Father General’s homily for St. Joseph * March 19, 2011
For the feast of St. Joseph, the liturgy of the Word chooses two passages of the Gospel: the announcement of the birth of Jesus to Joseph and the story of the finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem. I think that these two texts are the most important to understand the figure of St. Joseph and his spiritual progress. Both speak about a loss – Joseph discovers that what he considered as his own belongs to God: his wife is the favored one, the “full of grace”, who is totally inhabited by the Holy Spirit; his son Jesus declares that the Temple is his home, his Father’s house, not the small house of Nazareth. Humanly, these two experiences are terrible: what kind of life can Joseph live if he is husband without a wife and father without a son? He had to feel really disappointed in his expectations. But it is exactly in this experience of loss and death that a new life begins, a new kind of love. Jesus gave to his parents this priceless gift of sharing his life. In this sense, Mary and Joseph are his first disciples and the most faithful.
I think that the identity and mission of religious life can be explained, can be shown by referring to the lives of Mary and Joseph, namely to the people who lived in a special intimacy with Jesus. I am sure that this was also the insight of St. Teresa and her deepest desire: to live the same life of the Holy Family, of Mary and Joseph next to Jesus.
Jesus is the gain that compensates the loss of a “normal” life. Apparently Joseph’s life is a very normal one, with its usual troubles and joys. There is nothing extraordinary. He is a man who works and loves his wife and his son. But this “natural” life is the incarnation of another life, the life of God, of the Trinity. This life is a continuous giving and receiving, losing and finding.
What Joseph discovers in his dream and in the journey to Jerusalem is not only a truth about Jesus, but also a truth about himself, a new identity, a new way of being a man, a husband and a father, without owning his wife and his child. His wife and his child are not his own, but he receives them as a gift to protect and to give in his turn to others. In this way, he is at the same time the richest and the poorest man in the world. This is the condition of every disciple of Jesus, because this was the condition of Jesus himself: to live the same life of everybody but with a different heart, with a divine heart. I hope and I pray our Lord, through the intercession of St. Joseph, that this can be also our religious life: a very simple life, rooted in the heart of the Trinity.
