On four great virtues of Saint Joseph

March 19th is the Solemnity of St. Joseph. People look to the saints as models of virtue, evidence of how concrete human beings have managed to live the kind of lives God wants of us.

Fr. Czesław Krakowiak, a professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, examined popular devotions to St. Joseph (as enumerated in the “Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy”) and identified four virtues which St. Joseph embodies. Let’s consider them because they are signs of contradiction to modern perspectives and mentalities.

Faith. St. Joseph is always a man of faith. He recognizes he is a son of Israel, bound in covenant to Him who Is. In some sense, St. Joseph takes faith for granted—not in the sense that he merely acquiesces in some practices because “everybody else is doing them” but, rather, in the sense that faith is part of the air he breathed. Thinking and acting under the guidance of faith is as “natural” to St. Joseph as a fish living in water: it is simply part of his chosen life’s path.

I stress the “chosen” element, which perhaps strikes some as a “modern” preoccupation, but it’s not. Faith must always become a personal decision, one that is personally appropriated. Otherwise, in crunch time, a person will crumble. And St. Joseph had plenty of crunch times in his life; that he stood firm was precisely because he was a man of faith.

God often talks to St. Joseph in his dreams. Our world might see relying on dreams as really an act of faith, but perhaps not so much for Israel. Remember that, for Israel, direct encounter with God was seen as fatal: one cannot see the face of God and live (Ex 33:20). Important moments in salvation history take place in sleep, e.g., it is within a “deep sleep” that God makes His covenant with Abram (Gen 15:12). God’s first great work in human salvation—fashioning for the man a fitting companion in woman (Gen 2:21)—occurs in a “deep sleep.” Given those precedents, that God would have communicated equally important things to Joseph in dreams (Mt 1:20; 2:13, 19, 22) in itself would not have surprised St. Joseph or his contemporaries.

But following what one has been told—that still requires a commitment in faith. And we see from St. Joseph’s response that his faith is not just a theoretical acceptance of a message but also a personal act of faith in a Person, that the One who has revealed it is trustworthy, One who “cannot deceive nor be deceived” (Act of Faith).

Obedience. Including “obedience” on a roster of virtues might surprise some people. Including it as a virtue for an adult might be even more striking. Catholics’ understanding of the Fourth Commandment—“honor your father and mother”—has often been (wrongly) reduced to obedience, while its association with the parent/child relationship seems to foster the notion that obedience is something for children. The modern American obsession with “independence” and “autonomy,” coupled with a certain cultural inclination to “push” children out “into the world,” likewise seems to narrow the relevance or at least duration of “obligatory” obedience.

St. Joseph challenges all these misunderstandings. First, “obedience” is a basic human and Christian posture. Man is a contingent being. He is not responsible for his own existence. His being is a gift, a truth that one does not necessarily have to be Christian to recognize. One’s being, after all, comes from others—one’s parents—over whose gift you had no influence. And any normal person will acknowledge that their existence is good. A sense of honor and obedience, then, naturally flows towards those upon whom one is or at least has been dependent.

The Christian, fortified by divine revelation, while appreciating one’s parents, also recognizes an even deeper ground of Being: “I Am Who Am” (Ex 3:14, Jn 8:58). There are two reasons for this. First, your parents themselves are bound in a chain of obedient gratitude for their existence to their parents, and so on and so on. Second, even your parents alone could not give you life. Fruitful love is always a threesome, because only God can create a soul.

Recognizing man’s ultimate dependence on God, therefore, also connects us to obedience, not simply because “God said so” (though that’s also a reason) but because Him to whom we are obedient is not arbitrary or capricious. His Gift of Life itself reveals His intentions towards us: “I know the plans I have for you, plans for your good and not harm” (Jer 29:11). Obedience to God is not, therefore, some alienated submission to unnecessary rules externally imposed on us by God as some kind of “test.” Obedience to God is acknowledgement that His designs for us are also, in fact, our genuine good.

When we look at how St. Joseph obeyed, Fr. Krakowiak notes two important characteristics: that obedience was “perfect” and it was “silent.” In the few instances where St. Joseph appears in the Gospels, he is never presented as resisting God’s Will. He may question what he is supposed to do and sometimes, when operating on purely human knowledge or reason (e.g., Mary’s pregnancy) may speculate how that purely human knowledge or reason might address the problem (e.g., separate from Mary). But it is never a rejection or condemnation of God’s Will: Matthew makes that clear that Joseph is “a just man” (1:19). And when God enlightens him, illuminating his human speculations by divine revelation (again, Mary’s pregnancy) Joseph does what is “right and just,” i.e., what he had wanted all along to do out of love, “take Mary as your wife.”

In a very real sense, St. Joseph consummately embodies the character element which Jesus later praises in St. Bartholomew: “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no guile” (Jn 1:47).

St. Joseph is always ready to obey, to conform his will to His Will. That is the essence of not just of discipleship but of sonship because, if we are commanded to “honor your father and mother” and “all fatherhood in heaven and on earth takes its name from” God (Eph 3:15), then that perfect obedience is not the servile fear of a slave but the filial love of a child of God which, as St. John reminds us, is what we now are (I Jn 3:2).

Not only is St. Joseph’s obedience perfect, but it is silent. None of the Gospels record a single word uttered by St. Joseph. He is very much what was once considered a model of manhood: the “strong, silent type” who doesn’t talk but does.

