A Cup of Joe

Here’s an insight into how my mind works. As I was walking in to work one morning a couple of years ago, commuter coffee mug firmly in hand, it suddenly struck me: the reason we call coffee “joe” is because it gets us through our morning, much as Saint Joseph got his foster-son Jesus through the “morning” of his life.

I know. Apologies all around. Imagine if you had to live with this brain in your head!

Today on the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, we would do well to meditate on the life of the man who helped raise the Son of God. It can’t have been easy. Tradition holds that Joseph was already an old man and a widower when be married the Blessed Virgin, who was very young, perhaps 16 or so.

He had several children already (Saint James comes to mind), and the children needed a mother. Mary’s parents, Saints Joachim and Anne, were also very old, and the young girl would need a protector. It was, perhaps, a marriage of convenience for all concerned.

When Mary came up pregnant, Joseph knew very well that the child was not his. The law of the time said that he should denounce her, and that she would then be stoned to death.

Nevertheless being a righteous man (Matt. 1:19), he resolved to cause her no scandal and to divorce her quietly and without fuss.

And then the angel of the Lord appeared to him and straightened him out.

This is followed by the Roman census, where Joseph had to take his very pregnant wife cross-country. They arrive and there’s no room at the inn. When the child is very young, they flee to Egypt to avoid the murderous rage of King Herod.

I imagine Saint Joseph being quite exasperated, “Lord, I’m too old for this!”

Of course, unlike virtually everybody else mentioned in the family (Mary, Jesus, James, Zacharias, Elisabeth, John the Baptist), none of his words are recorded in the Gospels.

As the silent man, he was perhaps the very epitome of the teaching that would later be attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi: “preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary use words”.

But he persevered, returned home at last, and raised and taught the boy who was King.

Joseph is not mentioned in any of the four Gospels after the incident at the Temple when Jesus was about 12 years old (Luke 2:42-51). Tradition holds that Joseph died sometime between then and the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

Today’s Solemnity of Saint Joseph is a Big Food Feast in parts of Italy and in Sicily. I suspect this might have something to do with it typically occurring in Lent!

It is also the name day of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

Spare a prayer for him, and ask Saint Joseph to continue praying for him, and for all of us.