Lessons of silence - A talk for St Joseph's day

St Joseph, amongst other things, is the patron of the universal church, workers in general and carpenters in particular, expectant mothers, families, and a happy death. It’s obvious why some of these have been assigned to his portfolio, as it were, but someone suggested to me recently that she thought Joseph should also be the patron saint of those who suffer from inferiority complexes. When I asked why, she said “well, how do you think it would make you feel if you had to sit down to breakfast every morning with the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity and the immaculately conceived Mother of God?” In fact, of course, we don’t know how this made him feel. Indeed, although, as we’ll see a little later, preachers throughout the ages have found it all but impossible to resist trying to analyse how Joseph “must have felt” and what he “must have thought” at various points in his extraordinary history, actually the Bible tells us next to nothing about his thoughts and feelings. St Matthew’s gospel, which is where we find almost all of the information the NT gives us about St Joseph doesn’t record even one of his words. And in St Luke’s account, Joseph’s apparently total silence is set against a backdrop in which the presence of both the unborn and the infant Jesus tends to make other people burst into ecstatic speech or song. Think of Elizabeth’s crying out with a loud voice (really “intoning”) when her cousin, pregnant with the Word, greets her; think of Mary’s own Magnificat on the same occasion; think of Simeon in the Temple announcing that he has seen his salvation in the baby brought by the couple from Nazareth along with the offering of the poor, and prophecying such great and mysterious things of Him. The closest thing we have to a recorded utterance of Joseph, by contrast, is that Luke tells us that on this occasion he “marvels”, along with Our Lady, at what is being said. If the Bible both paints a picture of Joseph as a quiet man, and is itself rather quiet about him, much the same can be said about the history of the Church, at least for the first thousand years or so. By comparison to devotion to Our Lady, for instance, interest in the figure of St Joseph took a long time to develop. Whilst Giuseppe must surely be one of the most commonly used men’s Christian names in modern Italy, for instance, baptismal records show that, even in the late Middle Ages, almost no little Italian boys were given this name. Some people, especially non-Catholics, occasionally find this puzzling, but there is, of course a good reason for it. Mary has a completely unique kind of role when compared with any other saint: whilst Catholic Christians freely call on the intercession of any or all the saints, and look to any or all of them for inspiration, Mary has a place in what you might call the structure of the Christian faith itself that no one else has: the creed would have a totally different shape without her. What I mean by this is that, if we believe that Jesus had no human father, he takes his humanity entirely from Mary. It is Mary who, in her obedience to the message of God conveyed to her by Gabriel, ensures that the Word can be made flesh, human flesh, and become one of us. Without Mary, Jesus could have been some kind of a demi-god, swooping down into our history from outside, but he could never have been our brother. It’s for this reason, I think, more than any other, that devotion to the Mother of God developed so strongly so early: it is intimately connected with devotion to the Son of God, and indeed with the Church’s teaching about the Son of God, in a way that devotion to no other saint could be. But actually it’s not only by comparison with Mary that St Joseph took a long time to become a popular saint. One reason sometimes given for Joseph being a late developer, as it were, is that, apart from Our Lady, the most popular saints in the early centuries of the Church tended to be the martyrs, who people could particularly identify with in times of persecution, but it’s difficult to be sure. We’ll come back to the importance of Joseph’s own silence, and the importance of the silence about him. But, of course, that silence isn’t total. So what can we know about him on the basis of what we read in scripture? And what can we learn from this for our own lives with the Lord? In the litany of St Joseph, he is called both “the light of the Patriarchs”, and “the renowned offspring of David”, and both these titles draw our attention to how he stands at the doorway between the old and the new testaments. Calling him the offspring of David reminds us of one of the facts about him on which St Matthew is most insistent, and with which we’re most familiar from the readings and carols we hear at Christmas time, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, David’s royal city, because, as St Luke points out, St Joseph is a descendant of David, and therefore has to go with Mary to his ancestral home to be enrolled in the census. When the angel comes to Joseph in his dream to tell him to take Mary as his wife, he addresses him by name as “Joseph, son of David”. One ancient commentator rather charmingly suggests that this is the angel reassuring Joseph that he knows who it is he’s talking to, that he’s definitely delivering this somewhat disturbing message to the correct address. (Joseph was, after all, the single most common male name in Palestine at the time) But there’s something more important going on as well. For St Matthew, in particular, who is almost certainly writing his gospel for an audience made up largely of Christian converts from Judaism, it is vital to establish that Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one who will bring freedom and peace to his people, before showing how this Messiah overturns all the expectations about how this will come to pass. And in order to show that he is the Messiah, he has first to show that he could be the Messiah, who would, it was believed, be of David’s dynasty. And membership of that dynasty by the way, could, according to Jewish law be conferred, as in this case, by adoption. Indeed, this was one of the reasons, among others connected with how a single mother would have been perceived and treated and so on, that it was important for Joseph to marry Mary, to ensure that her Son inherits a place in the family tree of the royal house. So it is important that Joseph is a son of David, a renowned offspring of David as his litany puts it, so that Jesus can be adopted into the lineage of David but, of course, King David, in turn, is descended from those mysterious figures from the book of Genesis who we call the Patriarchs, the fathers, from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Just to make sure that we don’t forget this, St Matthew includes, as the prologue to his gospel, the family tree of Jesus, reaching back far beyond David to begins with “Abraham…the father of Isaac” and concluding with “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah”. What might be the significance of all this? It’s worth noticing that according to Matthew, Joseph’s father was called Jacob, and that’s surely meant to ring bells for an audience as saturated in what we call the Old Testament as Matthew’s original readers. In the immortal words of Tim Rice, “way, way back many centuries ago, not long after the Bible began”, there was another Jacob who had a son called Joseph, he of the amazing Technicolor dream coat. And the dreaming, if not the dream coat is important, because significant dreams seem to run in the family. There are echoes of the story of the Old Testament Joseph, of course, in the story of his NT namesake, particularly in the part Egypt plays in both, and, obviously, both Josephs are dreamers, who are obedient to the will of God revealed in dreams. But Jacob, the father of the original Joseph, is also a dreamer, and in fact I think that one at least of Jacob’s dreams is particularly interesting when set alongside that of the later Joseph. I want to suggest, in fact, that what Matthew is doing when he insists that the later Joseph’s father is called Jacob (as it happens, St Luke gives him a different name in his genealogy ) is suggesting that NT Joseph’s dream starts out, in a strange kind of a way, where OT Jacob’s leaves off. You remember the Genesis story: Jacob, tired out after travelling, lies down where he is at sunset with a stone under his head, and dreams of a ladder stretching between heaven and earth, with angels climbing up and down it. In his dream he is addressed by God, who repeats to him almost word for word the promise he made earlier to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham: he will have numberless descendants, they will dwell in their own land, and all the peoples of the earth will “bless themselves” by them. The Lord also tells Jacob explicitly “I am with you”. On waking, we are told, not altogether surprisingly, Jacob is afraid, and, recognising that “the Lord is in this place and I did not know it”, says “this is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven” before setting up a kind of shrine and declaring that the place should henceforth be known as Bethel, the house of God. Now, what happens if we fast forward to the time of Joseph, husband of Mary? The first of Joseph’s dreams described in St Matthew’s gospel, of course, is the one in which the angel assures Joseph that the child Mary is carrying is “of the Holy Spirit”. If we read the two dream stories alongside each other, we might wonder at this point, as some of the fathers of the Church did, whether the ladder in Jacob’s dream, connecting heaven and earth, points forward to the one in whom heaven and earth will be bound together forever: Jesus, the Son of God and the Son of Mary. The Lord himself, after all, seems to imply this. When he speaks, in St John’s Gospel, of angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man; a Jewish audience could hardly have missed the echo of Jacob’s dream. And, of course, Christians have always understood that the promise made to Abraham, and heard again in his dream by his grandson Jacob, is fulfilled in Jesus: the numberless children of Abraham are the children of the Church, called to be a blessing to the whole earth because we are called to show all our brothers and sisters the way home to God. And there are some other points of contact too, between the two dreams, which are perhaps easier to overlook. When he speaks to Jacob in his dream, the Lord tells him “I am with you”. St Matthew takes care to tell us that the conception of Jesus, as described in Joseph’s dream takes place to fulfil a prophecy which speaks about God being with his people: a phrase echoed at the end of Matthew’s Gospel when the risen Lord tells his disciples he will be “with” them till the end of time. All of this is important, I think, partly because it shows us that God doesn’t change his mind. One of the abiding temptations for Christians is to draw a distinction between the God of the old testament and the God of the new, to forget that, if, as the documents of Vatican II tell us, the Church is the People of God, this does not mean that He had another People whom he has forgotten or abandoned. In fact, the Old Testament is still in our Bibles not just to provide us with interesting background information about the upbringing Jesus must have had as a nice Jewish boy, but because it records the deeds of the one God who is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as well as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The dream of Jacob in Genesis is a kind of prophecy calling out for fulfilment which it receives in the dream of Joseph in