I have to admit that Joseph is one of my absolute favorite
Biblical people. And that's because he
is the epitome of my Dad. You see, Dad
was one who walked his talk, who believed strongly in the law, but more
strongly in God and the spirit of the law, than in its letter. He was a man who often made choices according
to his vocation as a father, rather than his occupation in the military, like
turning down a promotion so I could have my last two years in one high
school. So I had a phenomenal example of
the kind of man Joseph was, and since I adored my father, Joseph became my
favorite.
It's rather
interesting to note that the Bible devotes very few verses to the man who
raised Jesus. One canonical gospel
ignores him entirely. And while people
obviously focus on Christ's heavenly father, Joseph actually has some rather
important roles in his life. With free
will, this man had many choices that could have derailed the Christian story as
we know it, but God chose well in Joseph.
The most important things we know about him have nothing to do with
words, and everything to do with actions.
He was a man
who obeyed God and was devoted to his wife.
We know of at least two dreams that Joseph was given from the Biblical
account. Keep in mind that psychology
today has researched and categorized the types of dreams one may have to a
great degree. In Joseph's time, however,
God communicated with His people directly through dreams. It was the method by which His message was
provided to prophets and kings, and sometimes to the common man. So when Joseph received a dream, with the
angel passing along God's message, Joseph knew that as a righteous man, he must
follow the directions of God. His submission
to God was no less than Mary's, when she told Gabriel that she was God's
servant. Joseph did not put Mary aside nor
report her for infidelity, but rather kept her as his wife and took Jesus as
his own child.
Joseph was a
man whose devotion to his family meant more than his business. We interpret the word carpenter these days as
a man who worked with wood, but in Greek, the word can mean anything from
carpenter to architect, working with wood, stone, designing buildings,
etc. According to Matthew, Joseph's
family was fairly large, with at least four other sons and an unknown number of
daughters. We assume that his business was
able to keep his family provided with food and shelter. Again, after a dream from God, he left the career
he had established and took his family to Egypt, where they would be
foreigners, immigrants – not speaking the language, not having a home – in order
to protect his young son from the infanticide initiated by Herod.
Joseph's
devotion to God and his faith was obvious from the fact that they visited the
temple in Jerusalem – not often, but enough that two of the trips there made it
into the Bible – when Jesus was presented at the Temple after Mary's
confinement, and again when Jesus was 12.
And it is after that point that we don't hear of Joseph again. Many scholars believe that it would have been
shortly thereafter that Joseph died, but in John 6, when Jesus was in
Capernaum, the people said, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose
father and mother we know?" Joseph
is referred to here in the present tense, not past. So he may have lived to at least see the
start of his son's ministry. We do
assume that he had died by the time Christ was crucified, as Jesus left the
care of his mother to his beloved disciple.
We have no
words spoken by Joseph throughout the entirety of the Bible. What we have are the actions of a man who
walked his talk, whose faith in God guided his life, and whose devotion to his
family was exemplary. May we honor his
life by following that example.
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