Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Thoughts on St. Joseph

     St. Joseph did not get a liturgical feast until the 15th century in Rome, and it was only in the 16th century that a feast was authorized for the Universal Church. As early as 150, however, the apocryphal writing, Protevanglium of James, tried to give more details to Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the infancy of Jesus, including the role of Joseph. Other apocryphal gospels written between the second and eighth centuries influenced the growing devotion to Joseph, and the iconography of Joseph holding a lily comes out of these gospels plus the story of his dying in the presence of Jesus and Mary. These writings are evidence of our interest in the human setting and details of the Holy Family, details lacking in the Gospels. Who was Joseph? What did he do? How did he live? How did he relate to his human and divine charges? How did he act as a father and guardian?
     Luke’s account of Mary and Joseph is from Mary’s viewpoint while Matthew concentrates on Joseph. Matthew looks at Joseph as a man of dreams like the patriarch Joseph in Genesis. Joseph is instructed in dreams to take Mary into his own home, to name the child, to go to Egypt (like his Genesis predecessor) to save the child’s life, and to return to the land of Israel after the danger passed. Karl Rahner notes that Scripture says of Joseph three times, “He rose up.”
     There are many views of St. Joseph. St. Bernard says, “When we do not know how to pray, we turn to Joseph,” and St. Teresa of Avila says she knows by experience that Joseph helps in every area. “…I know by experience [he] helps us in every need.” Jacques Bossuet contrasted the vocation of the apostles with that of Joseph

. “The apostles were lights to make Jesus Christ visible to the whole world. Joseph was a veil to hide him. …the apostles proclaimed the gospel so loudly that their words re-echoed in the heavens. …Joseph listened, wondered and kept silence.”
     Karl Rahner says that Joseph as the guardian and protector of the Son of God is our model as we are “called to be guardian of the Holy One in ourselves, in lives, in our work.” Rahner also says that Joseph is a good patron for us—“a patron of the poor, a patron of workers, a patron of exiles, a model for worshippers, an exemplar of the pure discipline of the heart.”
     Who is Joseph to you as we celebrate his feast today?
               Sr. Deborah Harmeling, OSB


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