Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A
First reading: Isa 5:10-14
Second reading: Rom 1:1-7
Gospel reading: Mt 1:18-24
For many centuries, God taught his people to look forward to salvation. Through the prophets, he revealed that the Saviour, God the Son, would be “of the House of David.” He fulfilled these prophecies when Mary, “a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph,” consented to become his Son’s mother.
“Betrothed” did not mean what “engaged” means to us. Betrothal was marriage in every legal and religious sense; only divorce, permitted by Moses, could dissolve it. However, a betrothed couple lived apart until after the formal home-taking, months or even years later.
The angel Gabriel explained that not even Joseph would be involved in Mary’s pregnancy. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” he said; “hence, the holy Offspring to be born will be called Son of God.”
By both Jewish and Roman law, Joseph, confronted with Mary’s condition, had to divorce her – publicly or quietly, but not secretly, for divorce required two witnesses.
Joseph “did not know how to deal with Mary’s astonishing motherhood,” Pope St. John Paul II said in his apostolic exhortation Redemptoris Custos (“The Guardian of the Redeemer”). Being “a righteous man,” he did not want to live with an adulterous wife. However, being compassionate, he did not want to “expose her to public disgrace.”
Before Joseph could act, an angel intervened, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the Child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a Son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
Joseph was a “son of David” (the only man besides Jesus to be addressed by this Messianic title). When Caesar Augustus ordered a census, therefore, he went – with Mary and her Child – to Bethlehem, “David’s town.” There he 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.”
Now naming a child was the Jewish father’s right. “In conferring the name, Joseph declared his own legal fatherhood over Jesus,” Pope John Paul said, “and in speaking the name he proclaimed the Child’s mission as Saviour.”
Jesus is “Son of God” by the Holy Spirit, but “Son of David” by Joseph. Joseph gave him “legal paternity in the line of David,” the Pope said at St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, September 11, 1984.
Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father, but he was his “legal” father – not just his foster-father or guardian. That is why the evangelists list Jesus’ ancestors according to Joseph’s genealogy, the Pope noted.
God called Joseph to take Mary as his wife so that Jesus would “be born of Joseph’s spouse into the Messianic lineage of David,” he said. We must uphold not only Jesus’ virginal conception, therefore, but also Joseph’s marriage to Mary, for that is “the juridical basis of his fatherhood.”
Through that marriage, Mary’s Son “is also Joseph’s Son.” Both “deserve to be called Christ’s parents.” Mary’s words to Jesus – “Your father and I have been searching for you” – showed “the complete reality of the Incarnation” present in the Holy Family.
Joseph was Jesus’ father just as he was Mary’s husband: “in mind, not in the flesh.” 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, faced with “the sublime mystery” of Mary and Joseph’s “spousal communion,” have been led “to think of Joseph as advanced in age and to consider him Mary’s guardian more than her husband,” the Pope noted. Rather, he said, it was Joseph’s “interior perfection, the fruit of grace,” that “led him to live his spousal relationship with Mary with virginal affection.”
Joseph was truly a father to Jesus.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights. The whole course is available in written form and, one session per week, in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person: on Sundays at 2 p.m. in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, Vancouver (33rd and Willow); and on Mondays at 10 a.m. in St. Anthony’s Church hall, 2347 Inglewood Ave., West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is “The Communion Among the Saints in the Body of Christ.”