Saint Joseph: The Forgotten ‘Father Christmas’

Hark, all ye fathers, who in the wee hours of Christmas Eve find yourselves half in the bag from a surfeit of eggnog or Martinis—or both, thereof—grumbling and cursing as you contemplate the electric train set (116 parts) and the Victorian doll house (424 parts)—verily, still in their boxes. Why—thou fools, thou knaves—didst thou wait until this late hour to confront these most fearsome words: “Some assembly required”?

Yet tremble not. You are not alone. Someone watcheth over you. Verily.

The Catholic Church has a patron saint for pretty much every occasion and situation, from lost causes (St. Jude) to lost objects (St. Anthony), baldness (St. Bartholomew), and gum disease (St. Apollonia). Saint Joseph is not specifically invoked as the patron saint of unassembled toys on Christmas Eve, but he should be, for he does watch over us. I know. I have seen him, lo, on many a tipsy Christmas Eve, while nothing doth stir in all the house, except stupid me. On that first Christmas Eve, who got the manger ready in that ratty stable in Bethlehem? And decent Joe that he was, he probably wasn’t snockered on Scotch and barking at Mary because he couldn’t find his bleeping hammer.

Certainly St. Joseph could be forgiven if he had been grumpy that night. Consider—earlier that year, his wife had handed him a bit of a surprise, informing him that she was pregnant. By, uh, the Holy Spirit.

Most guys would not greet with unbridled joy the news that they’d been superseeded by a “spirit,” never mind how “holy.” The let-me-get-this-straight possibilities are endless. But St. Joseph neither blew his top nor lost his cool, to use two phrases probably not current in AD 1.

As the Gospel of St. Matthew informs us, “Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.” The operative word there is “quietly.” For “put her to shame” meant: Allow her to be stoned to death for adultery. Jewish law in those days was pretty stern stuff.

Though Matthew doesn’t mention it, St. Joseph at this point may have been kicking himself for not having insisted on a prenup. At any rate, what a dilemma the poor guy was handed. Thank you, Holy Spirit. As for “quietly” divorcing—tricky. Recent scholarship has shown that back then, El Al had no direct flights to Reno, Haiti, or Tijuana.

Joseph now had a dream in which he was visited by an angel. In English lit this is called the deus ex machina, Latin for, “In case of Third Act problems, resort to this.”

It was the first of four such dreams. Joseph ought to be in the Guinness Book of Records for “New Testament Figure Most Visited by an Angel While Dreaming.” By the fourth visitation, he was surely muttering, “Oy gevalt, again?”

In Matthew’s telling, the angel’s message was both straight-forward and ambiguous: “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived of her is of the Holy Spirit.” It’s straightforward insofar as: Your wife has been impregnated by the Holy Spirit. Ambiguous because “do not fear to take Mary your wife” would appear to make little sense. Two verses earlier, Joseph is identified as “her husband.” So he has already taken Mary as his wife.

I stipulate that, my Greek, Latin, and Hebrew being rusty (actually, nonexistent), I am unable to check the translation. Maybe “take” means “put up with.” Wait. Is Matthew here pre-figuring the coming, two thousand years hence, of Henny Youngman? “Take my wife—please!” Hmm.

A few verses later, we come to the slightly indelicate matter of Joseph and Mary’s connubial arrangement. Joseph wakes up from his dream—surely muttering WTF? And “as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took his wife, but knew her not until she had borne him a son.”

Two observations. First, Joseph demonstrates that he is a mensch of the first order. A credulous mensch, perhaps, but a mensch all the same. Second, in order to fulfill the prophecy that the Messiah would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), Mary had to remain intacta until Jesus was born. Matthew tells us that following the blessed event, Joseph was permitted—finally, poor guy—to consummate their marriage.

Much as I would prefer to draw the curtain there and leave the nice young married couple in peace, the narrative presents us with a difficulty. For if Jesus was not biologically related to Joseph, then how could he be “the son of David”? (See Matthew 1:1.) He is referred to as such no fewer than nine times in Matthew. But it’s Joseph who is related to David, not Mary.

In the opening verses of his Gospel, Matthew goes to great pains to establish Jesus’ direct lineal descent from David—indeed, all the way back to Abraham. Matthew’s interminable genealogy also inflicted great pain, as any Catholic schoolboy or girl who had to memorize those bloody sixteen verses will attest. I still twitch whenever I hear “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob...and Ezekiel begat Manassas.” (Fortunately, you don’t hear it all that often.) From Abraham to Jesus is forty-two generations, which is a lot of begatting.

So: if Joseph didn’t contribute DNA to Jesus, how could Jesus be related to David and Abraham? You and I may not stay up at night gnawing the bed linen fretting over this, but reconciling Jesus’ divine and Davidic paternity caused all manner of doctrinal mayhem among the early Church fathers. They actually cared about this stuff. That was their job.

A hundred and fifty years after Jesus’ birth, there appeared a text called the Protoevangelium, or Gospel of James. It purported to be a prequel—as it were—to the Nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke. (Mark doesn’t mention Joseph at all; John makes only a glancing reference to the Holy Family.) At any rate, the Protoevangelium asserted that Mary remained a virgin after Jesus’ birth, contradicting Matthew. It was a must-read document among early Christians, very popular. But it caused a lot of argument, and probably fistfights. The Church fathers finally solved the problem by declaring it apocryphal, which is the doctrinal term for “Nah.”

