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On December 8, 2020, Pope Francis declared “The Year of St. Joseph.” I was a little confused as to why the date of December 8 was chosen, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, but the day coincides with the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s declaration of St. Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church. Later, Pope Pius XII declared Joseph the Patron of Workers, and Pope John Paul II honored him as the Guardian of the Redeemer. Pope Francis, while incorporating these historical honors into his own 2020 Apostolic Letter, “With a Father’s Heart,” brings the memory of Joseph into the twenty-first century in a very pointed way.
In his Letter, Francis describes Saint Joseph as “a beloved father, a tender and loving father, an obedient father, an accepting father, a father who is creatively courageous, a working father, a father in the shadows.” Although we take Joseph for granted as a major Biblical figure, our image of the man is constructed with remarkable little help from the Scriptures. Joseph is not mentioned at all in the Gospels of John and Mark, and little in St. Luke. We would not know that he was a carpenter except for a tiny fragment in Matthew 13:55. Joseph’s major role in the family of Jesus is chronicled only in the first two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, which itself is overshadowed by a parallel account in Luke’s first two chapters, where Mary’s obedience is the pivotal devotional point highlighted consistently in the beads of the rosary. But In Matthew’s narrative Joseph is the pivotal character in the Infancy account. Mary says not a word. The angel communicates to Joseph the nature and meaning of Mary’s pregnancy. Joseph is described as a “just” or “righteous” man who is willing to stretch the boundaries of what is the legal thing to do in favor of what is the divinely inspired thing to do, provide protection and dignity to a young woman who, to all appearances, is pregnant outside of marriage. Joseph will continue to listen to this divine inspiration when he protects his family by fleeing into Egypt to avoid Herod, and then settles in an unfamiliar region of Galilee. This is the last we hear of Joseph, the assumption being that he raised, supported, and trained his [putative] son in the ways of Jewish life. As Pope Francis puts it, Joseph is “a father in obedience to God: with his ‘fiat’ he protects Mary and Jesus and teaches his Son to “do the will of the Father.” The pope goes on to describe Joseph as an “accepting Father” because he “accepted Mary unconditionally,” a critical witness in this world “where psychological, verbal, and physical violence toward women is so evident.” Francis goes on to underscore Joseph’s trusting in the Lord, even events he did not understand, “setting aside his own ideas” and reconciling himself with his own history. Joseph was “able to accept life as it is, with all its contradictions, frustrations, and disappointments.” In our time when the needs and rights of aliens—a basic concern of the Old Testament—has become a point of contention in the United States, Francis calls Joseph “the special patron of all those forced to leave their native lands because of war, hatred, persecution, and poverty…every poor, needy, suffering, or dying person, every stranger, every prisoner, every infirm person is ‘the child’ whom Joseph continues to protect.” From St. Joseph “we must learn…to love the Church and the poor.” The Church has long venerated St. Joseph as the Worker, and in 1955 Pope Pius XII instituted the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1 of each year as a counterbalance to the celebration of May Day in Communist bloc countries. In his A Marginal Jew I [1991] Father John Meier describes the work of a carpenter in Jesus’ day as a physical one, specifically the framing of new homes with trusses. [pp. 278-285] Both Joseph and Jesus would have been strong men for this kind of labor. If St. Luke is correct, the work was also sustaining; Joseph would not have been summoned to Bethlehem for a tax census were his profits insignificant. Pope Francis goes to great length to encourage sensitivity to a “renewed need to appreciate the importance of dignified work, of which St. Joseph is an exemplary patron.” I see on a variety of catechetical and religious websites numerous requests for ideas on how to integrate the year of St. Joseph into parish life. There are several opportunities here to be drawn from the figure of Joseph as he comes down to us from Scripture and historical devotion in the Church: Critical Bible Study: The only Scripture text which speaks of Joseph at any length is Matthew’s Gospel, and come Christmas we are prone to pass over it to Luke’s narrative for our study and reflection, as Luke more closely fits the narrative we carry around in our head. But Matthew focuses on the character of Joseph, referring to him as “a just man,” a powerful accolade in Hebrew literature. It is Joseph who, after making his mind up to take his courageous step to divorce her quietly and sparing her the wrath of the law, receives the divine assurance and revelation that