Saint Joseph: Wise and Faithful Servant

Saint Joseph, wise and faithful servant: the guardian of Mary and Jesus

The entrance antiphon of the Mass, on the solemnity celebrated on March 19 in honor of Saint Joseph, relates these words: Here is the wise and faithful servant, whom the Lord placed at the head of his family.

Other texts are long and dense, full of exegetical ideas and inexhaustible openings of horizons. Here we have exactly the opposite: only two short sentences, but very clear and very applicable. Not to be considered in an abstract way, but to be brought back to the reality of life.

A wise and faithful servant. Who is the wise and faithful servant? A servant is someone who renders a service. But the word indicates something more: a servant who, in some way and in any capacity, belongs to the Lord whom he serves. In this precise sense, Joseph was a servant: a man who gave himself over to the service of God, but he was not a slave, because there is a somewhat inhuman component in slavery: it lacks freedom. Of the latter, Joseph always remained the complete master. He exercised it, however, by voluntarily serving God in everything he knew to be His will. He gave his life to God not by losing it, as the martyrs do, but by consecrating it to the mission for which he had been called by God through the angel.

He was faithful because he kept intact the faith he owed to his God and Lord. One could well apply the concept of fidelity that developed to the highest degree during the Middle Ages: a personal relationship of adherence and loyalty to the Lord, an unshakable firmness in the word given, in the promise made, at any cost and despite any difficulty, obstacle, or problem that may arise. Conceived in this way, fidelity has a connotation, or rather a property, that inspires confidence and confers it. A faithful man is a man firm in his faith and, therefore, one can count on him.

He was also wise, because he worked with prudence. To act with prudence is to have discernment, to know how to distinguish what is good from what is not. But wisdom is not only this. There is more. A wise man, above all, is a man capable of knowing reality and adhering to it and, therefore, is a man who has a solid foundation on which to make his choices. Indeed, Joseph does not seem to belong to that kind of people who spend their energies, or a great part of them, developing projects they will never bring to completion, not least because it is difficult for them to implement them. The kind of people who dream of great things and then let slip, carried away by so many chimeras, the concrete duty demanded by the moment, the one that is more real than all the marvelous but imaginary plots that attract them. Joseph, as a wise man, did not build castles in the air, but made his decisions according to the precise data furnished to him by the reality of things.

But such a man, a man clearly aware of his condition as a servant in relation to his God and Lord. Who for that very reason knows that he exists to serve Him and wants to do so with full and determined freedom. Who, precisely because he voluntarily and freely accepted his condition, remains faithful to the decision to the point of maintaining this firmness despite any obstacle, opposition, or danger. And who, moreover, prudent and faithful to reality, knows how to make the right choice in every case and circumstance, without falling into unfounded optimism, blind ambition, or foolish vanity, is a man worthy of trust.

Joseph was made of this stuff, and for this reason the Lord placed him at the head of his family. God trusted him enough to place His incarnate Son and His Most Holy Mother under his protection: the most extraordinary treasures ever entrusted to a creature. To trust means to hope in someone with firmness and security, to place something precious in his hand with the only guarantee constituted by the certainty placed in that fidelity. God knew that Joseph was wise and faithful, and for this reason He made him His trusted man, one of those in whom one can confide in complete tranquility, certain that he will not fail if circumstances are adverse, that he will remain loyal in any adversity, that he will fulfill in the best way the tasks entrusted to him.

Nothing turned Joseph aside from the path that had been shown to him. No obstacle, no threat, no danger could break or undermine his loyalty. Joseph remained in his place and subordinated any legitimate aspiration to the mission he had received. The Church, therefore, had every reason to choose and to apply to Joseph, for the communion antiphon of the Mass of March 19, the words of the parable of the talents reported by Saint Matthew: Well done, good and faithful servant […] share in the joy of your Lord

(Mt 25:21).

A wise and faithful servant is indeed the good servant, that is, the servant who does good, and not sometimes or accidentally, but as a rule, as the lasting effect of a cause. The cause, in this case, is goodness. A man is good because he is of such a quality that good proceeds from him, as good fruits come from a good tree.

