St.  Joseph and the Christmas story

There are countless persons, basilicas, churches, shrines, seminaries, convents, towns, and cities named after St. Joseph. My native country, Canada, has him as its patron.

Who exactly is this Joseph? He is that quiet figure named in the Christmas story as the husband of Mary and the stepfather of Jesus, and then basically is never mentioned again. The pious conception we have of him is that of an older man, a safe protector to Mary, a carpenter by trade, chaste, holy, humble, quiet, the perfect patron for manual laborers and anonymous virtue, humility incarnate.

What do we really know about him?

In the Gospel of Matthew, the annunciation of Jesus’ conception is given to Joseph rather than to Mary: Before they came together, Mary was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, being an upright man and unwilling to shame her, had decided to divorce her quietly, when an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, that the child in her had been conceived through the Holy Spirit.

What’s in this text?

Partly it’s symbolic. The Joseph of the Christmas story is clearly reminiscent of the Joseph of the Exodus story; he too has a dream; he too goes to Egypt; he too saves the family. Likewise, King Herod is clearly the counterpart of the Egyptian Pharaoh; both feel threatened, and both kill the Hebrew male children only to have God protect the life of the one who is to save the people.

But, after that important symbolism, the Joseph of the Christmas story has his own story. He is presented as an “upright man”, a designation that scholars say implies that he had conformed himself to the Law of God, the supreme Jewish standard of holiness. In every way he was blameless, a paradigm of goodness, which he demonstrates by refusing to expose Mary to shame, even as he decides to divorce her quietly.

What would have happened here historically?

In so far as we can reconstruct it, the background to the relationship between Joseph and Mary would have been this. The marriage custom at the time was that a young woman, essentially at the age of puberty, would be given to a man, usually several years her senior, in an arranged marriage by her parents. They would be betrothed, technically married, but would not yet live together or begin sexual relations for several more years. The Jewish law was especially strict as to the couple remaining celibate while in the betrothal period. During this time, the young woman would continue to live with her parents and the young man would go about setting up a house and an occupation to be able to support his wife once they began to live together.

Joseph and Mary were at this stage of their relationship, legally married but not yet living together when Mary became pregnant. Joseph, knowing that the child was not his, had a problem. If he wasn’t the father, who was? In order to save his own reputation, he could have demanded a public inquiry and, indeed, had Mary been accused of adultery, it might have meant her death. However, he decided to “divorce her quietly”, that is, to avoid a public inquiry which would leave her in an awkward and vulnerable situation.

Then, after receiving a revelation in a dream, he agrees to take her home as his wife and to name the child as his own, thus claiming that he is the father. By doing this, he spares Mary embarrassment, perhaps even saves her life, and he provides an accepted physical, social, and religious place for the child to be born and raised. But he does something else that is not as evident. He shows how a person can be a committed believer, deeply faithful to everything within his religious tradition, and yet at the same time be open to a mystery beyond both his human and religious understanding.

And this was exactly the problem for many Christians, including Matthew himself, at the time the Gospels were written. They were committed Jews who did not know how to integrate Christ into their religious framework. What does one do when God breaks into one’s life in new, previously unimaginable ways? How does one deal with an impossible conception? Joseph is the paradigm. As Raymond Brown puts it: “The hero of Matthew’s infancy story is Joseph, a very sensitive Jewish observer of the Law. In Joseph, the evangelist was portraying what he thought a Jew [a true pious believer] should be and probably what he himself was.”

In essence, Joseph teaches us how to live in loving fidelity to all that we cling to humanly and religiously, even as we are open to a mystery of God that takes us beyond all the categories of our religious practice and imagination. And isn’t that one of the real challenges of Christmas?

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website ronrolheiser.com and facebook.com/ronrolheiser.