A Short Life of Saint Joseph
by
Frits Albers, Ph. B.
INTRODUCTION
Having lived for the best part of my life with the insatiable inquisitiveness of children and young adults, I think it would not be an exaggeration to state that many readers of biographies, apart from expecting that the authors of those lives render a factual account of the deeds that make up the life under consideration, nevertheless have the greater part of their interest centred around the answer to the constant question: “Who and what influenced the subjects who appear in the story to think and act the way they did?”. “What motivated Our Blessed Lord to come down from His Father’s House and die for us on a Cross?”. “What made the highpriest of the time reject Our Blessed Saviour right up to the bitter end and even beyond?”
Now if the subject of this scrutiny happens to be the life of a Saint of the Holy Catholic Church, then the question of influence increases dramatically at the same time that it becomes more difficult to trace due to the overwhelming presence of divine grace. Luckily, many Saints have left us a rich legacy of their works from which diligent study and meditation may lead us to the source of the visible and invisible influence that guided their actions at the time.
But when a Saint has left no written works behind, and when moreover very few actions of such a life have been recorded, as is the case with St. Joseph, then any attempts at writing such a life may be deemed to border on the impossible on the assumption that the invisible part of that life is so hidden in God, that any probing seems to acquire the stigma of intrusion.
But then the question arises: ‘How can Saints be loved and honoured if they are not known?’ If no attempt is being made to ‘bring them back to life’ in a manner of speaking, then what the great Apostle St. Paul once said about the impossibility of acquiring the fullness of Faith if its rich contents are not preached (Rom. 10: 14-15) must be extended over much of the other areas of human understanding. Knowledge has great difficulty rising to the conscious level unless it has been enkindled and triggered.
From this it follows that the Holy Fathers who have encouraged the faithful to honour and love St. Joseph, must have wanted the exceptional holiness of this great Saint’s hidden life to be made known. This would mean two things, one, that these Popes will never brand as intrusion any prayerful research into the hidden life of the fosterfather of Our Lord, and secondly, that they expect this research to turn over such a rich field, that love and devotion for St. Joseph are bound to follow, thereby reducing to zero all previous references to an almost sheer impossibility.
In finding out what kind of man God had predestined to be the husband of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, and had chosen to be the fosterfather of His Son born of that Virgin, we become aware of the silence with which the New Testament has surrounded the early formation of this uniquely privileged person. The solution to this apparent impasse lies in something that comes as no surprise to all those children of God most high who have made the truth of the Word of God the supreme rule of their lives. And this solution is the principle that Sacred Writ is the first and foremost interpreter of the Word of God entrusted to its pages. Meaning that, if Scripture is silent on a particular issue or aspect, it has almost certainly already shed abundant light on this detail or phase at another place in its sacred pages. So if we come across a life in the Scriptures in which we see the acceptance of very great responsibilities in the history of salvation of God’s people, and if in that particular life the preparation for this acceptance is not dealt with in a detail which to our Western minds would amount to ‘appropriate’, then we may confidently assume that the essentials of this preparation can be found in other parts of Scripture in the education of lives lived in earlier times.
Thus, in the concrete situation of the life of St. Joseph, we are well advised to turn to the Old Testament, that is to the earlier part of God’s divine Revelation, to find there in abundance what the New Testament passes over in silence. For it will be there that we learn how the formation of those earlier lives has a definite bearing on the preparation of later lives because of the divine unity of God’s Revelation contained in the books of both the Old and the New Testament.
Take as an example the life of St. John the Baptist.
Apart from the visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to his mother Elizabeth and the wondrous effect that visit had on this unborn life, nothing is known of the early formation of Our Lord’s precursor. Yet the New Testament references in regard to St. John the Baptist to the person and the life of the Old Testament prophet Elijah are so compelling, that they can only be attributed to the overriding inspiration of the Holy Spirit. From this we may learn that it is the wish of the Holy Spirit that the gaps in our understanding with regard to lives depicted in the New Testament can be filled in from a careful study of what is known of lives lived in the Ancient Regime.
In an earlier work, “The Glories of the New Eve”, I have applied the many fruits of this principle by letting the personification of Wisdom in the Old Testament Wisdom books shine their inspired light on those aspects of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary on which the New Testament is completely silent.
So, with respect to the life of St. Joseph, where would we go looking in the Old Testament to find a life used by God for the education and training of a boy and a young man called Joseph who lived at the dawn of the New? Where would God Himself have sent this young man? Which life in the Old Regime holds the key whereby God has unlocked for us part of the mystery of St. Joseph’s rise in grace, his selection and consequent great holiness?
The answer is not difficult at all, for there, in the Old Testament, we come across another little boy called Joseph, growing into a young man, the apple of his father Jacob’s eye, and very much blessed by God in meditation and prayer. The early life of this young man is well-known, and we may confidently assume (since both lives ended up with the acceptance and faultless execution of vast responsibilities) that the training and education of the earlier Joseph will shed a steady light on the hidden life of the Joseph who came later and who was able to read and ponder about this earlier life in his own ascent to God. For, if the detailed preparation of Jacob’s son Joseph led eventually to him being placed over all pharaoh’s possessions in the land of Egypt, then we may allow the principal elements of those details to guide us to an understanding of how God’s painstaking education and training of the New Testament Joseph eventually led him to the highest responsibility of them all: to be placed as God’s trusted custodian over all of God’s greatest possessions here on earth.
This wondrous unity of the whole of Sacred Scripture is a never ending font of waters welling up to eternal Life and to a great understanding of the details of that Life, even the most minute. For, in another Book of the Old Testament, written much later than the Book of Genesis which contains the life story of the patriarch Joseph, we come across a synopsis, a kind of short recapitulation, of this earlier life. And it is with this reference in the Book of Wisdom to the life of Joseph, Jacob’s favourite son, that we will begin the life story of St. Joseph, a son so favoured by God.
Thus, as a summary of this short Introduction to our Life of St. Joseph, we may confidently say that, even if the New Testament is sketchy on the preparation of the great sanctity displayed by the last patriarch, the one to straddle the transition from the Old Testament to the New, Holy Scripture itself is far from silent on the details of how that unique preparation was inspired and achieved through the grace of the Holy Spirit. And since the highlight of the above-mentioned life of Jacob’s son Joseph is found in the Old Testament Book of Wisdom, it will be in the Wisdom Books that the key is to be found that will unlock for us the door to an understanding of how the Holy Spirit guided a young carpenter in Galilee into becoming the worthy spouse of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary.