Saint Joseph: The Drama of the Repudiation

The Drama of the Repudiation: Joseph, Mary, and Faith in the Mystery

Joseph’s decision to leave the Virgin secretly was not a single act, like a kind of sudden response to a stimulus, the reaction to a prompting. It was not one of those instinctive and automatic reactions that come even before there is time to understand a problem completely. Nor was it an outburst of wounded pride or outraged self-love, or any other of the many emotions that such situations usually awaken in men. The more important a question is, the more attention it demands, even if not everyone is aware of this or capable of it. In that concrete case, in which the question was important, and very much so, not only for Joseph but for Mary, Joseph showed himself a man mature enough to give it the necessary attention and not to treat it with levity.

It was not only a question of honor. It was also, and above all, a question of love. As for honor, that of the Virgin was assured by the decision he had made. And as for his own honor, in order to save hers he did not care about it, even at the probable cost of coming off badly. What really hurt was the second aspect. Joseph loved Mary, and hence the gravity of the conflict: when the head and the heart are going in different directions, the laceration becomes inevitable. The heart of a man in love tends, with almost irresistible force, toward the woman he loves. But if his head tells him that he must resist that impulse, the result can only be one: suffering.

In Joseph’s case, the conflict grew even worse. In itself, the decision was very difficult. As if that were not enough, time, instead of easing its gravity, made ever more urgent a resolution that, the more he reflected, the less clear it seemed to him. It was a dead end. According to all appearances, Mary was guilty. Yet, despite all appearances, he was not convinced that this could be true and, in fact, he remained certain that it was not.

The contrast between what he saw and what he knew about his wife increased his perplexity and indecision. To all this was added the silence of the Virgin. Why did she not speak? Why did she say nothing? Did he perhaps deserve a few words, some explanation? She certainly did not behave like a guilty woman. She did not show the shame that one might suppose inevitable in a woman who had committed so obvious a fault. Her eyes did not darken, and her gaze shone through as pure, clear, and serene as ever, even when, by chance, she looked at him with a touch of compassion. Even her face was not furrowed and, at times, in fact, it seemed radiant. And her bearing: not that of someone faced with the thorny necessity of explaining what is evident, what no longer leaves room for another explanation. She looked at him, and she suffered with his suffering, and she kept silent. From where did she draw the strength, the inner support that, in so tense a situation, allowed her to go on with her tasks without being shaken, unchanged, the same as always?

Whether that period of agonizing perplexity, of conflicting feelings, lasted long or little, it is impossible to know. But, with these premises, having before his eyes Mary’s condition, her inexplicable silence and her serene bearing, it is more than understandable that Joseph struggled for some time, not knowing what to do. But it happened that “after he had thought about this” Mt 1:20, while Joseph was meditating on these things, on the solution he had proposed, examining it from different points of view, weighing whether it was really the appropriate solution, the revelation came to him: precisely when, after bitter reflections with no one in whom to confide, without a glimmer to suggest a clear way out, he finally managed to find some relief. The solution came, while he was resting, different from the one he had come to recognize, and with it came peace and joy. For “behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said: Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary, your wife, with you, for that which is conceived in her comes from the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:20).

It seems that Joseph was afraid to take his wife with him. They were married, but the completion of the marriage had not yet taken place, nor, therefore, had the official escorting of Mary into the husband’s house. That problem could hardly fail to affect this second part of the marriage, and we may suppose that Joseph feared that step precisely in view of the new factor, unforeseeable and even unimaginable, that had arisen. It was certainly not fear of dishonor. That, at worst, would have been avoided or smothered by the marriage. Was it, perhaps, fear of doing wrong before God, of profaning a mystery that was unknown yet sensed?

We shall never know. In reality, in fact, whatever the origin of his fear of receiving Mary into his own house and of celebrating the wedding, it vanished the instant the angel made him a participant in the great mystery. The illumination concerning the designs prepared by God for men introduced him officially, so to speak, into the work of the Redemption, a Redemption that, in the words of Edith Stein, “was conceived and accomplished in the abyss of mysterious depths, in silence and in secret”. In silence and in secret came the Annunciation of the mystery to the Virgin Mary and the Incarnation of the Son of God. In silence and secret, Joseph was purified during the agonizing days of the trial. And always in silence and in secret was communicated to Joseph, son of David, what he needed to know, for he could not fulfill the mission that God had determined for him without knowing, at least, the fundamental outline of the part that fell to him. The angel calmed his doubts, revealed to him the mystery of the Incarnation, and he knew what service he was to render. And immediately, in the very instant in which he knew it, he responded with unconditional promptness and dedication: equal to those with which, months earlier, Mary, his wife, had consented to the divine plan proposed by the angel.

