.
Homily of the Mass celebrated in St. Peter's on 19 March
1969:
Dearest brethren, sons and daughters!
Today's
feast invites us to meditate about Saint Joseph, Our Lord Jesus' legal and
foster father. Because of that function which he performed in regard to
Christ during his childhood and youth, he has been declared Patron or
Protector of the Church, which continues Christ's image and mission in time
and reflects them in history.
At
first sight there seems to be no material for a meditation on Joseph, for
what do we know of him, apart from his name and a few events that occurred in
Our Lord's childhood? The Gospel does not record a single word from him; his
language is silence. It was his attention to the angelic voices which spoke
in his sleep; it was that prompt and generous obedience which was demanded
from him; it was manual labour, in the most modest and fatiguing of
forms, which earned Jesus the reputation of being "the son of the
carpenter" (Mt. 13:55). There, is nothing else known of him, and it
might well be said that he lived an unknown life, the life of a simple
artisan, with no sign of personal greatness.
But
that humble figure which was so near to Jesus and Mary, Christ's Virgin
Mother, he who was so intimately connected with their life and so closely
linked with the genealogy of the Messias as to be the fateful and conclusive
representative of the descendants of David (Mt. 1, 20), is revealed as being
full of significance if we look at him attentively. He is seen truly to
possess those qualities which the Church attributes to him in her liturgy,
which the devotion of the faithful also attributes to him, and which gave
rise to a series of invocations that have taken the form of a litany.
A
celebrated modern shrine of the saint, erected through the efforts of a
simple lay brother, Brother André of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, at
Montreal in Canada, illustrates those qualities in a series of chapels
arranged behind the high altar. All the chapels are dedicated to St. Joseph
in honour of the many titles which have been offered to him, such as
Protector of Childhood, Protector of Spouses, Protector of the Family,
Protector of the Workers, Protector of Virgins, Protector of Fugitives,
Protector of the Dying...
If
we look carefully into this life that was apparently so unremarkable, we
shall find that it was greater and more adventurous, more full of exciting
events, than we are accustomed to assume in our hasty perusal of the Gospel
story. The Gospel describes St. Joseph as a Just Man (Mt. 1:19). No
greater praise of virtue and no higher tribute to merit could be applied to a
man of humble social condition who was apparently far from being equipped to
perform great deeds. A poor, honest, hardworking, perhaps even timorous man,
but one with unfathomable interior life, from which very singular directions
and consolations came, bringing him also the logic and strength that belong
to simple and clear souls, and giving him the power of making great
decisions, such as that decision to put his liberty at once at the
disposition of the divine designs, to make over to them also his legitimate
human calling, his conjugal happiness, to accept the conditions, the
responsibility and the burden of a family, but, through an incomparable
virginal love, to renounce that natural conjugal love that is the foundation
and the nourishment of the family; in this way he offered the whole of his
existence in a total sacrifice to the imponderable demands raised by the
astonishing coming of the Messias, to whom he was to give the everlastingly
blessed name of Jesus (Mt. 1:21), whom he was to acknowledge as the effect of
the Holy Spirit, and his own son only in a juridical and domestic way.
So
St. Joseph was a "committed" man, as we might say nowadays.
And
what commitment! Total commitment to Mary, the elect of all the women of the
earth and of history, always his virgin spouse, never his wife physically,
and total commitment to Jesus, who was his offspring only by legal
descendance, not by the flesh. He had the burdens, the responsibilities, the
risks and the labours Surrounding the holy family. His was the service, the
work, the sacrifice, in the shadows of that gospel picture in which we love to
meditate on him; and we are certainly not mistaken, for we all know him now
and call him Blessed.
This
is Gospel in which the values of human existence take on a different
dimension from that with which we are accustomed to appreciate them. What is
little becomes big, and in this connection we do well to remember Jesus'
fervent words in the eleventh chapter of St. Matthew: "I give thee
praise, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because thou hast hidden these
things (the things or the kingdom of the Messias!) from the wise and
learned, but hast revealed them to little ones".
