by James Martin
We haven’t talked much about Joseph yet. But that’s not unusual when it comes to the Nativity story. In many Christmas scenes (whether classical paintings or cheap Christmas cards) Mary’s husband is sometimes shunted off to the side or stuck in the back of the scene, behind a shepherd. Joseph is often portrayed as a wizened old man, balding and stooped, looking more like Mary’s father than her husband.
Why this relative lack of attention to Joseph, especially since he can be a powerful figure not only for fathers, but also for all Christians?
Joseph has presented a delicate problem for the Catholic Church over the past two millennia. The miracle of the Incarnation was not only that God became human, but also that this was accomplished through a virgin. Naturally, Mary is one of the stars of the Nativity story, at least in Luke’s Gospel. But the emphasis on Mary’s virginity may have made her marriage to Joseph an uncomfortable reality—after all, if they were married, didn’t that mean that they had sex? That flew in the face of an early tradition in the church—Mary’s perpetual virginity. So Joseph ended up in the background.
Some scholars have posited this as one reason that Joseph is portrayed as elderly in so many paintings, even though some experts estimate he was around thirty years old at the time of Jesus’s birth. Lawrence Cunningham, a professor of theology at Notre Dame and author of A Brief History of Saints, told me in a conversation, “Nine times out of ten in Christian art, Joseph takes on more of father-protector role rather than a husband. That was a way of solving the sexuality problem.” Cunningham noted that in some paintings, Joseph is shown dozing off in the corner of the stable or even leaving the scene of the Nativity entirely, “out of modesty.”
We can’t blame Western artists for giving Joseph short shrift. They didn’t have much to go on. Joseph is given no lines to speak in any of the Gospels and is not mentioned by name anywhere in Mark’s Gospel. Significantly, he is absent during Jesus’s public ministry and even at the Crucifixion, where, by contrast, Mary is featured prominently. This has led many scholars to conclude that he died before the end of Jesus’s earthly life. In the Church of St. Joseph in Nazareth is a moving stained-glass window entitled The Death of Joseph, a rare scene in Christian art. The dying man lies in a bed, his right hand held tenderly by Jesus, his left by Mary.
So what do we know about Joseph? Apart from his trade—he’s called a tektōn in the Gospels, which is usually translated as “carpenter” but is more likely a general craftsman—not much. But Pheme Perkins, a professor of New Testament at Boston College, told me that we can draw some interesting conclusions if we read the Gospels carefully.
“The most obvious assumption in antiquity would have been that Joseph had been married before and was a widower,” Perkins told me. “Most likely, an arrangement was made for him to find a young wife.” This is the basis for the Catholic tradition that Jesus’s “brothers and sisters,” mentioned in the Gospels, were from Joseph’s first marriage. (Mainline Protestant churches are generally more comfortable with the possibility that Mary could have given birth to other children after Jesus.)
Given that Mary seems not to have been forced for economic reasons to remarry after her husband’s death, “Joseph must have been a good provider,” Perkins said. She is not certain that his portrayal as an elderly man in so many works of Christian art necessarily had to do with issues surrounding sexuality. “We usually make revered figures older,” she said. “If you look at most of the paintings of St. Peter and St. Paul, they look older, no matter what stage of life they’re in.”
Though most of Joseph’s life goes unmentioned in the Gospels, he carried out an exceedingly important task: helping to raise the Son of God. During the first years of Jesus’s life, and perhaps into his young adulthood, he would have learned much of what he knew about the Jewish faith—its beliefs and practices, its history and ethics—from his mother and his foster father. Perhaps the skills Jesus learned alongside Joseph in the carpentry shop—patience, hard work, creativity—were put to use in his later ministry. In this way Joseph represents the holiness of the hidden life, doing meaningful things without a great deal of fanfare.
Joseph’s actions during the Nativity story offer a powerful model for Christians. The Gospel of Matthew describes him as a “righteous man” who does what God asks of him after his initial confusion. After discovering Mary’s pregnancy, Joseph thinks of “quietly” ending their marriage plans, so as not to disgrace her. But the Gospel of Matthew tells readers that an angel reassures the clearly confused Joseph in a dream: “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife,” says the angel, who then explains the unusual circumstances of the birth. “The child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”11
In both the Old and New Testaments, dreams are privileged ways in which God communicates with people. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching up to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.12 Jacob’s son and Joseph’s namesake, the Joseph of Genesis, receives messages in dreams about his future and later, as a servant in Pharaoh’s court, becomes an interpreter of dreams.13 In my experience as a spiritual director, I have noticed how dreams are sometimes means through which God can communicate difficult truths, which the conscious mind might not be ready or able to grasp. And in my own life, I’ve had several revelatory dreams that, though they didn’t predict the future or tell me that my wife was going to miraculously conceive a child, seemed indeed gifts from God.
Joseph faced an agonizing decision. But with God’s grace he moved from confusion to a process of discernment and finally to acceptance. In this way he mirrors Mary more than we might initially suspect. While the sequence is different for Mary and Joseph, both face confusion, both have vivid experiences of God, both are confronted with a never-before-made decision, both assent to God’s will, and both then prepare themselves for a life that will be, needless to say, confusing.
