The original follower of Jesus

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 2: 41-51) recounts the episode of the finding in the Temple. After the Passover visit to Jerusalem, the twelve year-old Jesus stays in Jerusalem while his parents travel back to Nazareth. Realising He is not with either of them, Mary and Joseph rush back to the city to search for Him, a task that covers three days of utter anguish for them. They finally find Him asking questions in the Temple and amazing those who heard His questions and His own answers. Rebuked by Joseph and Mary, Jesus returns with them to a life of submission and obedience in His own hometown.

This gospel marks the feast of St Joseph, and we will come to him shortly. Yet in passing, let us wonder who could have heard Jesus speak during this episode twenty years before His public ministry. Was Nicodemus there? Does the gospel record without our knowing it the first stirrings of Nicodemus’s vocation when he perhaps shared the amazement of Jesus’ listeners? Did a different, ambitious man, a Sadducee named Caiaphas, look on and long to be the centre of attention like this young Nazarene upstart? Who knows whose paths intersect with this scene that is pregnant with meaning for the Old Testament and the New?

Yet amid the tumult of these three days, we find the fleeting figure of a father fraught with anxiety, accompanied by his even more distressed wife, both looking desperately for signs that their child was still alive and still here somehow in a capital city from where strangers from all around the Mediterranean World were departing again for their distant homelands. Apart from the usual fleshpots and dens of sin where Jesus might have been detained, who know what ghastly fears crossed the minds of Mary and Joseph as they watched the foreigners leaving, accompanied perhaps by retinues of young slaves? How could their lovely boy have disappeared? Surely, He was taken against His will? And how the three days, one by one, must have ground that niggling anxiety to a sharpened, gleaming sword of sorrow!

Yet, we may wonder if Joseph’s anxiety was different from Mary’s, and not only because he was a man, and men worry differently. Mary’s soul was full of grace at all times. Yet because of this, we see in this moment that the fullness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit cannot signify that God moves them constantly into action. In these three days, Mary lives by the theological virtue of faith, a faith unsupported by human emotion or the connatural stirrings of affection that the Paraclete’s gifts share with us, a faith that knows the greatness and goodness of God, but also that He can sometimes permit the most terrible things to happen. Perhaps for Mary, the anxiety lay in not knowing which explanation applied to Jesus’ absence. There was no human accounting for it; only a gulf, an absence, a vacuum, where normally there was union, presence, and a silent fullness in her soul.

Joseph’s experience was likely very different. By tradition a man without personal sin, he was not preserved from the wounds of original sin, and how these wounds must have bitten deeply in the three days of searching. What thoughts of self-doubt that tortured his mind with the help of demonic profiteers: Joseph the prudent become Joseph the fool who lost the Son of God; Joseph the strong rendered Joseph the weak by failing to do his duty towards his Son; Joseph the obedient rendered a rebel by his lack of attention. Did Joseph go to bed fitful each night, hoping against hope that another dream would visit him? Was the third morning worse than the others, precisely because no dream had come now for two nights? Did he fear punishment because, like Eli who failed to restrain his sons, he, Joseph, had failed to care for His?

All we know in the end is that St Joseph survived these three days, and that Jesus was submissive to His authority from that moment forward. Yet surely, in this moment, Joseph proved himself attentive to the Father’s forming action. What was the Father teaching St Joseph in these days of chaos and crisis if not that his own role was only for a time? Joseph had a job to do, but it did not exhaust who he was. Joseph had responsibilities but these did not define his life entirely. At all times, Joseph’s experience was one of the need for utter dependence on the provision of God, communicated to him often through angelic messengers. This experience must then have driven him forward in that calling that lay within his exterior calling as the foster father of Jesus. In the end, God gave Joseph a job only because He wanted Joseph for His own, granting him a role in that work of salvation.

What are any of us called to when the circumstances escape our capacities, other than to offer ourselves again to the loving kindness of the heart of our God who has all things in His care? How deep the space that these days of apparent separation must have carved in the heart of this just man! Yet in this, he is our model and example, like his spouse Mary whose own experience of these days we may reflect on another time. Mary, our mother and our model, is yet different from us in a way that we cannot comprehend, due to her unwounded human nature. Yet Joseph is like us, a man born in sin, a hero of silent fidelity, of union with God’s purposes, of obedience despite the cravings of his lower nature.

Next in the gospel come the middle, hidden years when Jesus becomes an adult man, and who does He choose to learn under but this humble carpenter from a despised Galilean town? God achieved many purposes in these events; the refining of Joseph’s soul for the road ahead was not the least of them. For in teaching him that he was not the master of his destiny, that nothing but the deepest reliance on God would do, the Heavenly Father taught Jesus’ earthly father to be a follower of Jesus before there was even such a thing.