In
the Gospel's account, what is lowly becomes worthy to be the social condition
of the Son of God made son of man; that which is elementary and the product
of fatiguing and rudimentary handwork served to train the maker and
continuator of the cosmos in the skills of human hands (cf. Jn. 1:3; 5:17),
and to give humble bread to him who was to describe Himself as "the
Bread of Life" (Jn. 6:48); what was lost for love of Christ is here
rediscovered (cf. Mt. 10:39), and whoever sacrifices his own life for Him in
this world saves it for everlasting life (Jn. 12:25).
St.
Joseph was the type of the message of that Gospel that Jesus was to announce
as the programme in the redemption of mankind, once he left the little
workshop at Nazareth and began his mission as prophet and teacher. St. Joseph
is the model of those humble ones that Christianity raises to great
destinies, and he is the proof that in order to be good and genuine followers
of Christ there is no need of "great things"; it is enough to have
the common, simple, human virtues, but they need to be true and authentic.
Our
meditation now shifts from the humble Saint to our own personal
circumstances, as is usual in the practice of mental prayer. We now turn to
make a comparison and I contrast between him and ourselves; we have no reason
to feel proud of the comparison, but we can derive some good suggestion from
it for imitating him in some way which our own life condition allows, in our
spirit and in concrete practice of those virtues which are so vigorously
depicted in the Saint, and one especially, poverty, of which there is so much
talk nowadays. And let us not be upset by the difficulties which poverty
brings with it today, in this world which is all devoted to conquest of
economic wealth, as if poverty were in contradiction with the line of
progress which must be followed, a paradox, an unreality in a society of
welfare and consumption.
Let
us think again of St. Joseph in his poverty and hard work, all his energy
engaged in the effort of earning something to live on, and let us then
remember that economic goods are indeed worthy of our Christian interest, on
condition that they do not become ends in themselves, but are understood and
used as means to keep going life which is directed towards other and higher
goods, on condition that economic goods are not sought after with greedy
egoism, but be rather a source and stimulus of provident charity, on
condition again that they be not used as authorization for soft and easy
indulgence in the so-called pleasures of life but rather be used for the
broad and honest interests of the common good.
This
Saint's laborious and dignified poverty, can still be in excellent guide for
us to follow the path traced by Christ's footsteps in the modern world, and
can also eloquently instruct us in positive and honest wellbeing, so that we
may avoid losing Christ's path in the complicated and giddy world of
economics, to avoid going too far on one side into tempting ambitions of
conquest of temporal riches, and too far on the other side, into making use
of poverty for ideological ends, as a power to rouse social hatred and
systematic subversion.
So,
St. Joseph is an example for us, and let us try to imitate him; and we shall
call upon him as our protector, as the Church has been wont to do in these
recent times, for herself in the first place, for spontaneous theological
reflection on the marriage of divine with human action in the great economy
of the Redemption, in which economy the first, the divine one is wholly
sufficient to itself, but the second, human action, which is ours, though
capable of nothing (cf. Jn. 15:5), is never dispensed from humble but
conditional and ennobling collaboration.
The
Church also calls upon him as her Protector because of a profound and most
present desire to reinvigorate her ancient life with true evangelical
virtues, such as shine forth in St. Joseph. Finally, the Church invokes him
as her Patron and Protector through her unshakeable trust that he to whom
Christ willed to confide the care and protection of His. own frail human
childhood, will continue from heaven to perform his protective task in order
to guide and defend the Mystical Body of Christ Himself, which is always
weak, always under attack, always in a state of peril. Finally, we call upon
St. Joseph for the world, trusting that the heart of the humble working man
of Nazareth, now overflowing with immeasurable wisdom and power, still
harbours and will always harbour a singular and precious fellow-feeling for
the whole of mankind. So may it be.
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