St. Joseph as the First Confessor of the New Law…as we continue to look at the blessing of St. Joseph in our lives as faithful disciples, we come to understand him as a confessor of faith. As Archbishop M. de Langalerie writes, “He was the first after the Blessed Virgin to imitate Jesus Christ in a perfection until then unknown. He listened to Jesus Christ, and implicitly believed the truths received from the lips of Eternal Truth.” (p. 48, from “The Month of St. Joseph”) As a confessor of truth he knew the voice of God through his interactions with the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.

One of the most important aspects of being a confessor of faith is to see the blessings God gives in love of His creation where we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”, can have its origin only in God.” (#33)
This positive view, where holiness, goodness, and happiness are the cornerstones of who we are in the eyes of God and how we should look outward in our relationships with others in our life of faith. We can imagine St. Joseph as he enters into marriage, fatherhood and the growing closeness with Jesus and the Virgin Mary, the weariness and hurts of the world begin to fall away and his heart opens to the holiness and goodness he lives in contact with every day of his life. When we live in the reality of God’s blessing surrounding us in such great abundance, our heart naturally opens to greater love.

This doesn’t mean the sin of the world disappears. Because as we know very clearly how the violence and sins of the time surrounded the Holy Family and something St. Joseph had to deal with each and every day, but holiness in his daily interactions with the Word Made Flesh, Jesus Christ, transformed his heart into a willing receptacle of the grace given and shared.
And this is how we are called to live our lives. Even amidst the horrific sins of the world we are invited to share our lives in service of one another. Imagine where we, like the Holy Family are called to invite others to our table as well as the table of the Lord. We are challenged to care for our neighbors with prayers and works of mercy. We are given the gifts needed to do all things with God as our guide and center of our life.
This begins the path of holiness and points us towards our true home. “We can enter heaven without being canonized saints and confessors, or without forcing on ourselves the fulfillment of the evangelical counsels; but it is not possible for us to attain eternal bliss if we do not, in some degree, imitate the saints and advance in the path of perfection.” (p 48) In other words, we don’t have to be perfect to follow Jesus. We must simply begin to follow him and the path of perfection will be placed before us.

This brings us back to St. Joseph and our call to imitate him in seeing and living the gift of holiness, as confessors of the new law, in our own life and seeking this in others even when we are surrounded by a culture of death and the sins of our fallen world. I often think of Joseph bringing co-workers and friends back into his home for a meal, a prayer and some time together and how the child Jesus would listen to the words of his foster father as he spoke with gentleness and kindness seeking the very best of each person. This challenges us to do the same, as Jesus continues to be present in our homes, to listen and share seeking the best of each other …seeking the holiness and truth of our Heavenly Father.
God bless
Fr. Mark