Whenever we read of St. Joseph in the Gospels, it’s clear: he thinks about and even wrestles with problems, but when God gives him clarity, he acts … and without delay. He “takes Mary for his wife.” He gets up and goes to Egypt. He returns to the Holy Land. He bypasses Archaelus’s tetrarchy in Judea and goes to Galilee. When he knows what God requires, or at least permits, he does.

Piety. St. Joseph’s behavior is marked by piety. We owe grateful obedience to parents because they gave us life, but we also recognize they are part of a longer and contingent line of life-givers, that the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6) stands beyond all those individual life-givers and is the Source both of all Life and all their power to give life. That is God. Recognizing who God is, who we are, that we’re not God and, therefore, how we ought to relate to Him who is God is piety.

Piety is not fear, though it may include a trace of fear. Piety is first and foremost a respectful, loving relationship, the relationship between a child and a parent that recognizes who is who. If it includes a trace of “fear,” it is not the craven fear of a judgmental parent but, rather, the fear that—knowing how truly loving and generous this parent is—I fear not his judgment or even his faithful love but, rather, my own inconstancy, my own infidelity to corresponding to what I have been given. Piety is a child who knows his loving Father seeks nothing but his good and, therefore, is obedient not out of fear or mere self-interest but out of piety, of the loving respect of this precious relationship.

The Polish Catholic-Jewish writer Roman Brandstaetter brought this home to me in his Jezus z Nazarethu. Joseph is a son of Israel. At the same time, he is the man whom God Himself has asked to raise His Son. Of all the men in all of history, obedient St. Joseph has been asked to assume a unique position—being the human foster father with whom, along with Mary, the Son of God would “go down … with them and be obedient to them” (Lk 2:51), not just after having been found in the Temple but throughout His whole hidden life.

Every father is challenged and humbled by the authority God has given him, especially when he sees that same authority reflected through the trusting eyes of a child for whom his father is a hero. God was asking St. Joseph to “measure up” in Jesus’s eyes—and, since God never asks us to do what He also does not enable us to do—can we appreciate the piety animating the life of St. Joseph? A man who made sure this boy was circumcised? A man who ensured this boy was presented in the Temple? A man who first prayed and shared the Bible with this boy, guaranteeing He would be a “son of the Law” even though raised in His first years in a foreign, pagan land? A man who took this boy up to the Temple, who searched for Him when lost, and who I bet had a glimmer of pride when—upon finding Him—saw this boy with the doctors of the Law. All that is piety, deliberately exercised over many years.

Chaste Love. I hesitate to write “chaste love” because, after all, there is no such thing as “unchaste love”—only the modern world seems to think “lust” and “love” have something in common. But I write “chaste love” to point out just what a virtue this is in St. Joseph.

Again, I invoke what I learned from Roman Brandstaetter. Catholic tradition speaks of Mary’s perpetual virginity, not just that Mary was a virgin when she conceived and gave birth to Jesus, but all her life.

St. Joseph is counseled by God not to fear taking Mary as “his wife.” Having learned that his intended bride is pregnant “through the Holy Spirit,” St. Joseph is already in a unique situation: no other prospective husband has faced that situation.

But—perhaps because our age has lost an appreciation of the meaning of virginity—St. Joseph also faced the fact that his beloved has been touched by another, and touched so profoundly that that One has engaged her maternity. This is not to suggest a sexual “touch” by God. But that touch was, nevertheless, as profound and personal a touch as one could experience. Common wisdom speaks of always being marked by one’s “first love.” For St. Joseph, the “first love” of his betrothed Mary is … God.

Now, as devout Jews, that idea in and of itself is not necessarily problematic: every pious Jew (like every pious Catholic) should be willing to admit God is his or her “first love” without that necessarily excluding human spousal love.

But the Catholic tradition has also recognized that, sometimes, that “first love” is so profound and so committed that one foregoes human spousal love. Such are the charisms of consecrated virginity, consecrated chastity, and celibacy.

Mary’s consecrated virginity, however, is on a wholly novel and unique level: her “first love” is responsible also for her maternity, her giving life. Mary has been touched in a unique, novel, and exclusive way by God. She is His.

How, then, could he ever touch her resulting in “the two shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24) when the All Holy One has shared His Life with Mary that resulted in the hypostatic union? This Child is “true God and true man.” St. Joseph’s own sense of piety would have made him profoundly aware of that.

And yet God calls St. Joseph to “take Mary for your wife” in a way that respects her virginity yet brings Mary and Joseph together in the mutual support of love that also now includes the Son of God. In dissuading Joseph from “divorcing her quietly,” God already profoundly affirms—before Jesus explicitly teaches about divorce—the permanence of “what God has joined together.” Joseph accompanies Mary and Joseph down the roads of life until, according to Catholic Tradition, he passed from this world surrounded by persons we hope are—with St. Joseph—at our deathbeds.

So, Joseph is a man of love. He is also a man of chastity. And there is no contradiction in the Divine Plan between those truths. Which is also why St. Joseph can be a true patron of husbands and fathers—and (like Mary, given on the cross) of celibate priests and religious.

**********

As we celebrate the solemnity of St. Joseph, let us consider the key virtues that marked his life. Let us not think of St. Joseph as a naïve figure who embodies some “virtues” that are the stuff of pious legends or fervorinos. Looking at St. Joseph’s life as a real human being, we discover he was made of a tougher mettle that is exceedingly relevant for us today. He had to be: only a man of that kind of mettle could even now be the “terror of demons.”