by the Superior of Annecy Visitation
Who is Joseph? To Joseph, God “entrusted the care of his most precious treasures ”.
Joseph is a village craftsman: he is a carpenter. Human labor, in especially manual labor, takes on a special emphasis in the Gospel. He entered the mystery of the Incarnation at the same time as the humanity of the Son of God. In the human growth of Jesus “in wisdom, in stature and in grace,” a virtue had a important part: professional conscience. It is not the profession that makes a man, it is the way in which he exercises it.
Today we will look at Joseph the righteous man, Joseph the man of silence, Joseph the obedient man. Joseph, the Righteous. When Joseph saw that Mary was pregnant, he did not want to denounce her publicly and resolved to repudiate her silently. . .
St Francis de Sales said: “He could not believe that Mary had become pregnant against her duty. Although the argument was strong to make him conceive a bad opinion of this Virgin. . . , he saw her all holy, all pure, all evangelical. . . The righteous man, when he can no longer excuse either the fact or the intention of one who, moreover, knows a good man, refuses to judge: he removes the problem from his mind and leaves the judgment to God. “
The characteristic of the just is to withdraw, always, before God.
Joseph, man of silence
The silence of St Joseph is not complete silence, it says something from the depth of his inner life and also something of his fatherhood. The greatest things are done in silence; God is silence. It is in the silence of the soul that He makes Himself heard. The silence of God is the transparency of love. When we contemplate the mystery in God, we understand that the silence of God is at the bottom of oneself. Silence is not the fact of a closure, but it is the fruit of a gift of oneself, of a decentering of oneself to welcome a presence. There is no silence without giving of oneself. Silence is chaste: chastity is the silence of the heart which leads to the silence of body; chastity is charity in the heart and in the body. Such silence is linked to solitude. Silent and lonely, two words that say something about the paternity of Joseph to collaborate in the mission of Jesus the Savior.
Joseph, obedient man
St Francis de Sales, in an interview, praised Joseph’s obedience.
Oh ! may the angel treat St. Joseph well as a true religious! “Take the Child,” he said, “and his Mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you. ” What is this? Holy Couldn’t Joseph have said: “You tell me I’m going, won’t it be enough time to go? tomorrow morning? Where do you want me to go at night? My crew is not trained; how do you want me to carry the Child? Would I have arms strong enough to carry it continually on such a long journey? What? Do you hear that the Mother is carrying Himt in her turn? I have no horse, no money to do the trip. And don’t you know that the Egyptians are enemies of the Israelites? Who will receive us ? And similar things that we would have alleged to the angel if we had been in the place of Saint Joseph; who does not say a word to apologize for doing obedience, but he left at the same time and did whatever the angel had commanded him. “
What message can we receive from St Joseph today? The message is a reminder of the primacy of the interior life and of contemplation over external action and agitation, the prior urgency of self-denial, a foundation indispensable for all fertility. He teaches us that the essential in the end is not to appear, it is to be; it’s not to be adorned with a title is to serve; it is to put one’s existence under the sign of the will of God and seeking the glory of God.
The Invitation is to reflect on how we are going to live the month of 5t Joseph!