And in fact, awakened from sleep, Saint Matthew’s narrative continues, he “did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife with him” (Mt 1:24). Awakened like one emerging from a nightmare, from a situation so strange that it seems unreal, as anomalous as one of those absurd and monstrous deliriums into which we are sometimes led by the delirium of fever. Or, perhaps, to emerge from doubt and indecision by virtue of the angelic revelation, and to adopt the resolution of receiving his wife, was equivalent to leaving a dark and troubled world to find oneself suddenly in the unmistakable brightness of a sure path to follow.

And it may be that the circumstance of having received the revelation of the mystery while he was meditating on these things is not without significance. God could certainly have spared him these sufferings, for example, by letting him know His plan at the same time as Mary. In that case, she too would have avoided the anguish of witnessing Joseph’s suffering while bound to keep such a secret, which she could have disclosed in such a way as to resolve all the problems immediately. But God does not bind Himself to the vision of men. He let the Virgin suffer; He let Joseph struggle for some time in anguished perplexity, understanding nothing and seeing no solution, without the certainty of what to do in a situation as unexpected as it was delicate and painful. Only when he had arrived at a right solution (within the limits of his imperfect knowledge of reality) did God will to intervene through the angel.

The true solution came to him as soon as Joseph had done what in those circumstances lay within his strength, neglecting nothing that was within his power. Only then, and not before, did God convey to him the unknown facts, necessary for correcting an erroneous decision. And, with the facts, a reference. For, as Saint John Chrysostom says, “the angel sends Joseph back to the testimony of Isaiah so that, should he on waking forget what he heard in the dream, by remembering the words of the prophet, on which he had always been nourished, he may recall to his memory the revelation he received”.

Not in the same way, because the torment Joseph had to face cannot be generalized to the totality of men, but certainly in different ways all pass at times through afflictions that show some resemblance to the one Joseph suffered. Let us say that, amid conflicts, problems, and setbacks, there are difficult moments in the life of every man that do not concern him alone, situations in which one is forced to make decisions that can affect, even irreversibly, the course of one’s own life and that of other people. There one lives a peculiar suffering, hardly understood by those who have not experienced it, which demands an attitude on which, in many cases, depends the rightness of the solution that will be adopted. When the heart and the head contradict each other, and a man feels an inner laceration, when it is the heart that pulls hard, above all then one must avoid acting in haste. More than ever it is necessary to stop and reflect, so that emotion does not take over. If the heart, in fact, is made to love, the head is made to think and to show the heart the path to follow.

Joseph teaches that in the face of a problem, a conflict, an opposition (experiences that life spares no one), man’s proper and primary response is reflection. In the wake of impulses, movements of the heart, instinctive and hasty reactions, correct solutions are never reached. If we achieve anything, it is to tangle the skein still further, adding new difficulties and exacerbating the disagreement. Nor is it to be expected that the problem will resolve itself, or that others will resolve it, because there are moments and situations in which no one can decide for us. We have to be mature enough to face them and to face the consequences. Some men remain perpetually minors, caught up in an immaturity from which they seem unwilling to emerge. They are people whose uniform, in the face of difficulties, is the perennial recourse to others, not in order to receive advice (a prudential rule more than fitting for attaining success), but in order to unload the weight onto the shoulders of others.

It is good, however, that recourse to others, to one’s neighbor, should occur only after one has assessed whether one is capable of finding a way out by oneself, of arriving at an adequate solution. When, in fact, the nature of the matter does not demand particular confidentiality, it is never excessive to have recourse to the opinion and counsel of someone who, through knowledge or experience, can give the due explanations with a view to the best solution. Finally, not even Joseph resolved his solitary conflict alone, but with the help of the angel and by following his counsel.

The solution that came to Joseph, the higher illumination, in the same context of solitude in which he found himself struggling, reached him in a very simple way, with discretion, in silence, without troublesome outward and sensible features. It came to him from outside himself, showed him that the choice he had made, however logical it was, was not correct, and Joseph immediately rectified his decision, changing his mind and acting in accordance with the facts the angel had revealed to him. But let us not forget this aspect: Saint Joseph never refused to reflect on the facts, and thus he obtained from the Lord that degree of understanding of the works of God which constitutes true wisdom.

To deepen your understanding of the relationship between Mary and Joseph in the history of salvation, consult the encyclical Redemptoris Mater by Saint John Paul II.

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