Jesus, the Son of the carpenter

Concluding the episode of the finding of Jesus in the temple, Saint Luke recounts that He departed with them and returned to Nazareth. Practically the whole life of Joseph seems to have unfolded here in Nazareth. And what can the inhabitant of a remote village like Nazareth expect from life? Work and nothing but work. Every day, always with the same effort. Then, at the end of the day, to recover his strength and begin to work again the next day.

So passed the life of Joseph on his return from Egypt, identical, moreover, to what it had been before, since the end of his childhood. He probably died before Jesus began His public life. In Nazareth, however, he was remembered even later on, and the Gospel references specify that he was remembered above all for his condition as a worker.

When Jesus began His ministry, He was about thirty years old and was the son, as was believed, of Joseph

(Lk 3:23).

So Saint Luke, after having devoted a brief account to the baptism of Jesus, opens the years of the public life with His genealogy. A little further on, on the occasion of the visit that Jesus made to Nazareth, which yielded scant fruit because of the unbelief of His fellow townsmen, he reports the comment of the people astonished at the wisdom of His words: Is he the son of Joseph?

(Lk 4:22).

This time Saint Luke preferred to recall Joseph, while it was Matthew who mentioned the Virgin: Is he not the son of the carpenter? Is not his mother called Mary?

(Mt 13:55).

Saint Mark echoes Matthew: Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?

(Mk 6:3).

The term “carpenter”, much used in translations, is not the most suitable one to designate Joseph, nor, for that matter, Jesus. Tekton, in the Greek original, is a word that in the most widespread opinion is translated as “craftsman”. Joseph was therefore a craftsman, a worker who earned his living with his hands for himself and for his people.

The identification of Joseph’s profession with that of a carpenter should probably be traced back to Saint Justin, who himself used it in his Dialogue with Trypho. And there is an apocryphal writing that tells the story of Joseph the carpenter. Given his authority and the fact that he wrote in the second century, it is not surprising that, in the long run, the thesis prevailed. The term used by the Greek text can, however, designate both the worker who works iron and the one who works wood. Saint Ambrose declared himself in favor of a Joseph who was a blacksmith, and he had some followers. After all, one hypothesis does not exclude the other, if we consider that Nazareth was not a town large enough to have, so to speak, skilled workers: as happens in small settlements, instead of specializing it was customary to learn to solve everyday problems, in order to satisfy the most immediate needs of the ordinary people who lived in the neighborhood. In a word, several things had to be mastered. There are also those who translate the Greek term as master builder, builder of houses, and some ancient authors, without much foundation, in truth, say that Joseph was a goldsmith.

Whatever his occupation may have been, there is no doubt that it was work of no great importance. He was a man with a family dependent on him. As head of the family, he had the responsibility of supporting his relatives with decorum and, as a man, he had no other capital than the knowledge of a trade, capital that he had to make profitable by work. And in this too the peculiar physiognomy of Joseph stands out, inclined to the most everyday and simple aspects of life (which are in no way to be identified with the easy ones). He persevered in the same work unshakably. A whole lifetime of work. But work done with pleasure, a continuous service, without making a burden of it, not only, though principally, to Jesus and Mary, but to whoever had need of his ability and his commitment.

Like Saint Paul later on, Joseph worked with vigor and toil, day and night, so as not to be a burden to anyone.

(2 Thess 3:8).

Work was the activity to which Jesus devoted the greater part of His life. For this reason it was sanctified by Him and endowed with redemptive value, to the point of becoming capable of transcending natural limits in order to be converted into an offering to God and, still more, into collaboration in the work of the Redemption. Provided, however, that it be really carried out with love: in fact, it is love that purifies work of any residual servility, in order to transform it into service. It is then that one strives to refine the work and, at the same time, that one can speak fully of the honor of work.

The honor about which Charles Péguy wrote pages so splendid that they deserve a mention, even though a long one:

We knew an honor of work. We knew a commitment carried to perfection, identical in its totality and in the smallest details. We knew the piety of a work well done, carried out to the most extreme requirements. Those workers had honor. A chair leg had to be well made. It was understood. It was a manifestation of superiority. It did not have to be well made because of the wage, or in view of the wage. It was not to be well made for the master, nor for the connoisseurs, nor for the master’s customers. It had to be well made for itself, in itself, in its own being. A tradition going back to the most intimate depths of the race, a history, an absolute, an honor, they wanted that chair leg to be well made. Each leg of the chair, although not all of them were in sight, was as perfect as the one that was seen. It is the same principle to which we owe the cathedrals. All honors converged toward this. The decency and the subtlety of expression. Respect for the house. A sense of respect, of any respect, of the very being of respect, so to speak. Everything was a constant ceremony. Often, on the other hand, the house was confused with the shop, and the honor of the house and that of the shop were one single honor. Everything was rhythm and ceremony, from the light of dawn. Everything was example and teaching, everything answered to a tradition, everything contributed to the most wholesome custom. Everything was interior elevation, and prayer ends the day, sleep and waking, work and rest in the garden, the bed and the table, the soup and the meat, the house, the door and the road, the courtyard and the threshold, and the plate on the table. And, as a consequence, all the splendid derived and filial sentiments. Respect for the elderly, for parents, for the family. An admirable respect for children. Respect, of course, for women: and it is really fitting to specify this, since today we are less and less concerned to respect women, for their own sake. Respect for the family and for the home. And, above all, the pleasure and the respect for respect itself. Respect for the tool and for the hand, the supreme tool.

Charles Péguy, Money (1912).

It is true that there are tasks that men call noble and others that they consider vile: the liberal arts and the servile duties, intellectual occupations and manual trades. But it is equally true that in the eyes of God there are other things that matter, because work, assumed by Christ, becomes a redeemed and redeeming activity: it is not only the space in which man lives, but a means and a way of holiness, a sanctifying reality.

Joseph of Nazareth lived all this in his work, and he also went through opposition of another depth. Jesus too knew the weariness and the fatigue of the workshop, the monotony of days without relief and without history. Nevertheless, no occupation was more fruitful than that of Joseph.

C. Péguy was right to add, speaking of work:

“Masters, priests, fathers, a man who works well and knows how to conduct himself well can be sure that he will never lack anything”. In these two things lies the dignity of the poor, and from them comes his strength: to work well and to conduct himself well. And Saint Joseph was never what is usually called “a successful man”.

But besides the fact that anxiety for success can also be a serious obstacle to a work well done, since it leads one to make a goal of what is only a result, this does not seem to disturb his peace. It did not occur to him that to spend his life in that condition was a bad thing, or that it was a fault not to aspire to climb the steep and risky ladder of honors.

It may be that worldly criteria consider Joseph a failure, for having spent his whole life without prospering, without being able (even though he never thought about it), in so many years of hard work, to “make his way in life”, as people usually say, or to “secure a future”. But criteria of this kind, not rare to find in this world, are erroneous criteria, because in the end Joseph attained both goals. He did not do so in the sense in which the great mass of men understands these expressions, but in a completely different way, because it is not conventional, but real. He opened a way to eternal life, a way of holiness, and he secured a future so radiant that the universal Church has in him its patron. And with Jesus and Mary he merited to form the Holy Family, whose living of the mysteries of faith still today leads us to a depth to be discovered by Mariology.

To go deeper into the identity of Jesus as son of Mary and Joseph in the Marian tradition, consult the encyclical Redemptoris Mater by Saint John Paul II.

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