Joseph’s Total Dedication
If we look carefully into Joseph’s life that was apparently so unremarkable, we shall find that it was greater and more adventurous, more full of exciting events, than we are accustomed to assume in our hasty perusal of the Gospel story. The Gospel describes Joseph as a “just man” (Mt 1:19). No greater praise of virtue and no higher tribute to merit could be applied to a man of humble social condition who was apparently far from being equipped to perform great deeds. A poor, honest, hardworking, perhaps even timorous man, but one with unfathomable interior life, from which very singular directions and consolations came, bringing him also the logic and strength that belong to simple and clear souls, and giving him the power of making great decisions, such as the decision to put his liberty at once at the disposition of the divine designs, to make over to them also his legitimate human calling, his marital happiness, to accept the conditions, the responsibility and the burden of a family. In this way he offered the whole of his existence in a total sacrifice to the imponderable demands raised by the astonishing coming of the Messiah, to whom he was to give the everlastingly blessed name of Jesus (Mt 1:21), whom he was to acknowledge as the effect of the Holy Spirit, and his own son only in a legal and domestic way.
—Pope St. Paul VI
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