he has done the right thing. Joseph continues to receive divine enlightenment on how to protect his family throughout Matthew’s narrative. The story of Joseph is a case study in the importance of critical analysis of the Biblical texts. Matthew has significant doctrinal and moral reasons for composing his Infancy narrative as he did, not least of all to emphasize how a just man, a descendant of Abraham, played a critical role in the Redemption narrative by being the kind of man he was. The treatment of women by men: Color me old fashioned, but I judge another man by how he treats women, whether that be in the home, the marketplace, or the church. There is great wisdom in Genesis in describing creation as a fruitful duality, “male and female he made them,” and I am grateful for the women in my life who have saved me from my worst self and nurtured me into a better self, past and present. The society of Joseph’s time was patriarchal in its customs and laws, which only underscores his “manning up” to protect his beloved from the consequences of a time when the scales were tipped against women. There is a Pro Life consideration under this by-line. In her 2019 bestseller Heartlands, an autobiographical description of rural poverty in her native Kansas, Sarah Smarsh describes in some detail the Saturday night struggles of the teenaged girls to convince their boyfriends to use condoms, against the emotional pleadings of their partners to please them. I do not need to spell out which sex bears the greater cost in these moral missteps. Respect for women is not just a public rubric. The dignity of work. The Covid-19 pandemic has only worsened what has long been a problem in our country and elsewhere, i.e., the chronic difficulties of making a living and supporting a family. I would add to this reality another factor, that some jobs and some careers are more rewarding than others. I would be lying if I said I had an answer to this human dilemma. It does seem that on such matters as job safety, wages, health care, and childcare, for example, the boundaries of the discussion are arbitrarily set to “market conditions,” i.e., what is profitable. Curiously, there is a rather large body of Church teaching on the rights of workers and the divine necessity of fairness to laborers, in no small part attributable to the example of St. Joseph, venerated as “The Worker” in our compendium of feasts. From Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum [1891] to John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens [1981], the Church is on record as teaching the basic rights and protections of workers, rights that would probably be viewed as too progressive or generous in American capitalist culture. A review of Catholic social justice teachings on the work force seems a fitting exercise for the Year of St. Joseph. Protection of the Alien. As noted above, Pope Francis describes Joseph as “the special patron of those forced to leave their native lands because of war, hatred, persecution, and poverty.” Despite the Old Testament’s frequent call for mercy for “the alien and the orphan,” the United States has had a troubled history with aliens seeking entry into our country to build a better life. In very recent times, our national policy toward aliens has actually created more orphans. The year of St. Joseph presents an excellent time for public discussion of a moral and just process by which immigrant may be processed into American life. At the very least, applicants must receive due process of law. But beyond that, reconciliation and affiliation of the estimated 11,000,000 persons currently in our country would be entirely consistent with our Biblical roots. I am thinking, too, of the DACA population, many of whom have been assisted by Catholic social justice groups and/or graduated from Catholic schools and colleges. We can only imagine how Joseph and his family depended upon citizens and even civil officials during their sojourn to foreign Egypt in flight from Herod. While there is plenty of room for debate about the details, the principle of welcoming and integrating well-intentioned seekers of admission and integration into our country today is fully consistent with a Biblically based faith. And come to think of it, most of us would not be here today if our ancestors had been denied at the gate.
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John, known as the “Baptist” in several but not all New Testament references, remains one of Scripture’s most intriguing figure. Our catechetics and preaching have led us to consider John as religion’s greatest advance man. The term “precursor” was one of those linguistic challenges of early religious education, up there with tabernacle, transubstantiation, and other terms given us in youth to unpack as adults. I was well on my way to middle school before the terminology of the Feast of the Circumcision was explained to me, in benign and generic ways. In a nutshell, our 1950’s religion classes depicted John as a strange and wooly character of the desert who baptized imperfectly until Jesus came on the scene to reorder the washing rite into our familiar sacrament of Baptism for the forgiveness of original sin.
