Page 143 - Reflections on St. Joseph

Joseph drew together human work and the mystery of the Redemption.” (Redemptoris Custos, n.
22)

In reality, alongside Joseph, Jesus not only learned the trade of His father, but also shared and
took on that concrete and human dimension which characterizes the world of work, the “civil
state, the social category, the economic condition, the professional experience, the family
environment and human education.” (Paul VI, Allocuzione of March 19, 1964). The participation
of Jesus in Joseph’s work thus goes well beyond a mere activity occasionally exercised alongside
someone else. It is an act of submission, whose meaning qualifies and defines all of Jesus’ life.
When Luke, after the episode of Jesus being found in the Temple, affirms that He “went with
them and returned to Nazareth and was obedient to them” (2,51) he does not, with this
expression, intend to simply conclude a phase of Jesus’ earthly life, the preparation for his
public ministry.

A computer exegesis, ever more fashionable today, searching for how often a word recurs
in a sacred text so as to infer its importance, might underestimate, due to its frequency, the
middle participle hypotassomenos, used by Luke to define the entire hidden life of Jesus. The
Catechism of the Catholic Church interprets this text masterfully: “in the submission of Jesus
to His mother and legal father, the perfect observance of the 4th Commandment is realized.
This submission is the image in time of His filial obedience to His Heavenly Father. The
daily submission of Jesus to Joseph and Mary announced and anticipated the submission
of Holy Thursday: ‘Not...my will...’(Lk 22,42). The obedience of Christ in His daily hidden
life already inaugurates the work of restoration of that which the disobedience of Adam
destroyed.”(n. 532)

The Apostolic Exhortation Redemptoris Custos follows the same lines of explanation,
developing the idea of “submission” through historical example. “This submission”, the
obedience of Jesus in the house of Nazareth, is understood to also mean participating in
Joseph’s work. He who was called the “son of the carpenter” learned his work from his
reputed “father”. If the Holy Family of Nazareth, both in the order of salvation and of
holiness, is the example and model for human families, so also, analogously, is the work of
Jesus at the side of Joseph the carpenter. In our times the Church has underscored this by
means of the liturgical memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, established on May 1.”(n. 22).
Thus due to this necessary “submission” in the economy of salvation, the presence of
Joseph alongside that of Jesus is not in any way merely decorative.
In relation to the redemption of work, Joseph is a minister salutis in two ways. The first is
better known. It views work, as considered by John Paul II as an expression of love, the
work “by means of which Joseph sought to assure the wellbeing of his family.” For this
alone Joseph merits mention by the Church in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, alongside that of
the glorious ever Virgin Mary, because Joseph “nourished He whom the faithful would eat
as the bread of eternal life.” (Redemptoris Custos, n. 16, cf. n. 6).

The second, more closely linked to the work “taken up” by Jesus, consists in the fact that
precisely “thanks to the workbench at which he exercised his craft together with Jesus,
Joseph drew together human work and the mystery of the Redemption.”(Redemptoris
119
Custos n. 22). In this affirmation it is clear, based on the principle that “that which is taken
Reflections on st. joseph