuals,” or of their interests and rights. A people is bound together by memory, history, custom and rite (p. 97). A people has a soul, and a way of viewing the world (p. 101). Belonging to a people is so important to Francis that he writes in his encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti that “either we are all saved together or no one is saved” (FT 137).

Joseph does belong to a people. In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph’s name and his dreams evoke another Joseph, the son of the patriarch Jacob, whose stories are told in the book of Genesis. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Joseph belonged to the house and line of King David, which is why Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem, the city of David. But everything else we know about Joseph—defying social custom by taking his inexplicably pregnant fiancé into his home, taking his family to a foreign land, and when he finally returns, settling in an unfamiliar town—everything Joseph does seems to separate him from his people.

Why then, does Pope Francis invite us to find in an apparent introvert a guide to living out the social demands of the Gospels?

Perhaps the reason is that Pope Francis relishes what he calls ‘contraposition.’ Contrapositions are ideas or experiences that exist in creative tension within a larger unity. You could say that the Catholic faith is full of contrapositions, from our faith in Jesus Christ, who is fully human and fully God, to our hope for salvation that is already won and still to come. Contrapositions, Pope Francis argues, are not meant to be resolved. To see a contraposition as a contradiction is “mediocre thinking” he writes, a refusal to live and grow by seeking to understand important differences (Let Us Dream, pp. 78-80).

Joseph, the man who seems to be alone with his dreams, alerts us to three important contrapositions for those who seek to put the Gospel into practice.

First, Joseph is a living reminder of the Catholic tradition that the Word of God speaks to us as a people, in Scripture and our shared worship and prayer over the ages, and in the depths of each of our individual hearts.

Second, whenever and wherever it speaks, the voice of God calls us to honor both the dignity of each person as the image of God and the dignity of the common life for which we are created and in which we are saved. If Pope Francis’ writings tend to emphasize the Gospel’s social demands, it is because he preaches in a world of ‘mediocre thinking,’ to a culture that has collapsed this contraposition, allowing individual rights and interests to trump our common good.

Third, because the Gospel is addressed to both self and society, it requires that we commit ourselves to the transformation of both. To put the Gospel into practice requires both specific acts of mercy and the transformation of any social conditions that lead to human suffering.

The voice of God that speaks in our hearts and dreams may, as it did for Joseph, call us away from our people and all that is familiar. Matthew’s Gospel does not tell us how Joseph found it within himself to follow that call. And yet it is here that Joseph offers us another powerful example.

When our world seems turned inside out by circumstances beyond our control—as it has been in the past year—the story of Joseph, especially as told in Matthew, reminds us that the voice of God continues to speak to us. We too can respond to all that Voice asks of us. We may know little about Joseph’s inner life, but we know that he heeded what God spoke to his deepest being. And in these challenging years, that is example enough to strengthen us. Like Joseph, each of us can do the hard work of putting into practice the Word of God that leads in the end to the salvation of us all.