God Himself, in the Holy Gospel, pronounces the encomium of St. Joseph by calling him “just”.1 And the great doctor, St. Jerome, thus expounds the term: “Joseph is called just on account of having possessed all virtues in a perfect degree”. The word justice, in fact, comprehends every virtue, inasmuch as it leads man to render to each his due: to God, to his neighbors, and to himself; and when this debt is faithfully discharged, what else is wanting to true perfection?
Joseph rendered to God His due by the constant exercise of the three theological virtues, walking ever with the liveliest faith in the presence of God, with firm and stable hope expecting the near advent of the Messias, and with ardent charity loving without measure the sovereign goodness of God, and striving to the utmost of his power to make Him loved by others. He rendered faithfully to God His due by practicing all the duties of religion, continually praising Him, making Him oblations and sacrifices, sanctifying all His feasts, reverencing His Temple, honoring His priests. In one word, he gave himself wholly to God, and for His glory he would willingly have shed his blood.
To men he rendered their due by respecting them in their property, their honor, and their life. He loved them tenderly, was solicitous to assist them, and zealously edified them by his example. Compassion for the suffering was, as it may be called, an integral portion of his being. Like Job, he might have said, “From my infancy mercy grew up with me”.2 This was a gift specially infused into his soul by God in order that, as he was to be the patron of the afflicted, his heart should melt at once at the sight of misery and be moved to give instant succor.
Finally, Joseph rendered to himself what was his due: as respected his soul, treasuring up in it all the virtues, all the merits, all the sound doctrine, and all the holy operations necessary to salvation; as regarded his body, procuring for it the fitting means for leading an honorable life, even to the acquiring a handicraft which might keep him holily employed and minister to his temporal needs.
Thus abundantly furnished with divine grace, Joseph had entered on the perfect possession of all virtues. He is, therefore, with full reason styled “just” in the Holy Gospel, and this, not merely to distinguish him from other saints, as St. James the Less and Joseph called Barsabas were styled just, but as being in reality perfectly just; just, not in an ordinary and common manner, but singularly and supereminently just. We have here no slight indication of his sublime sanctity; for while the people of God were expecting with earnest longing the Just One by excellence, that is, the Messias, and were daily, in the words of the Prophet, praying that the clouds would rain down the Just,3 behold, before the time, there appears on earth one who is perfectly just. One who is just by grace precedes Him who is just by nature. Joseph, adorned with all justice, comes to figure and announce Jesus, who is called, and is in fact, “the Lord, our Just One”.4 Jesus, who is the Sun of Justice, sends before Him this star of justice, Joseph, who may thus be styled and is in fact, after Mary, the first just one of the New Law; the first justified and sanctified by the grace of the Redeemer Christ; the first just one canonized expressly in the Gospel by the Holy Spirit; first, not merely in the order of time but in that of excellence, perfection, and dignity, always excepting the Most Blessed Virgin.
We have noticed how Joseph, to avoid idleness and procure an honorable livelihood, practiced a trade. Although the family of Joseph had long been shorn of its ancestral splendor and reduced to a humble state of life, we must not suppose that they were so far impoverished as even to be obliged at times to ask alms, which some have thought, grounding their supposition chiefly on the necessity in which, they say, Joseph found himself to practice a mechanical trade, and on the contempt in which he was on this account, according to them, held by his countrymen. To refute such exaggerations it is sufficient to refer to other special circumstances in Joseph’s life, and to recollect the customs of his nation.
Joseph, indeed, was poor, but he was not a beggar; neither, because he worked at a trade which implied manual labor, need his state in life be regarded either as mean or contemptible. With the Hebrews, who still retained many of the simple and primitive customs of the Patriarchs, the profession of an artisan, if not noble or distinguished, was yet far from being esteemed as the lowest. The arts were respected as useful to society; and a good artificer was preferred to the richest merchant. Moreover, every father of a family was bound by the law to make his children learn some trade, even if they did not require to practice it, in order that they might not take to dishonest practices or become a burden to others. Accordingly, we find that St. Paul, born in possession of the freedom of a Roman citizen and a learned doctor in the law, which he had studied at the feet of Gamaliel, had been taught the art of tent-making, which he afterwards practiced when an Apostle,5 that he might be a charge to no man.
As for the supposed contempt implied in the language of his countrymen mentioned by St. Mark and St. Matthew, such is not its real or natural meaning. In St. Mark’s Gospel we read: “And going out from thence, He went into His own country; and His disciples followed Him. And when the Sabbath was come, He began to teach in the synagogue; and many, hearing Him, were in admiration at His doctrine, saying, ‘How came this man by all these things? and what wisdom is this that is given to Him; and such mighty works as are wrought by His hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joseph, and Jude, and Simon? are not also His sisters with us?’ And they were scandalized in regard of Him.”6 These words of the men of Nazareth seem to manifest astonishment rather than contempt, an astonishment, however, mingled with jealousy. They had not seen Him frequenting the schools; He was known to them as a carpenter and the son of a carpenter; and as, on the one hand, they were filled with wonder at the wisdom and learning He displayed and the miracles He wrought, so, on the other, they were offended at the authority with which He spoke; for, as it is said elsewhere,7 He taught as one having power, and not as the Scribes and Pharisees. Their words and conduct implied nothing of contempt in regard either to His station in life or His occupation.