Still arguments raged, and trying to follow them will give you a headache. Finally, twelve centuries later, Thomas Aquinas found a solution by declaring that Joseph was not some mere bystander, but was essential to the whole concept of the Incarnation. Why? Remove Joseph and unmarried, pregnant Mary goes down in a hail of stones. Viewed in this light, Joseph is the ultimate beard. Certainly he is the ultimate husband—especially if, as the Protowhatever averred, he never got any.

In Joseph’s second dream, the angel warned him to take the Holy Family and flee into Egypt, because Herod, livid at being informed by the Magi that a future king had been born, was going to slaughter every Judean male child under two years old.

The third dream told Joseph it was now okay to come back to Israel. The fourth said to avoid Judea. Herod’s son, no improvement on dad, was now ruler. Joseph should go to Galilee. So, after a schlepping of literally biblical proportion, Joseph finally settled the family in Nazareth, a far from fashionable venue. As Bette Davis famously described it, “What a dump.”

Joseph is mentioned only once more—not in Matthew, but in Luke. Jesus is twelve now, about bar mitzvah age. At Passover time, Joseph and Mary take Him to Jerusalem, which must have seemed to be a relief after Nazareth. Jesus appears to have liked Jerusalem, because when it was time to go home, He disappeared. He didn’t learn much about the virtue of “obedience” from his dad, who himself set the gold standard. But to be fair, Joseph and Mary do seem to have been a bit casual in the chaperone department. They managed to walk all the way back to Nazareth—a real schlep—before either of them said to the other, “I thought He was with you.”

Frantic, Joseph and Mary hoof it back to Jerusalem, look everywhere, and finally find Jesus in the Temple, where He’s dazzling the rabbis with his commentary on Scripture. Joseph and Mary are in no mood to kvell. They tell Him they’ve been out of their minds with worry. Does Jesus say, “Sorry”? Oh, no. He sniffs, “How is it you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Hello? Here His parents are sick with worry, their feet blistered, and He’s giving them attitude? Thank you, Little “Lord” Fauntleroy. And how nice of Him to remind Joseph, after everything he’s done for Him, that You’re not my real father. Such was Joseph’s reward for being a devoted husband and father, and without ever having uttered a word of complaint. Or any word, for that matter. Joseph doesn’t have a single line of dialogue in any of the Gospels (though this does make him an ideal Jewish husband). The scene in the Temple is our last glimpse of Joseph. We don’t even hear, And eventually Joseph died, his heart being broken.

One could speculate. Suppose that after they got the kid back to Nazareth, Joseph said, “You know, I’m not feeling the love here.” Suppose he decided, enough and took a sabbatical from being “Saint” Joseph, Perfect Husband, Terrific Dad. But Joseph, being Joseph, wouldn’t have done that. Whatever happened to him, I hope he did find some love in the end. He sure earned it.

He did, in a way, but it took a long time—fifteen centuries. As Thomas J. Craughwell explains in Saints Preserved: An Encyclopedia of Relics:

Saint Joseph was a casualty of the early Church’s often violent controversies regarding the nature of Christ, whether he was truly God, or a specially selected man, or was both God and man simultaneously. The debate that raged around the issue precluded the development of devotion to Saint Joseph—it would only be asking for more. And so as love for the Blessed Virgin and her parents Anne and Saint Joachim flourished, Joseph remained a bit player who attracted very little notice. As a result, no place claimed to possess his tomb or remains.

His comeback began in the 1500s and 1600s, first courtesy of the Carmelites and then by the new order of Jesuits, who were the Navy SEALs and Delta Force of the Counter-Reformation. In 1870 Pope Pius IX made Joseph patron of the Universal Church. He asserted (ahem, absent scriptural authority) that St. Joseph had died in “the arms of Jesus and Mary,” making him the patron saint of a happy death. It’s lovely to think that’s how it ended for this splendid man. (Though it would have been nice to hear Matthew or Luke or someone say that’s how it went down.)

Later, in 1889, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical urging Catholics to pray to St. Joseph. His popularity blossomed. He became a fashionable patron saint, and the list of countries claiming him as theirs is now long and diverse, from Canada to Vietnam.

He became political, too. In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, Pope Pius XII slyly designated May 1 as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, this being May Day, which commie dictatorships honored with clanking parades of missiles, tanks, goose-stepping soldiers, and giant posters of those humanitarians, Stalin and Mao. Somewhere on the instrument panel of his B-52 bomber in the movie Dr. Strangelove, Slim Pickens might have had a St. Joseph medal.

And now many saints get to be a drug brand? My generation’s first headaches were alleviated by St. Joseph’s Bayer Aspirin for children.

For about fifteen years or so, until my children’s presents no longer required “some assembly,” I celebrated St. Joseph’s feast day not on May 1 or March 19 (its current slot), but on December 24 and on into the early hours of December 25.

A little over a century ago, a prayer containing a series of petitions, or litany, to St. Joseph was formally approved by the then-pope. It lists all his holy attributes, including “Light of Patriarchs,” “Chaste guardian of the Virgin”—which would appear to clinch the argument made by the Protoevangeliumists—and “Foster Father of the Son of God.” It continues, calling him the “Mirror of patience, Lover of poverty, Model of artisans” and enough encomia to keep even the most modest saint blushing for another two millennia.

No less than his due. Had the Vatican put me on the St. Joseph Litany Committee back in 1909, I’d have noted some of his other outstanding qualities:

Assembler most diligent,
Locator of Part 7b,
Repairer of Part 45c,
Provider of socket head screw,
And of (@#$%-ing) hex key.

Bearer of aspirin,
Forestaller of hangover,
Comforter and companion.
Mensch without equal.
Amen