Recently I saw in a friend’s house a representation of St. Joseph that
really made me think. It was a relief from a Baroque Portuguese
altarpiece, depicting the night of the escape into Egypt. You see an
open tent with an angel standing beside it. Inside, Joseph, who is
sleeping, but dressed in the garb of a pilgrim, wearing long boots as
needed for a difficult journey. The first impression may be somewhat
naive, showing him as a traveller, but sleeping. However, if we think
more deeply we begin to understand what the image is trying to suggest.
The silences
Joseph sleeps, it is true, yet he is able to hear the voice of the angel
(Mt 2:13 ff). The scene appears to represent what the Song of Solomon
had proclaimed: “I slept, but my heart was vigilant” (Song 5:2). The
external senses are at rest, but the depths of the soul are open and
receptive. In this open tent we see the figure of a man who, deep down,
can hear what resonates within or is told him from above; a man whose
heart is open enough to receive what the living God and his angel tell
him. In that profound openness, the soul of any man can meet God. From
it, God speaks to each of us, and shows that he is close to us.
However, most of the time we are invaded by cares, concerns,
expectations and desires of every kind. We may be so full of images and
worries produced by everyday life, that however alert we are externally,
we lack inner vigilance and fail to hear the sound of the voices that
speak in the depths of the soul. Our souls may be so burdened and
partitioned that the gentle voice of God, who is so near to us, can not
be heard. With the advent of the modern age, we have increasingly
mastered the world, and tailored everything to our desires, but these
advances in our dominion over things, and in our knowledge of what we
can do with them, have diminished our sensitivity so that our universe
has become one-dimensional. We are ruled by our possessions, by all the
objects that our hands can reach, and that we use as instruments to
produce other objects. Basically, we see nothing but our own image, and
we are unable to hear the voice that comes from the depths of Creation,
and that, today too, speaks to us of the goodness and beauty of God.
Joseph, who sleeps, but who at the same time is alert to hear the voice
that rings out in his soul and from on high – which is what today’s
Gospel tells us about – is someone who unites inner recollection and
promptness. From the open tent of his life he is inviting us to withdraw
a little from the tumult of the senses; to recover our inner
recollection; to learn to look inside ourselves and to look up, so that
God can touch our souls and speak his word to us. Lent is an especially
appropriate time for us to turn aside from our daily cares and redirect
our steps once again along the paths of the interior life.
He gets up and welcomes God’s plan
We can proceed to a second point. Joseph, as we see, is prompt to get up
and do what God tells him, as the Gospel shows us (Mt 1:24; 2:14). This
is where his life touches that of Mary, in the response that she gives
at the decisive moment of her life: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the
Lord” (Lk 1:38). St Joseph reacts in the same way: “Behold your servant.
Command what you will of me.” His reply is the same as that of Isaiah
when he was called: “Here am I! Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8; see 1 Sam 3:8ff).
This calling will fill his whole life from that moment on. But there is
also another text of the Gospel that is relevant here: the announcement
that Jesus makes to Peter when he tells him, “They will lead you where
you do not wish to go” (Jn 21:18). Joseph, with his readiness, makes it
his rule of life, because he is ready to let himself be led, even though
it is not the direction he wants to go in. His whole life is a story of
this kind of responsiveness.
It begins with the message of the angel about the secret of Mary’s
divine motherhood, the mystery of the coming of the Messiah.
Unexpectedly, his plans for a quiet, simple, peaceful life are turned
upside-down, and he finds himself part of the adventure of God among
men. As happened to Moses before the burning bush, Joseph finds himself
face to face with a mystery of which he is to be witness and
participant. He will soon learn what this implies: that the Messiah’s
birth cannot take place in Nazareth. He has to set off for Bethlehem,
the city of David, but the birth does not even take place within
Bethlehem, because “his own people received him not” (Jn 1:11). This
already points to the Cross, because our Lord has to be born outside the
city, in a stable. Next, after a new message from the angel, there
comes the flight into Egypt, where they endure the fate of the homeless
and exiles: refugees, foreigners, rootless wanderers looking for a place
to stay.