St Matthew’s Gospel. But does Jacob’s dream have any more specific light to shed on the events surrounding Joseph’s dream? We’re probably all fairly familiar with sermons preached around Christmas time that suggest either how hard it must have been for Mary to live with Joseph’s suspicions, or for Joseph to have been tortured by the assumption that someone else had slept with Mary. But actually what the text says is that the reason Joseph thought of separating from Mary was in order to “spare her publicity”: in other words, it tells us something about his estimation of what the village gossips in Nazareth were likely to make of the situation, but nothing at all about what he made of it. From the early centuries of Church history there have been several very different assumptions about what might have been going through Joseph’s mind when he fell asleep and met the angel. The first is the one with which, I’ve suggested, we’re perhaps most familiar. This assumes that Joseph had no inkling of any explanation of his fiancée’s pregnancy except the obvious one until the angel spoke to him: devastating as the idea presumably was, he must have thought that Mary had been unfaithful to him. St Augustine, for instance, speaks of Joseph being “tormented” by the idea of “the seeming certainty of her unchastity”. But, as some of the Fathers noticed, St Matthew says that Mary was “found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” before Joseph has his dream. Of course, those words “of the Holy Spirit” might just be meant for our ears, as it were: Joseph discovered that Mary was expecting, and decided to separate from her privately, and then he had his dream in which the real explanation of the pregnancy was given him, an explanation that St Matthew has already kindly given his readers. But what if the whole of that sentence “Mary was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” refers to Joseph’s own experience? What if, either Mary told him of her experience of the Annunciation, presumably when she got home to Nazareth after her three months with Elizabeth, or Joseph had some kind of private revelation which is not recorded in the Gospel? This does perhaps make more sense of the angel telling Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife: on the assumption that Joseph fell asleep thinking that Mary had betrayed him, would fear have been the uppermost emotion in his mind? Anger, desperate hurt, confusion, sure – but fear? But if we think that Joseph already had some sense of Who it was who was growing in Mary’s womb, fear, in the sense of awe, is a perfectly understandable reaction: think of how, in the OT, it was dangerous – and forbidden - to come too close to the ark of the covenant (a traditional title of Mary, of course, in the litany) think about the intense sense of the unapproachable holiness of God that we find expressed, for example, in the way that the Jerusalem temple was organised (with the High Priest being allowed into the holy of holies only once a year). On this understanding, of course, when the angel tells Joseph that the child is of the Holy Spirit, he is not breaking news that is totally unexpected, but clarifying and confirming something that would surely have taken some getting used to. The emphasis then of the “Do not be afraid”” would be something like “don’t let the fact that this Child is of the Holy Spirit stand in the way of your taking Mary as your wife”. And that, I think, is where some of those other details from old Jacob’s dream are rather to the point. He awakes from his dream with fear, because the Lord is within this place and he knew it not, because he finds himself at the Gate of Heaven. Joseph, in his dream, reaches new clarity about how the Lord is within Mary, who is, of course, in another of her titles from the litany, herself the gate of heaven, and, above all, is brought to see that this is not a moment for fear. At the very beginning of the NT, Joseph is authoritatively told that God no longer wants to hold his people at arms length. At the death of Jesus, the veil of the Temple will be torn in two; here, though the unborn Messiah is still veiled within Mary’s body, God is beckoning all his children to come close, through Joseph who both represents the Jewish people and stands in the very doorway of the Christian Church. Obviously, we can’t know for certain what passed between God and Joseph, or between Joseph and Mary before the dream, and therefore, we can’t know for certain how the words of the angel are to be interpreted. If we try for a moment to think about what we can learn from Joseph’s example for our own lives of faith, it’s probably as well that we can’t be certain, because I think , both the interpretations I’ve sketched can be helpful maybe for different people, or maybe even for the same people at different times. In the first case, what you have is Joseph’s very human perplexity giving way gradually to faith and trust in what seems at first sight incredible, a situation that seems impossible to live with being illuminated by God’s kindly light. In the second, you have a fear of God being replaced by an awed understanding that He wants to draw us to Himself so we can relate to him as naturally as members of a family. This brings us back to the silence of St Joseph from which we started; his own silence, and the silence of others about him: and the two are obviously connected: we don’t know how, precisely, Joseph reacted to the news of Mary’s pregnancy because no words of his survive to tell us. Presumably, this is no accident, and I’ve suggested that we shouldn’t think of it merely as a negative thing, as if St Matthew is telling us to mind our own business. It’s not just that we don’t need to know, but, perhaps, we actually need not to know, so that we can make room in our reflections for various different possibilities, all of