What else was his life but an uninterrupted dedication to the service for which he was called? Spouse of the Virgin Mary, legal father of Jesus; nevertheless, the qualifier that specifies the noun is necessary in order to avoid misunderstandings. The Gospel, for its part, does not use adjectives of this kind, and this too offers an excellent motive for reflection. He spent his life protecting them, giving himself over to the service of the mission to which he had been called. And since those who have given themselves no longer belong to themselves, he ceased to be concerned about himself from the moment when, enlightened by the angel in that first dream, he fully accepted the designs that God had drawn up for him, received Mary as his wife, and began to live for those who had been placed under his custody. If the Lord entrusted His family to him, Joseph did not disappoint Him. If God leaned on him, he remained firm in all circumstances. The role assigned to him was not brilliant (as is commonly believed), but this did not matter to him, and in carrying out his obscure task well, he employed the same effort he would have made to carry out any other service in which God might have wished to employ him.

Thus it happened that to a simple man, hardworking, patient, experienced, helpful, silent, humble, obedient, and ignored, was addressed the praise of a just, faithful, wise, and good man. Of an efficient man, who knew how to overcome the difficult circumstances for the family God had entrusted to him, preserving it from dangers or drawing it out of them. And he did so without the slightest boasting or arrogance over the trust of which he had been the object. Without complaining and protesting, without a gesture of impatience in the difficult moments, incomprehensible from the human point of view, through which God made him pass. Neither favorable times nor adverse ones altered his fidelity to God and his dedication to the service of Jesus and Mary: his constancy reached such a point that if there ever existed in the world a man who can be called faithful in all things, this man is Joseph of Nazareth.

If the Church applies the designation of servant to Joseph, if she calls the men who died in the name of holiness servants of God, this means that being a servant, a man who dedicates himself to the service of others, must not in itself be so contemptible a state: at least not as much as it seems, judging by the sound that this expression has taken on in the ears of our super-civilized contemporaries. There is something negative, in today’s consideration of the man who serves, if that service does not concern the State, a company, a vague and impersonal entity. As if serving another concrete man, a family, more generally other men, meant lowering oneself, letting oneself be stamped with a mark of inferiority that places the servant below human dignity.

But Jesus said that He came to serve and not to be served

(Mt 20:28).

He bent His knees before the disciples to wash their feet and thus to serve them, He who was the Lord! I have given you the example

(Jn 13:15),

He said to them, commanding them to serve one another. Therefore, to serve is not a bad, contemptible, or humiliating attitude toward human nature. And the condition of the servant is in no way dishonorable. And to serve is not a shame. And Joseph of Nazareth did nothing other than serve his loved ones with his person, and his neighbors with his work: all of this, although it is not among the activities commonly considered worthy of particular mention, constitutes precisely what should be the essence of every man’s life, as it was of the life of Joseph.

It is not easy for a father of a family to live up to his mission if he is not willing to serve his loved ones with self-denial, to seek their good above all else, even at his own expense. If he does not learn not to feel humiliated by the fact that this service requires him to devote the necessary time to his family, taking a part of it away from friends, from leisure, from social or professional relationships.

Even we who call ourselves Christians, that is, disciples of Christ, do not seem, today, very inclined to the virtue of humility. And who knows whether this is precisely the reason for the decline of so many trades and professions carried out without love, without a spirit of service, without dedication to a work well finished. The Christian must know that he is not greater than the Master. And if Jesus said that He did not come to be served, but to serve, being at the service of others must constitute an aspiration, which even becomes an obligation when it concerns those whom God has entrusted to our care.

In this light, one easily finds the reason that led Saint John Paul II, at the inaugural Mass of his pontificate, to exclaim:

“O Christ! Grant that I may become and be a servant! […] Let me be a servant!”.

To whom, better than to Joseph, could God have entrusted the Holy Family? When Saint Francis of Assisi said that we must never consider ourselves superior to others, but must serve every human creature for God, he could well have been thinking of Joseph. And the excellent reason that Saint Thomas takes up to affirm the fittingness of the Virgin’s marrying comes from Saint Jerome: So that Saint Joseph may serve her, he says.

Saint Teresa called Saint Joseph a glorious saint in short but dense words:

“Master of the interior life, a worker committed to daily duty, a faithful servant of God in constant relation with Jesus: this is Joseph. From Joseph the Christian learns what it means to belong to God and to be fully inserted among men, sanctifying the world. Attend to Joseph and you will find Jesus, attend to Joseph and you will come to know Mary, who always filled the carpenter’s shop of Nazareth with peace”.

To go deeper into the role of Saint Joseph as guardian of Mary and of Jesus in the history of salvation, consult the encyclical Redemptoris Mater by Saint John Paul II.

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