Holiness in Ordinary Life: Homily for Tuesday, March 19, 2024

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In every aspect of his life Joseph was faithful to God.

Holiness in Ordinary Life

Both of the options for the Gospel today are really wonderful, and I wish I could have read them both. The first has to do with Joseph and the dream. But I thought that this second Gospel, the one we read today, was one that was worth spending a little time thinking about.

You know, sometimes when we look back on the saints, we can forget that they were fully human. So Mary is fully human. Joseph is fully human. And they had to discover and develop this relationship with God in the same way that you and I do. They had to figure out what it meant. They had to figure out who was this Jesus. They had to come to know and to love their son for who he was.

And as we can see there, at least in this instance, we don’t get many instances with Joseph where there was potentially a real struggle in figuring out what it meant to be the father of this boy. Joseph disappears from the Gospels relatively early. There’s all kinds of speculation with that.

Some posit that he was an elderly man, that this was a second marriage. Hence Jesus having brothers and sisters, for example. But whatever it was, we don’t get many instances. But the instances we do get of Joseph, for he is recounted, we know that Joseph was a man of faith. We know that deep within his being there was a sense of righteousness.

He’s not going to shame Mary, for example, when he has to come to grips with the real difficulty of a woman he is betrothed to who is pregnant and he knows he is not the father. We know that he follows the advice in a dream and takes Mary to Egypt for the safety of Mary and Jesus.

And we can only imagine that today, when they are looking for Jesus, Joseph is continuing to be the man of faith. That somewhere in the midst of all of this, he will come to know who his son is and he will come to believe.

That really for us is the season of Lent. To take those ordinary events of our lives and to ask ourselves where is God present and what does God want us to do? Such is what we celebrate in Joseph. He needed to ask where was God present and what did God want him to do?And indeed, what God wanted him to do was no small thing.

It was a significant thing, caring for the Lord Jesus so that Jesus might become the one who dies for our sins to save us forever.As we go through the ordinary events of our lives, especially in these last few days of Lent, let us ask the Lord to help us to know where God is in our lives and what it is that God wants us to do.

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