St. Joseph, the Man of March, is our Lenten model
In Church tradition, March is dedicated to St. Joseph — and in the Church calendar, Lent falls mostly in March. That makes Joseph our Lenten leader each year. That makes a lot of sense. He is a Lenten leader in the way the Blessed Mother is the “Advent Woman.”
Mary shows us how to receive Christ in Advent. Advent is about receptivity, and that makes Mary “the Virgin of Advent,” as St. John Paul II said.
As we wait for the coming of Christ, the Church points us to Marian virtues again and again, with the Immaculate Conception celebrating her sinlessness on December 8, with the (new) feast of Our Lady of Loreto on December 10 celebrating the home she made for Jesus, and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12, celebrating how she prepared the New World for Christ in 1531.
Mary shows us how to prepare a place for Jesus in our lives as she did in the world.
But if Advent is about “Christlessness,” when we read the prophets’ longing for Christ, Lent is about “Christ-fullness” when we wait with Jesus Christ in the desert, walk with him along the Way of the Cross, and prepare for his ultimate victory at Easter.
Keeping Christ in Lent
In the same way, St. Joseph can show us how to keep Christ in Lent.
While Advent is the season of receptivity, Lent is the season of custody — where we care for, guard, and protect the great gift of Christ in our lives. We are waiting for Christ in Advent, but we are waiting with Christ in Lent. Christ has come, and he has asked us to stay with him to the end.
There is no better model for that than St. Joseph. St. Joseph’s March 19 feast day is the Husband of Mary, when we celebrate the builder from Nazareth who had to change his life because Jesus had come into the world.
When the Gospel says, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us,” the original Greek actually says he “tabernacled among us.” In other words, the Word entered Joseph’s family, lived in Joseph’s house, and entrusted himself to Joseph’s care. In the Old Testament, David offered to build a house for God, but God refused. But Joseph of the House of David built a home for Jesus, and his own household became a Holy of Holies housing God himself.
That is what our Lenten task is: To be better custodians of the gift of Christ by shaping our house to his needs.
Saint Joseph as a model of sacrifice
Joseph was also the model of Christ’s sacrifice.
The other major focus of Lent is the Passion of Christ. As we take up our cross and follow Jesus, St. Joseph is our model once again. His whole life was dedicated to sacrifice, prayer, and self-giving as he lived a celibate marriage literally centered on Christ and responded obediently to the Lord who called him again and again.
But he was a model of the Passion in another way, too, according to Mother Teresa. “Saint Joseph is the most wonderful example!” she said. “When he realized that Mary was with child, he only had to do one thing: To go to the head, to the priest and say, ‘My wife has a child, not mine.’ … They would have stoned her; that was the rule.” Instead, according to Mother Teresa, “He decided, ‘I’ll run away.’ And the rule was that … if he had run away and left his wife pregnant, they would stone him.”
If that is what Joseph had in mind — and it does make sense — then each March we commemorate the man in Jesus’ life who was a model for taking the sins of his loved ones on to himself.
Joseph the just man
Last, St. Joseph is the model of the virtuous man that Lent exists to help us become.
The Gospel of Matthew identifies Joseph as a “just” or “righteous” man. Pope Benedict XVI pointed out that Matthew’s Jewish audience would have known how a “just man” is defined — by Psalm 1.
It says, “Blessed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked … whose delight is the law of the Lord, and who ponders his law, day and night.” Think of that as a description for St. Joseph, a man who was strong and silent and steady, who didn’t detract from Mary and Jesus but complemented them, “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season.”
Pope Francis’ letter about St. Joseph celebrates all those who, like Joseph, are: “ordinary people, people often overlooked. People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines, or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history.”
Lent is the time to shape our hearts in Joseph’s virtues, shaping the future without fanfare, for Christ.
This article was written by Tom Hoopes for Aleteia.
Featured image: An image of Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus, housed in the Bibliothèque Humaniste in Sélestat, France. (Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons – CC-BY-SA-3.0)
