4th Sunday of Advent, Year A
First Reading: Is 5:10–14
Second Reading: Rom 1:1–7
Gospel Reading: Mt 1:18–24

We hear in this Sunday’s readings that when Mary conceived Jesus, she was betrothed to Joseph – his wife in every legal and religious sense – but not yet living with him.

In justice, Joseph could not ignore her pregnancy. By both Jewish and Roman law, he had to divorce an adulterous wife – either publicly or quietly, but not secretly, for a bill of divorce required two witnesses. In compassion, however, he did not want to expose her to the shame of a public divorce trial.

“He did not know how to deal with Mary’s astonishing motherhood,” said Pope St. John Paul II. “He certainly sought an answer to this unsettling question, but above all, he sought a way out of what was for him a difficult situation.”

Before Joseph could act, an angel intervened, making two notable statements.

First, the angel called Joseph “son of David,” the only man other than Jesus ever to be addressed by this Messianic title. Accordingly, when Caesar Augustus ordered a census of his empire, and everyone went “to his own town” to register, Joseph went to “David’s town,” Bethlehem, “because he was of the house and lineage of David.”

Second, the angel told Joseph to name Mary’s Child, thus assuming the right of a Jewish father. “In conferring the name, Joseph declared his own legal fatherhood over Jesus,” said Pope John Paul, “and in speaking the name he proclaimed the Child’s mission as Saviour.”

Jesus is “Son of God” by the Holy Spirit, but he is “Son of David” by Joseph. It was Joseph who gave Jesus “legal paternity in the line of David,” Pope John Paul II said at St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal on Sept. 11, 1984.

Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father, but he was more than a foster-father or guardian: he was Jesus’ “legal” father. God called Joseph to take Mary as his wife so that Jesus “should be born of Joseph’s spouse into the Messianic lineage of David,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As Pope John Paul noted, Joseph “fulfilled for the Child Jesus the significant task of officially inserting the name ‘Jesus, Son of Joseph of Nazareth’ in the registry of the Roman Empire.”

We can see, then, why the readings for St. Joseph’s Solemnity March 19 are all about lineage. We can see why Matthew and Luke list the generations in Jesus’ ancestry according to Joseph’s genealogy.

We must uphold not only Jesus’ virginal conception, but also Joseph’s marriage to Mary, the Pope said, for that is “the juridical basis of his fatherhood.” Mary’s Son “is also Joseph’s Son” by virtue of that marriage.

“Both of them deserve to be called Christ’s parents,” he stressed. What Mary said to Jesus – “Your father and I have been searching for you” – was not just conventional; it showed “the complete reality of the Incarnation” present in the Holy Family.

Joseph was Jesus’ father in the same way that he was Mary’s husband: “in mind, not in the flesh,” the Pope said. Mary remained a virgin, but the spouses realized “all the goods of marriage”: namely “offspring, fidelity, and the sacrament.” Their “communion of virginal love” was “a true marriage.”

Many people have found it so difficult to accept “the sublime mystery” of their “spousal communion” that ever since the second century, they have been led “to think of Joseph as advanced in age and to consider him Mary’s guardian more than her husband,” the Pope said. Rather, we should suppose not that he was elderly, “but that his interior perfection, the fruit of grace, led him to live his spousal relationship with Mary with virginal affection.”

God gave Joseph the responsibility of supervising his Son’s birth and entrusted to his guardianship all Jesus’ hidden life. Joseph was truly a father to Jesus.

In the few days that remain of Advent, let us prepare to imitate Joseph in welcoming Jesus.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2–4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m.–noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). There will be no session for the next two weeks. The title of the Jan. 4 session is Mary and Joseph.

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