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St Joseph’s

Paternal Love

 

by Fr. Urban Snyder (RIP)

 

St. Joseph, virginal husband of the Mother of God and head of the Holy Family, lived the last three decades of his life in the intimate company of Jesus and Mary.  If you should happen to visit Nazareth in Galilee, you can still see the cave which, according to tradition, was part of his home and workshop.  Now, we know that Jesus died at Jerusalem, and His tomb we know.  We know that Mary lived her last years in solitude and contemplation on a mountain near Ephesus, in modern Turkey. (The house has been rebuilt on its original foundations, and you may visit and pray there, attend Mass, and drink from a spring nearby.)  Our Lady is generally believed to have fallen asleep at this place and to have been laid in a tomb close by; but this is disputed by those who hold that before dying she returned to Jerusalem.  A tomb said to be hers is shown in an Orthodox Church at the base of the Garden of Gethsemane.

But St. Joseph – did he die in the little home of Nazareth?  Most probably.  His Tomb? That’s a mystery.  No place is known to have ever been claimed for him, and this has given rise to various speculations.  One is that Providence has reserved the discovery of Joseph’s tomb for the last days, the time of the “great tribulation” – which may not be far away!  It is thought that discovery of Joseph’s tomb would be, in the plan of God, the occasion of a new and greater devotion to the holy patriarch, who thus far has never been sufficiently honored or invoked.  He would then emerge in his full power and grandeur as father and protector of the Mystical Christ on earth, which means the Church and each of its members.

Be that as it may, no one need wait for the discovery of Joseph’s tomb to act on the belief that, after the Mother of God, we have no other patron in Heaven as great and loving and powerful as he.  His mediation, like Mary’s, is universal in every sense; i.e., it extends to absolutely every need of body and soul for each individual Christian.  As she is mother of the whole Christ, Head and members, so he is the virginal father of the whole Christ, Head and members.

I have translated from the French a marvelous exposition of the virginal paternity of St. Joseph by the great Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux in France (+1704).  He explains how the vocation of St. Joseph required that God the Father should give to him a share in His own divine and paternal love for Jesus, so that Joseph would love Him as if he were the natural father – or rather, with a much greater and more perfect love, nothing less than a unique participation in the eternal Father’s own love for His divine Son.  This is a mystery surpassing all understanding, but it should fill our breasts with the deepest love and veneration for St. Joseph, and confidence in him, since as members of Christ he loves us too. 

Bossuet brings out the fact that Joseph was nothing less than the visible stand-in on earth, as it were, for “the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom all paternity in heaven and on earth is named.” (EPH, 3.15-16)  Put that way, one begins to see how St. Joseph’s fatherhood approaches, though on a lower lever, the dignity and greatness of the Mother of God.  And as her motherhood extends to every one of her Son’s members, so does Joseph’s paternity.  He knows and loves each one of us, with the most loving and solicitous father’s heart that was ever created.

Parents!  You have problems in the family!  Well, St. Joseph had them, too; more agonizing problems than yours.  His first problem was with Mary, when he came to realize that she was pregnant…Are you anxious and fearful for your children, growing up in a sick, pagan, sadistic world?  Go to Joseph!  He had to fly into pagan and idolatrous Egypt with Mary and the child, in order to save them from sadistic Herod.  Arrived there, he was homeless, jobless, poor and probably did not speak the language of the country.  Do you perhaps have a prodigal or two among your children, maybe even one who ran away?  Go to Joseph!  The child Jesus slipped away from him and Mary at the age of twelve – He was not yet even a teenager!

Perhaps you are concerned about your own salvation, about chronic faults and habits of sin – about neglect of prayer, or seemingly no time for it; about lack of taste for spiritual things; or too much attachment to the flesh, or to the things of this world.  Go to Joseph!  It is true that he was himself sinless, but, living thirty years in the daily company of the Son of God and His immaculate Mother, he attained more than any other saint a profound insight into the tragedy of not knowing God, and the misery of sin and attachment to the things of this world.  His share in God’s paternal love for human souls fills him with the deepest possible compassion and tenderness for sinners who turn to him for aid.  And he knows the best remedies, but he can obtain them for us from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who loved and obeyed him on earth.

St. Joseph is the patron of a good Christian end, of a holy and blessed death.  But his title of “patron of a holy death” means above all patron of death to self.  A good Christian, like the saints, must endeavor to “die daily” to himself, after the manner of the saints.  Even as it is written, “For thy sake we are put to death all the day long.  We are regarded as sheep for the slaughter.”  St. Joseph, totally self-effacing, totally devoted to the service of Jesus and Mary, is above all the patron of this kind of death, which leads to a holy and peaceful physical death like  his, in the arms of Love.

I turn you over now to the Bishop of Meaux, hoping that you will read him with prayerful reflection, for his thoughts are sometimes profound, though always beautiful.