which maybe have something to show us about how God wants to deal with us, how he asks for our cooperation as he asked for Joseph’s in bringing his Son into the world. Does the silence of Joseph have anything else to teach us? I want to suggest in conclusion that there are perhaps three other ways in which it’s important. Firstly, it reminds us, I think, that being “high profile”, articulate, being happy in the limelight, has nothing necessarily to do with holiness. I said earlier that we couldn’t be sure why devotion to St Joseph, now one of the most popular saints in the calendar, had taken so long to get off the ground, but one plausible reason might be that, actually, the “shy” saints, those who stay in the background, enabling great work for God to go on are as important as their more obviously charismatic brothers and sisters: Dominicans sometimes like to contrast St Dominic, and, say, St Francis of Assisi in this way. Shy saints show those of us who are ourselves inclined to prefer keeping quiet and staying in the background that this is a place where God may reach us and draw us into his service.Perhaps Joseph had to go on quietly working for centuries from his place in heaven with rather less recognition than we might feel due to the foster-father of God in order for God to make precisely this point through him. Secondly, the fact that Joseph actually says so little has, I think, an important implication for our life of prayer. It’s no accident, I think, that among the most important promoters of devotion to St Joseph have been the great contemplatives, especially among the Carmelites. St Teresa of Avila talks of finding him a never failing intercessor. Her spiritual daughter St Therese of Lisieux also speaks of her great love of Joseph, whom she invokes as “Joseph, protector of virgins”. Obviously part of the appeal of Joseph for women religious is his tender and sensitive love for Our Lady; he is the protector of virgins because he protected the Virgin. But there’s also something else. Joseph lived under the same roof with Jesus, in intimate closeness, to the Lord. Whatever else we don’t know about the Holy Family’s lifestyle, we do know this. In his sacramental form, those of us who live in religious communities, even decidedly un-enclosed ones like this one, have the same astonishing privilege. And all of us, of course, are able to visit the Blessed Sacrament in Church from time to time. If we understand Joseph’s silence against this background, it suggests both, I think, the importance of taking the opportunities that present themselves for spending time in silence with the Lord, and also, perhaps, the need to remain alive to the possibility that, if we do so, he will from time to time give us things which are not necessarily to be spoken about aloud. Finally, the fact that we know so little about St Joseph, although it may be frustrating, is, I think, an important gift to us, and a kind of a challenge. Writing about our blessed Lady, the 20th century English laywoman and mystic Caryll Houselander contrasts Mary, about whom we also know rather little, with other saints – she actually takes St Catherine of Siena as her example – about whom we know a very great deal. There are biographies of St Catherine which will go into considerable detail about her family background, her personality, her friends, the way she prayed, and so on. None of this do we have really, when it comes to Our Lady. Now, all this information about St Catherine helps us to know her and love her, encourages us to ask for her intercession, even inspire us to imitate her in some ways, though equally we may find some other saint more temperamentally congenial. But what reading the life of St Catherine also does is show us her uniqueness, the innumerable ways in which we can’t imitate St Catherine because God made me to be me and you to be you and not to be St Catherine. We will want to praise God for the wonderful things he accomplished in St Catherine, and ask him to accomplish wonderful things in our own lives – but not the same wonderful things. With Our Lady, Caryll Houselander suggests, it’s a little different. Because we are all called, actually, to do what she did, though not, of course in the same way. We are all called to bring Jesus into the world. Christ, she says, must be born from every soul, formed in every life, so that we can be Christ for others in the world. And she goes on to suggest that it’s for precisely this reason that we know so little about Our Lady’s personality. If we knew more, Caryll Houselander argues, we might be “dazzled into thinking that only one sort of person could form Christ in himself, and we should miss the meaning of our own being”. And I think we can say something similar about St Joseph. One of the oldest titles of St Joseph is “nutritor Domini” the one who nurtures and cherishes the Lord. If we’re all called to be Christ, to allow God to form the image of His Son within us as He did within Mary, we are all called, equally, to recognise that image in all our brothers and sisters, and, where we recognise Christ, to nurture Him, to be St Joseph to the Christ we see in our brothers and sisters. And, again, precisely because we know so little about his personality, his tastes and his talents, we can’t absolve ourselves by saying “I’m not like St Joseph at all so this can’t be what I’m called to do”. Just as there are as many ways of bearing Christ into the world as there are Christians, so there must be as many ways of nurturing Christ as there are Christians.In crafting words or wood, in looking after literal or spiritual children, in seeking the justice of God in silence and accompanying those who God gives us into the Egyptian darkness of whatever suffering and exile comes their way, we too can be nourishers of the Lord; we can be St Joseph to each other. We have only not to be afraid.