+JOSEPH, THE SILENT REFUGEE St Joseph, March 19, 2022
Everything around the life of St Joseph is steeped in silence, something that seems to be an outstanding trait of his personality. We don’t read of Joseph speaking a single word in all of the gospels. It’s not that he is just a quiet sort of guy, withdrawn from the rest of society, but he is one, as one author puts it: “who lets God speak and answers by obeying eagerly without discussion, without asking the least question (even an explanation), without expressing the slightest objection.” After his dream, he simply did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him.
With all that is going on these days in Ukraine, one cannot help but think he is close to the three million that have had to leave their homes for another country or to another part of Ukraine. Either responding to or fleeing from dominant figures of their time, Joseph and Mary had to leave the comfort of their homes. When Mary was already many months pregnant, a decree by Caesar Augustus demanded they go to Bethlehem, where amid great poverty Mary’s time to give birth took place. And then from fear of King Herod who sought the child’s death, they had to flee to Egypt. Joseph knows well the fragility of so many refugees and migrants of our own time. What sustained him was a deep and abiding faith in God’s care for each and all of the human family.
We see in Joseph a “righteousness that comes from faith” that St Paul writes about so eloquently in his letter to the Romans that we just heard. Along with Mary, he provides the care in which the long awaited heir, the promised one by the prophet Nathan, would find a home to live in. The temple that Solomon built was no lasting one. It was only in the person of Jesus that David’s house, David’s kingdom would come to endure forever. This is the Temple of which Jesus was later to speak, that if destroyed, God would raise up in three days. It is the Temple of his own body that we remember throughout this Lenten season.
Joseph’s whole mission is closely tied up with the early life of Jesus, with his infancy and early years. Joseph carries with him a continual awareness of God’s abiding presence, so attuned is he to God’s living word that one cannot help feeling he is ever listening right in the midst of everyday events. We live in a world that can overwhelm us with words and noises to where we risk losing a taste for silence, to where one wonders if God has much of a chance to get a word in edgewise. Joseph serves as a timely example, of one whose quiet interior arises out of a profound faith. It is this faith that allows us to be ever attentive to that divine movement at work in each of our lives.
This is captured in the middle of our gospel this morning where we heard of Mary who before she and Joseph “lived together, …was found with child through the Holy Spirit.” Not knowing how this could have happened, Joseph was “unwilling to expose her to shame” and decided to divorce her quietly. What pain must have pierced him, to think that one he so deeply loved and trusted, may have betrayed him. His faith intervened, purifying his righteousness so that he might live with the mystery of what had happened to her. Only then does an angel appear to him in a dream.
“When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.” Had Joseph not acted out of a righteousness based on faith, he would have exposed Mary to possibly being stoned to death as was demanded by the Law. By faith he opened himself to divine mystery. Joseph has a beautiful message for each one of our lives as we too find ourselves in a world immersed in divine mystery.
It is the mystery we are about to celebrate at this altar, the mystery of God’s everlasting love for us and all of creation. There becomes present here Christ’s very dying and rising that took place two thousand years ago but which continues to happen in the lives of believers everywhere, like the lives to those driven from their homes and their land in Ukraine. Each one of us is being called daily into this mystery of Christ’s dying and rising. As Joseph’s faith allowed him to embrace the life growing in Mary’s womb, our faith brings this same Life to birth in the world of today.
2 Samuel 7:4-5a, 12-14a, 16; Rom 4:13, 16-18, 22; Matt 1:16, 18-21, 24a