Joseph is the main character in Matthew’s telling of the
birth of Jesus.
In Luke, it’s Mary; but in Matthew, it’s Joseph.
Here Joseph lives up to the name later given to him by the
church, nutritor Domini – the
guardian of the Lord.
Joseph has been a very popular figure for obvious
reasons. And has been called the patron
saint of families, fathers and orphans, pregnant woman, married couples,
carpenters, teachers, lawyers, laborers and working people, and most recently
the patron saint of a happy death, and of fighting communism.
Much has been made of Joseph over the two millennia,
Much has been made of him though not nearly as much as has
been made of Mary.
Year after year we get a very mythologized picture of Joseph
We get this through Christmas decorations, through
television, through the internet.
Sometimes we need to peal away some of these accretions to see what we
might see of the real Joseph.
When I opened up the Bible to read the text for this week
and saw Joseph sitting there on the page, to be honest I began to feel a little
bored.
And I think it’s because the Joseph that lives in my
imagination is so divorced from reality – he’s the wooden Joseph of the manger
scenes, the cartoon Joseph of the children’s television shows, the stuffed
Joseph – is there a stuffed Joseph? I’m sure there is.
The Joseph of our million consumer-driven sometimes good and
often times awful “art”
How do we delete that Joseph in order to see him again for
the first time, to borrow a phrase that Marcus Borg uses in his books.
We need to see Joseph again for the first time.