Matthew, by the way, may also have been more intent on describing Joseph’s role because of the evangelist’s desire to present Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. His Gospel begins with a lengthy genealogy starting with Abraham, continues through David, and ends up with Joseph. In this way Joseph is a symbol of both continuity (the continuation of the royal line of David and the placement of Jesus in the long line of Jewish prophets) and discontinuity (the unique way that Jesus’s birth will come about and the utter newness of his ministry).
During the latter part of the Christmas story, the Holy Family leaves their homeland. Again in a dream, Joseph is told to flee from Bethlehem to Egypt to escape the rage of Herod, who will order the slaughter of all male children under two years of age. “Now after they [the wise men] had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’”
Throughout the entire story, the personality of Mary’s husband shines through, wordlessly. “Here is a model of someone who represents all the virtues in the Hebrew Bible,” Perkins told me. “He is asked to do something shocking, but because he’s righteous, he follows God’s guidance.”
Joseph was responsible for protecting Mary and her son in extreme conditions. Perkins calls him a “model for how people can follow God through difficult times.”
HOW DID JOSEPH DEAL with these difficult times? By pushing on in the midst of confusion. Matthew describes God communicating with Joseph through two dreams, first to explain Mary’s pregnancy and then to direct him to Egypt. “But,” as von Speyr intuits, “he will never fully comprehend what happened with Mary the Virgin.”14
This makes sense. Even in the light of direct revelation from God, Mary and Joseph could be forgiven for feeling confused. What soon-to-be mother and soon-to-be father do not feel confusion? And if normal parents feel addled, how much more confused must have been Mary and Joseph, parents of the most unusual child in history? I imagine them trudging to Bethlehem, loving and su
pportive of one another, trusting and hopeful in God, but worried. Did they keep their feelings to themselves, or did they share them? Perhaps they said to one another, trying to understand things: “Tell me, Mary, more about your experience with the angel.” Or “Tell me again about your dream, Joseph.”
So they were probably wondering, confused, and possibly frightened. Frightened of not finding lodgings in time, of the physical complications in an era when women often died in childbirth, and of their ability to care for the child whom they knew would be different.
Those emotions may have continued after the child’s birth. One of the most common emotions that new parents have often shared with me is fear. How will I know what to do? How will I provide for my child? What happens if he or she gets sick? When my first nephew was born I remember being seized with a welter of emotions. Joy first of all. But also—and this surprised me—fear. Would he remain healthy? Would an accident befall him? Would he live?
Last year, while visiting my mother in her retirement community, I was asked to take my seven-year-old nephew to the indoor pool. Matthew loves to swim; on the way to the pool, he raced past an elderly woman, almost knocking her over, and shouted, “I’m going to the pool!” But every time he leapt joyfully into the water I worried: Would he get hurt? And when he shouted, “Uncle Jim, watch this!” and flipped backward from the pool’s slippery edge, I thought: Don’t hit your head! Fear. And this was only an hour in a pool.
The next week, I asked a father of three children if he ever felt the same. “Yes,” said my friend. “I love being a father, but I’m afraid almost all the time.”
Had Mary and Joseph known precisely what their son’s future would hold, they might have been even more afraid. I’ve always wondered if Mary or Joseph had much intimation of Jesus’s future. After all, they knew that this child was destined for something special, even if they did not fully understand. Did they fear the entrance of this holy boy into a sinful world? Were they consumed with worry about their son’s future?15 Did they cast their minds back over what had happened to prophets in the past? If so, this did not prevent them from carrying out what God had asked them to do.
Fear is often identified as a stumbling block in the spiritual life—in Jesus’s time as well as ours. “Do not be afraid!” Jesus says, more than once. In fact, “Do not be afraid” may be what Jesus most often tells us not to do. The angels say the same to the shepherds in the field. But confusion seems less worthy of attention, although we feel it just as frequently. “Don’t worry about being confused!” would be an equally consoling message from God. We can take as our models Mary and Joseph, who had the right to be the two most confused people in history, who were confronted with something utterly baffling, but did what God was asking of them anyway.
Mary and Joseph do three simple but essential things: they listen, they trust, they love.
IRONICALLY, THE BIRTH OF Jesus was meant to lessen confusion for the rest of the world.
“God meets us where we are.” That’s what my first spiritual director told me frequently. In other words, God comes to us in ways that we can understand and appreciate, even if only partially or incompletely. For someone who delights in relationships, experiences of God might come through a conversation with a close friend. For a parent, through the smile on the face of an infant. For an active person, in working among the poor in a homeless shelter. For an introspective person, by meditating on Scripture. God meets us where we are.
God could have come to the world in any way that God desired. We may be so conditioned to the story of the birth of Jesus in humble circumstances that we forget that this was a choice. God could have come to us as a powerful ruler, born into a family of wealth and privilege. To push the theological envelope further, God could have come as a disembodied voice speaking from the heavens.
