Raymond Brown once said, “The hero of Matthew’s infancy story is Joseph, a very sensitive Jewish observer of the Law. He is presented to us as an ‘upright’ man, a designation that scholars say implies that he has conformed himself to the Law of God, the supreme Jewish standard of holiness. In Joseph, the evangelist Matthew was portraying what he thought a Jew [a true pious believer] should be.
In the Gospel of Matthew the annunciation of Jesus’ conception is given to Joseph rather than to Mary; Joseph, her husband, being an upright man and unwilling to shame her, had decided to divorce her quietly.
An angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, that the child in her had been conceived through the Holy Spirit.
Matthew was definitely giving symbolic introductions to the scene of the nativity.
He was portraying the Joseph of the New Testament as reminiscent of the Joseph of the Exodus story. They both have a lot in common. Both of them discern the will of God through their dreams. Both of them go to Egypt—the Old Joseph was sold to the Egyptians while the New Joseph flees to Egypt with his wife and child. They both save their families.
Likewise, King Herod is the counterpart of the Egyptian pharaoh. Both the pharaoh and Herod feel threatened and kill the Hebrew male children; but God protected the lives of the infants—Moses and Jesus—the ones who were to save the people.
After receiving the revelation in a dream, Joseph takes Mary home as his wife and names the child as his own. He spares Mary from embarrassment and provides an accepted physical, social and religious place for the child to be born and raised. Indeed, this was the ideal course of action for some who was “just.” But the virtue of Joseph was much more than being “upright.”
For a pious Jew, to be “upright” meant to follow the Law of Moses—the Law of God. But the Law of Moses had recommended stoning a person to death for the sin of adultery. Joseph was not going to blindly follow the law by the letter. Decades later, his son would teach the world, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Indeed, as the father, so the son!
St. Joseph shows us how a person can be a pious believer, deeply faithful to everything within his religious tradition and yet at the same time be open to a mystery beyond both his human and religious understanding.
In essence, what St. Joseph teaches us is how to live in loving fidelity to all that we cling to humanly and religiously while simultaneously being open to the mysteries of God that takes us beyond all the categories of our religious practice and imagination.