My youthful religious education took place in an age when independent Bible reading of the texts was neither taught nor encouraged. I had no idea that around the Western World scholars were studying the Bible, Jewish history, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, among other sources, and discovering what a complex man it was whose path crisscrossed that of Jesus of Nazareth. As the Catholic Biblical scholar Father John Meier reminds us, John had a life before Jesus, and there is good evidence that his movement continued long after Jesus. [A Marginal Jew II, p. 22] In the New Testament Acts of the Apostles [Chapter 19: 1-7], Paul comes across a community of the baptized who tell him: “We have never even heard that there is a holy Spirit.” Paul deduces that these are followers of John, now long dead, suggesting that John’s message and ministry was a true entity unto itself. Meier’s commentary, which I laid out in some detail in the previous post on this stream below, notes the distinct ways in which John interacts with Jesus. The four Gospels each take a different vantage point for the relationship of John’s ministry and Jesus’ community. These differences are not necessarily contradictory; what they do show is the variety of ways each evangelist attempted to explain John and his role in the dramatic unfolding of God’s saving intervention. Meier maintains that the degree of difficulty across all four Gospels argues strongly for the historical reality of John, for no one would have gone to the trouble of inventing a figure so enigmatic as to create a world of puzzlement for the Christian Church. Last Sunday’s Gospel was taken from the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. Absent any Infancy narrative, Mark begins with John and Jesus meeting as adults. The description of John—the rugged solitary figure who lives off the land and attracts large crowds with his call to repentance--Mark’s description of John, whom he calls “the Baptist,” draws from the prophesies of Isaiah, the precursor going ahead to prepare the way of the Lord. Mark’s Christology or understanding of Jesus is that of One who has come to usher the new day of the Kingdom of God, and the Markan account of John fits very well with that understanding of Jesus. Mark gives us no idea of the relationship between John and Jesus prior to the baptism, and he does not speak of the two men encountering each other after the baptism. [There is truly little discourse between the two in all the Gospels.] But Mark is the only evangelist who provides a lengthy narrative of the death of John, killed by Herod. Interestingly, when Herod came to hear of Jesus and his works, he comments in Mark 6:16 “It is John whom I beheaded. He has been raised up.” Even after his death, John remained a widely revered figure. Matthew’s Gospel is one of two that contains an Infancy narrative of Jesus’ birth, but there is no mention of John until the two men meet as adults in much the same way as Mark had described earlier. However, Matthew is the first to describe John’s ministry in considerable detail, notably his fiery preaching. In Matthew’s Gospel John’s words are directed at Pharisees and Sadducees, easily identified populations within Jewish society. John castigates them with the colorful phrase, “brood of vipers.” He accuses them of laxity and indifference, scoffing at their reliance upon their bloodline to Abraham as a kind of assurance of divine favor. “For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.” John warns that the one who is to follow him will baptize with the holy Spirit and with fire, separating wheat from chaff in one final judgment. This depiction of John from Matthew’s pen reinforces the evangelist’s understanding of Jesus as the new Moses, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. John’s damning critique of a complacent Jewish leadership reinforces the conversion of other Jews to Christianity. Matthew’s audience was a church of Jewish converts to Christianity; in the face of persecution Matthew attempts to rally them into remaining faithful to Jesus, in whom all the Scriptures have been fulfilled. Matthew is the only evangelist to include a “transition clause” between John and Jesus at the time of baptism, almost a passing of the baton. When Jesus presents himself for baptism, John protests. “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” Jesus replies that John should “allow it for now, for it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Biblical righteousness is a rich theme in the Old Testament, with its root understanding as devotion to God’s revealed Law, the Torah. Later Jesus himself would claim that “I have not come to destroy the Law and the prophets, but to bring them to fulfillment.” Luke’s Gospel is the only one to integrate John into the Infancy narrative of Jesus, long before his preaching and baptismal ministry. The pairing of the conception narratives in Luke 1 presents a powerful theological statement about both men. John’s birth is holy and marginally miraculous, but he is conceived naturally; the high priest Zechariah is his father. Jesus, by contrast, is conceived by the Holy Spirit in Mary, the true Son of God, and the ultimate Spirit-filled preacher of the Father’s message. Even the preborn John recognizes Jesus as divine, and “leaps in the womb” when his mother Elizabeth is visited by the pregnant Mary. As in the Gospel of Matthew, Luke devotes his third chapter to the preaching of John, nearly a verbatim retelling of Matthew’s account, suggesting a common source available to Matthew and Luke. [This hypothetical text is known as the Q-source.] Luke, whose