But God wanted to meet us where we are. So God came, first of all, as a human being, as something—someone—other men and women could approach. God is not only a flaming bush, a pillar of fire, or even a mysterious cloud, as God is described in various places in the Old Testament. God is one of us.
Second, God came in the least threatening of human states: a baby. God entered our world screaming and crying, dependent on someone to change him, feed him, nurse him, and care for his bodily needs. God came helplessly into the world to help us.
Finally, Jesus came from an unremarkable background. The Son of God was nothing special by outward appearance or by human standards. One might be awed by a great ruler or a learned scholar, but not by a simple craftsman. When Jesus began preaching, people in his hometown said, “Is not this the carpenter?”16 In other words, “Who, him?”
God comes to the world as a human being, at the risk of confusing Mary and Joseph, so that the rest of us will not be confused. Confused about God? Look at Jesus. See what he does. Listen to his words.
How can we respond to the entrance of God into our lives? In much the same way that Mary and Joseph did, and as parents do today: by protecting and nurturing something unique. Faith needs to be nurtured. This does not mean that we need to shelter our faith from the world, by closing ourselves off from the concerns of modern life. Rather, as Mary and Joseph did for Jesus, we are invited to respond to the gift with reverent care. We are called to nourish our faith (with prayer, worship, reading, service, and spiritual conversations) in the same way Mary and Joseph were called to nourish the Infant Christ.
ON THE WAY BACK from the Church of the Nativity, Aziz announced that he would drive George and me to the Milk Grotto, a small cave-cum-chapel where Mary is supposed to have nursed Jesus during the Holy Family’s escape into Egypt.
It’s odd stumbling upon a popular pilgrimage site that you’ve never heard of. You feel that you should know much more about it than you do, which in this case for me was nothing. At first I suspected that the chapel was merely a medieval invention, but a brochure in the church, officially Magharet Sitti Mariam, the Grotto of the Virgin Mary, noted that the pilgrims have been coming here since the fourth century. Over the cave itself is a modest church with an ornate façade, also fashioned from white stone, which was constructed by the Franciscans in the nineteenth century.
Pious legend has it that a drop of Mary’s milk fell to the ground, turning the cave the milky white color that persists today. It remains a popular destination for women hoping to give birth; hopeful women scrape some limestone powder off the wall and even, said one pamphlet, mix the powder with water and drink it.
The grotto was empty and cool. After the crowds at the Church of the Nativity, I was grateful for the quiet. George sat down on a small stone bench and closed his eyes; I sat down on another bench, rested, and prayed. Silence was elusive in the famous Church of the Nativity; ironically, in this church that I had never heard of, boasting a legend that I found extremely unlikely, I felt nearer to God. I thought not only of Mary and Joseph’s confusion but also their fatigue. I wanted to stay there all day.
But there was still one more stop on our agenda, or at least one person’s agenda. “You must visit my friend!” said our cabdriver. Aziz had talked all day about a friend who ran a curio shop. He threaded his car through Bethlehem’s narrow streets and squeezed into a tiny parking space. He vaulted out of the driver’s seat, walked down the street, pounded on a metal door, and waited a few moments until a balding man in a long white robe came out and shook his hand. “You are welcome!” Aziz said to us.
Having spent two years in Kenya helping to run a refugee-made handicrafts shop, I could see that Aziz’s friend was offering us some high-quality wares. And given the poverty of many Palestinian families, I figured that this would be a good place to purchase some of the most popular of Holy Land souvenirs: olive-wood carvings. For all we knew, Aziz received a small kickback for any visitors he brought to the isolated shop. But we didn’t care. Why not patronize a struggling merchant and a hardworking cabdriver?
As I was deciding on what to select, George motioned me over to a shelf of me
rchandise. He held up an unusual Nativity scene. Placed between the Holy Family and the Wise Men was a barrier, a thin block of wood. The owner explained, “That is the wall that blocks off the Palestinian territories. Jesus was a Palestinian, just like us.”
After George and I loaded up on olive-wood sculptures, Aziz drove us to the Bethlehem checkpoint, run by the Israeli border police. The checkpoint consists of a series of high stone walls, metal barricades, and turnstiles, each one patrolled by a guard. The guards thoroughly searched both men and women, and even small children, vigorously patting them down before permitting them to leave. Palestinians working in Jerusalem must pass through this checkpoint every day. A relative calm prevailed the day of our visit, but I knew that many days were not calm, for while most Israelis argue that the barrier is a necessary security precaution, the Palestinians see it as a humiliation, a despoliation.
We crossed the parking lot, where the bus to Jerusalem awaited. “It’s easier to get into San Quentin than out of Bethlehem,” said George, the Catholic chaplain at the prison.
During the ride back to Jerusalem on the Number 21 bus, I thought about exits and entrances. The image of the Door of Humility stuck with me, as did the legend on a small sign near the entrance to the Church of the Nativity:
We are hoping that: If you enter here as a tourist,
you would exit as a pilgrim.
If you enter here as a pilgrim,