Joseph returns to Israel, but the dangers have not ceased. Later he
suffers the painful experience of the three days during which Jesus is
lost (Lk 2:46). Those three days are a foreshadowing of the three days
between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection: days when our Lord has
disappeared, and his absence is felt. And just as the Risen Christ does
not live among his followers again in the same way as before, but tells
them “Do not try and hold onto me, because I shall ascend to my Father,
and you will be able to be with me when you too ascend (cf. Jn 20:17),
so too now, when Jesus is found in the Temple, what is foregrounded is
the mystery of Jesus in its distance, gravity and greatness. Joseph
feels, in a sense, put in his place by Jesus, but at the same time set
on his way to the heights. “I must be about my Father’s business” (Lk
2:49). As much as to say, “You are not my father but my guardian, and on
being entrusted with that office you received the task of guarding the
mystery of the Incarnation.”
Finally, Joseph dies without seeing the mission of Jesus made manifest.
All his sufferings, all his hopes, are buried in his silence. Joseph’s
life is not that of someone who, aiming to fulfil himself, seeks only
within himself for the resources he needs to make of his life what he
wants. Joseph is a man who denies himself, lets himself be taken where
he does not wish to go. He does not make his life into a possession for
himself, but into a gift that he gives. He is not guided by a plan
thought up by his own mind, decided on by his own will, but, responding
to God’s wishes, he renounces his will to give himself to the will of
the Other, the grandiose will of the Most High. But it is precisely in
that total self-renunciation that man discovers himself.
Because that is the truth: that only if we learn to lose ourselves, only
if we give ourselves, can we find ourselves. When that happens it is
not our will that prevails, but that of the Father, to which Jesus
submitted: “Not my will, but yours be done” (Lk 22:42). And since this
fulfils what we say in the Our Father – “Thy Will be done on earth as it
is in Heaven” –, there is then a part of Heaven on earth, because the
same is done on earth as is done in Heaven. So St Joseph, with his
renunciation, his abandonment that was in a way a foretaste of the
imitation of the crucified Christ, teaches us the paths of faithfulness,
resurrection and life.
Always on the road
There is a third aspect for us to consider. As we look at St Joseph, who
is dressed as a pilgrim, we understand that from the first moment of
the Mystery, his life is that of someone who is always on the road, on a
constant pilgrimage. Thus his life is marked with the sign of Abraham,
because the history of God among men, which is the history of his chosen
ones, begins with the command given to the father of the Chosen People:
“Go from your country… to the land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1; cf.
Heb 13:14). Our dwelling-place, or as St Paul says in the Letter to the
Philippians, our citizenship, is in Heaven (Phil 3: 20).
Today these words about Heaven sound bad, because we tend to believe
that such an attitude diverts us from fulfilling our duties on earth and
alienates us from our proper world. We tend to believe that we are
called to make a paradise of this earth. But what happens in reality is
that by acting according to that belief, what we do is precisely to
destroy creation. Because basically man’s desires point to the Infinite.
Today more than ever we can see that only God can totally satisfy man.
We are made in such a way that finite things leave us ever unsatisfied,
because we need much more: we need inexhaustible Love, unlimited Truth
and Beauty.
Although that desire cannot be suppressed, we can displace it and seek
for what is infinite in things that cannot give it. Wanting to have
Heaven while still on this earth, we hope and demand everything from the
earth and from present-day society. But in this attempt to extract the
infinite from what is finite, man tramples on the earth and makes
ordered social relations impossible, because each sees other people as a
threat or an obstacle. Only when we learn anew to direct our gaze to
Heaven will the earth too shine out in all its splendour. Only when we
enliven the great hopes of our souls with the idea of being with God
eternally, and feel once again like pilgrims on the way to Eternity,
instead of clinging stubbornly to this earth, only then will our desires
also radiate towards this world so that it too may have hope and peace.
For all of this, let us thank God today because he has given us this
Saint, who speaks to us of being recollected in God; who teaches us
promptness, obedience, and the attitude of pilgrims who let themselves
be led by God; and tells us that this is precisely the way to serve this
world. Let us beg for grace so that, by showing that same vigilance and
promptness, we may one day be received by God, the true goal of all our
journeying.