Gospel has a universal flavor, gives clues that Gentiles may have also sought the baptism of John, as the evangelist cites soldiers and tax collectors—agents—of Rome—in John’s audience. Interestingly, Luke’s narrative relays that John was arrested by Herod and evidently not present when Jesus is baptized, suggesting that John may have had a circle of believers who assisted him. This may explain, too, why John’s disciples came to Jesus instead of John himself, to ask Jesus “are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” [Luke 7: 18-23] This enigmatic question of John is not viewed as a challenge to Jesus’ credentials, but perhaps more of a “gentle transition.” It is a linguistic opening for Luke to portray Jesus as the one who is God’s final statement to the world. “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.” Luke’s reference is Isaiah 61, the apocalyptic forecast of deliverance of the poor and suffering. Luke’s inclusion of Isaiah’s language is a redirection from John’s message of future wrathful judgment toward an unspeakable outpouring of divine mercy as personified in Jesus. It is worth noting that Luke’s is the only Gospel to include such portraits of mercy as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Continuing in Chapter 7, Jesus goes on to praise John as the one who has gone ahead of him. “I tell you, among those born of women, no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” In the final Gospel, we have the Evangelist John depicting the Baptist John in the very first chapter. Again, the Evangelist John does not have an infancy narrative; the first meeting of Jesus and John [the Baptist] occurs in adulthood. The author opens his Gospel with the famous Christological hymn, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” From a literary analysis, this hymn as it appears in John’s Gospel is broken in several places by an editor, with references to John the Baptist, as in 1:6-8, “A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He [the Baptist] was not the light but came to testify to the light.” At the conclusion of the hymn the Evangelist describes John in much the same way as the previous Gospels do. When Jesus appears on the scene, John makes his famous profession of faith, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” The term ‘lamb” has multiple meanings. The NABRE Bible commentary says this: “The background for this title may be the victorious apocalyptic lamb who would destroy evil in the world (Rev 5–7; 17:14); the paschal lamb, whose blood saved Israel (Ex 12); and/or the suffering servant led like a lamb to the slaughter as a sin-offering (Is 53:7, 10). In any event, it is the strongest and most detailed affirmation of Jesus from the lips of John in all the Gospels. The Gospel of John is the only one which states that the Baptist had disciples, and even more remarkably, he encourages two of them, including one named Andrew, to go off and join Jesus as a disciple. [1: 35-37, from this Sunday’s Gospel.] Another curious point in the Gospel of John: the evangelist does not mention the actual baptism of Jesus, but in John 3:22ff. we hear that Jesus and his disciples were baptizing in the same locale as John. This disturbed a disciple of John, who complained to him that “everyone is coming to [Jesus].” John replies that “this joy of mine has been made complete. He must increase and I must decrease.” As the Gospel of John is the final one of the four, these words of the Baptist in John 3 are the final message of John the Baptist in the New Testament. John the Baptist is one of the most enigmatic figures of the Gospels, and even the four Gospels depict him in a variety of ways. The common thread throughout the Gospels is John’s officiating at the Baptism of Jesus, which we observe this weekend [January 9-10] at the Eucharist. But it may come as a surprise that there is more historical non-Biblical information about John than there is about Jesus. Consequently, to understand the Baptist, it is necessary to know what the ancient world thought about John as a free-standing figure, and then how the Christian evangelists integrated him into the New Testament narrative.
A primary Catholic scholarly source for Gospel study is Father John Meier [b. 1942], in retirement teaching courses at Notre Dame and completing his sixth volume of The Marginal Jew commentaries. [In 1988, when he began, he thought there would be only one volume!] In his second volume, Meier begins with a lengthy treatment on the Baptist called “John without Jesus” [pp. 19-99] and follows that with “Jesus with and without John” [pp. 100-233]. For Meier, John is a critical New Testament personage in his own right and in his interworking with Jesus. Thus, Meier examines what is known about John separate from the Christian Gospel sources. The primary source for our knowledge of John is the historical text of Flavius Josephus, The Jewish Antiquities. Josephus himself was a ubiquitous character who moved freely in Jewish and Roman circles, and he is a primary source for the terrible war of the Fall of Jerusalem, 66-70 A.D. It is in an earlier context that Josephus introduces John, specifically a rousing military defeat of King Herod at the hands of the Nabothian King Aretas IV around 35 A.D. This loss was a considerable shock to the Jews, and Josephus reports in his Antiquities his suspicions of why this calamity occurred. He writes: “But to some of the Jews it seemed that the army of Herod was destroyed by God—indeed, God quite justly punishing [Herod] to avenge what he had done to John, who was surnamed the Baptist. “For Herod killed him, although he was