I was thinking about St Joseph and how much he suffered quietly. A just and righteous Israelite. How easily we gloss over his role in the holy family. How that in accepting Mary as his wife he in a sense abandoned his ideal of remaining just in the eyes of men and opened himself up to gossips and snickers. How much he suffered in feeling like he was unable to provide properly for Mary in dragging her off for a census in her late stage of pregnancy, having made a crib for the baby and prepared so many things for Mary in Nazareth. He must have felt like a failure so many times having to abandon everything he proposed to follow the course disposed by God through the path of life. And in his homeland where he believed he would be welcomed he met only closed doors. A stable the best accommodations he could find for his wife and Messiah in his own homeland. How hard he tried to make that stable comfortable, cleaning it up as much as possible, trying to keep the drafts out hanging his own cloak over the entrance. But a cloak over a cave entrance only goes so far to warm it and sweeping and moving hay around doesn't cover up the smell of animal waste and odors. And then in raising Jesus and providing for his little family, the poverty and not being able to provide all the materiel things a father would want to give to his family and never showing his disappointment to his family but always placing them first. There is so much in the quiet just man to be pondered over and emulated even in how readily he takes the back seat to Mary and Jesus in the storyline.
But Joseph was the true just and righteous Israelite. He, beside Mary who was Immaculate, was the ideal Israelite in resigning his will to the Will of God. He was willing to cast his own ideals aside to accommodate God's plans and ideals. He never brooded over what he could have considered his own failings, which never were failings in the eyes of God, or the way he would be mistreated by those who took advantage of him in his labors. He always focused on God and placed his family's needs first. In The Gospel as revealed to Me I found a passage where Jesus is advising Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus in regards to how they should act in letting go of their false notions of what the Messiah should be, using St Joseph as his model.
Be just. Just like him who was My guardian for so many years and who was capable of every renovation to serve the Lord his God. If he were here, among us, oh! how he would teach you to serve the Lord perfectly, to be just, just, just. But it is right that he should already be in Abraham's bosom!... A new Abraham, with a broken heart, but with perfect will, he would not have advised Me to be cowardly, but he would have spoke the words that he used to utter when anything painful weighed heavily on us: "Let us raise our spirits. We shall meet the yes of God and we shall forget that it is men who grieve us. And let us do whatever is burdensome, as if the Most High presented it to us. In this way we shall sanctify also the least things, and God will love us." Oh! He would have said so also to comfort Me to suffer the deepest sorrows... He would have comforted us... Oh! My Mother!...
The Gospel as Revealed to Me, Vol. 9, pg 56.
Joseph the model man and father, laborer and Israelite. He, in his silence and resignation, teaches so much. Truly the Just Man who always placed God and others first and himself last.
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