The Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, Monday, May 1, 2023

Matthew 13, 54-58

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue. They were astonished and said, “Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? Are not his sisters all with us? Where did this man get all this?” And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house.” And he did not work many mighty deeds there because of their lack of faith.

“Is he not the carpenter’s son?”  The people in the synagogue had not seen Jesus for the better part of a year.  Since the death of Joseph and the moving on of Jesus the noise in the carpenter shop there in Nazareth had ceased.  Joseph’s wife, Mary, had moved in with other family members while she waited for the return of her Son.  Now, with a reputation as a miracle-worker, he teaches in the synagogue.  The people are thunderstruck (a word closer to the Greek meaning than “astonished”) by his wisdom and by the deeds he was reported to have performed.  They contrast him and his wisdom to his father the carpenter.  According to the idea of the time, a person continued his father or mother’s work.  If a man worked at blacksmithing, his son became a blacksmith.  If a woman was a seamstress, the daughter took up this work even while still a girl.  A person’s identity very much came from his family, their work, their tribe, and their town.  A person accounted as wise would be expected to come from a father accounted as wise.  If a father was an ordinary carpenter, no one would expect wisdom from the son.  He might show great skillfulness, but not wisdom.  The people therefore do not denigrate the occupation of carpenter when they ask how Jesus could be the son of one.  They simply do not see past their false expectations.

It is interesting that the people identify the (foster) father of Jesus as “the carpenter” rather than from the street the family lived on, or, more to the custom, from Joseph’s own father.  Certainly his name was known.  St. Matthew gives it to us as a man named Jacob.  But for us it is more important to know that Joseph was a carpenter and that the Lord Jesus chose to be known as the son of the carpenter for this tells us of the value of human work.  God did not create the human race in order to its members to wander around the Garden of Eden without purpose.  He created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden, giving them the work of tilling it and keeping it (Genesis 2, 15), as if continuing God’s work of creation, or, at least, preserving it.  Of course, God did not need their help but willed for them to have a part in his work.  It is a great dignity that God gives the human race in this way.  Nor did God take this dignity away after the catastrophic sin Adam and Eve committed.  We ought to think about this: God could have cast them out of the Garden and not allowed them to work anymore.  They would have lost their purpose, their role as caretakers of creation.  Certainly it was better for them to get their bread by the sweat of their brows than to drift through the empty land in their remaining days.  But their work, even after the Fall, brought them near to Almighty God who preserves the universe through his own act (or “work”) of conservation.

St. Joseph worked humbly and quietly, not expecting special favors from God to spare him from the labor that was his lot, assisting his neighbors by building doorframes for them or repairing their plows and performing other useful work.  He sought no riches, but only to feed himself, his wife, and his son.  And such a son!  If St. Luke could say of the Blessed Virgin that she looked on Jesus and heard what people inspired by God said about him and “kept all these words, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2, 19), then certainly this would be true of Joseph.  How many times did St. Joseph look up from his work in his shop and see Jesus next to him or in another part of the shop, working with him, and marvel over him and what he knew of him from the angel in his dreams and from Mary his wife!

You and I in our share in “tilling and keeping” the world around us with our own work, whatever it may be.  We offer our work to the Father through Jesus and ask for its success.  And through our work we imitate the Lord Jesus and his foster father St. Joseph who show us the dignity of the worker,