a good man and [simply] bade the Jews to join in baptism, provided that they were cultivating virtue and practicing justice toward one another and piety toward God. For [only] thus, in John’s opinion, would the baptism [he administered] indeed be acceptable to God, namely, if they used it to obtain not pardon for some sins but rather the cleansing of their bodies, inasmuch as [it was taken for granted that] their souls had already been purified by justice. “And when the others [namely, ordinary Jews] gathered together [around John]—for their excitement reached fever pitch as they listened to [his] words—Herod began to fear that John’s powerful ability to persuade people might lead to some sort of revolt, for they seemed likely to do whatever he counseled. So Herod decided to do away with John by a preemptive strike before he sparked a revolt. Herod considered this a better [course of action] than to wait until the situation changed and [then] to regret [his delay] when he was engulfed by a crisis. “And so, because of Herod’s suspicion, John was sent in chains to Machaerus, the mountain fortress previously mentioned; there he was killed. But the Jews were of the opinion that the army was destroyed to avenge John, God wishing to inflict harm on Herod.” [from John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew II, p. 20] Josephus’ portrayal of John the Baptist is easily recognizable to Christians, but his portrait is incomplete. Josephus tones down John’s eschatological and apocalyptic tendencies, i.e., language about future judgment and the end of the world. Luke’s Gospel [Chapter 3] portrays John as a firebrand who probably would have distressed civil authorities, particularly since Luke singles out soldiers and tax collectors as sinners needing baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Meier and others make the strong case that the historical existence of John the Baptist can be verified in both the Gospels and secular sources, notably Josephus. Meier applies the scholarly law of “multiple attestation” to the Gospels; John’s existence is recorded in all four Gospels, along with Jesus’ baptism, the calling of the twelve, the feeding of the 5000, the Last Supper, Pontius Pilate, Judas’s betrayal, and the Crucifixion, which all meet the standard of multiple attestation as having strong historical probability. However, John’s identity, ministry, and relationship to Jesus varies considerably across the four Gospels. Meier notes that John meets another marker of historical probability, “the criterion of embarrassment.” Consider for a moment that no Gospel writer would have included the betrayal of Peter during the Passion if it were not true. John is, is Meier’s words, a true “wild card” with prophetic heritage of the Old Testament but a certain independence as well. His direct contact with the Gospels is limited as well. The constant is his association with Jesus’ baptism, though even here the evangelists narrate the event in different ways. This weekend’s Mass account on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord is drawn from St. Mark, the Gospel of the B Cycle. Mark has no Infancy narrative and begins his Gospel by introducing the adult Jesus as Christ [“the anointed one’], the Son of God. Mark goes on to describe the Baptist as a descendant of the prophetic line of Israel, specifically the Prophet Isaiah. In practical terms Mark depicts John as a messenger preparing for the Lord by extending a baptism or washing for the forgiveness of sins. But this baptism is a preliminary step to what John calls a baptism of the Holy Spirit. Meyer makes the point that in Mark’s narrative there is a confusing disconnect. “The Old Testament prophesied the Baptist as the one who would prepare the way for Jesus; yet John never penetrated the mystery of Jesus’ identity, even when he baptized him.” [p. 21] There is more mystery. Mark continues his narrative with the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth and his baptism in the Jordan by John. What intrigues the reader—and centuries of readers of this Gospel of Mark—is the history before the event. How did Jesus come to the Jordan in the first place? Was he a typical layman, a Galilean carpenter, one of the hundreds moved by the preaching of this peripatetic Galilean preacher? Or was Jesus one of John’s inner circle of disciples, or as Meyer puts it, was John the mentor of Jesus? And, to go a step further, are there clues to what Jesus understood to be the nature of the water baptism? Was he shedding his sins, a thought entirely foreign to our understanding of Jesus’ nature? Or was Jesus giving good example? St. Matthew, writing after St. Mark, strongly suggests as much in his narrative. See Matthew 3 for his parallel account. The key to all four baptismal accounts is the encounter of Jesus with the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel a voice from the heavens proclaims: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” From the vantage point of Christian faith, the unity of Jesus’ earthly mission with the love and unity of his Father is conscious. Liturgically speaking, the encounter with the Spirit and God’s voice of identity answers the Christmas question of who this babe in Bethlehem is. Hence, the feast of the Baptism is the final day of the Advent-Christmas cycle of feasts. All four evangelists begin the public ministry of Jesus from this point, a ministry celebrated throughout the year as Ordinary Time. Parenthetically, the role of the Baptist becomes virtually invisible from this point in the Gospels, almost adversarial. |
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