But, further, the employment which Joseph adopted was one that our Divine Master Himself did not disdain to practice in His youth, that He might set us an example of humility and laborious industry. Nay, He had already prepared in His reputed father an example which He Himself tacitly followed. For, admitting even the exigencies of his condition, we have every right to believe that Joseph gave himself to this occupation from his esteem and love for labor, and, what is higher still, a predilection for poverty. Every man is bound to employ profitably the gifts he has received from God, whether spiritual or corporal, each according to his state of life. God, as we read in the Holy Scripture, placed Adam, as yet innocent, in the terrestrial paradise in order to keep and dress it; and Joseph, instructed in this school, although sprung from a race of kings, not only was not ashamed to appear poor, but led from his tenderest years, as we have reason to conclude, a life of toil, thus avoiding idleness and that which is often its companion, dissipation, and the vices flowing therefrom. Many at all times have like him fallen into poverty and sunk to a low estate, but few know how to value it. Constrained to exercise a toilsome and servile art, few are they who know how to raise themselves to the consideration that what has become a necessity of nature to man ever since the fall may also be at the same time a heavenly boon; whatever art or profession they follow becoming thus in their hands a means calculated to promote their sanctification. But, if there are few comparatively now who know how rightly to value poverty, and, if in Israel under the Old Law such value was almost unknown, it was a perfection of St. Joseph, a perfection which was his many years before the Type of all perfection had appeared among men, before the Incarnate Wisdom had opened His mouth to announce to the world that consoling truth: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven”.8
The merit of Joseph, then, did not consist in his having been born poor and living a life of poverty, neither was it on this account that God chose him for His representative in the house of His Son on earth, but because he willed and loved to be poor, seeing that God Himself so willed and disposed it. He was inwardly sensible of the perfection which lay in embracing a life of poverty, even as if he had a prescience that the moment was at hand when voluntary poverty would become one of the most splendid ornaments with which a creature could deck itself in the eyes of its Creator; a conviction quite opposed to that of the world of his day, not excepting the wise according to the flesh even in his very fatherland. The poverty, therefore, which was his by inheritance, he also chose for his portion on earth; so that he who was first poor by necessity became afterwards poor by election, because he was truly poor in spirit, and hence was a worthy instrument in God’s hands for the execution of His designs regarding him.
Joseph, then, labored with his hands, but what was his precise occupation? The word which we translate carpenter is in the original one of general import, and may be applied to a workman in any material, whether wood, iron, stone, or even in the precious metals. Accordingly, there have been interpreters who maintained that Joseph worked in iron. St. Hilary, adopting this view, says in reference to Jesus: “He was son of the smith who subdues iron with fire”.9 Others would have him to have been a builder or an architect; holding that, even as Jesus by eternal generation was the Son of the Eternal Artificer who formed the whole material universe, so also in His temporal generation He was believed and reputed to be the son of a builder.10 Others, again, have even advanced the opinion that Joseph worked in silver and gold. But that which is now the commonly received belief, being grounded upon the best certified tradition, is that Joseph worked in wood; that he was, in fact, a carpenter, although he may have understood and occasionally employed himself in work of another character.
The testimony of St. Justin Martyr, who lived in the middle of the second century, and must therefore have known persons who had conversed with the Apostles, is of great weight. In his celebrated Dialogue with the Jew, Tryphon, he says, “Jesus came to John, being reputed the son of Joseph, the carpenter, or worker in wood, and He Himself was reckoned to be a carpenter; for while He dwelt amongst men He had performed carpenter’s work, making ploughs and yokes, teaching us thus to lead just lives free from idleness”. Ancient pictures, representing the saint with the instruments of a carpenter, confirm this testimony of St. Justin, as also of other early ecclesiastical writers. That such was the common opinion of the first centuries is also incidentally proved by the famous answer which a Christian schoolmaster in Antioch gave to the sophist Libanius respecting the Emperor Julian the Apostate, who at that time was fighting against the Parthians. Libanius, having asked him what the son of the carpenter was doing now, he, speaking, as was believed, by a divine movement, promptly responded, “He is working at Julian’s bier”; in which he proved to be no false prophet, for soon after news came that Julian had fallen mortally wounded in battle. We have another proof of the general belief of primitive times in a remark of St. John Chrysostom, when, expounding St. Matthew’s Gospel, he says, “Therefore was Mary espoused to a carpenter, because Jesus, the Spouse of the Church, was to work the salvation of the world by the wood of the Cross”. Such was also the decided opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas, who with reference to the words in the 13th chapter of St. Matthew, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” makes this comment: “Jesus was reputed to be the son of Joseph, who was not a forger of iron but a worker in wood”. More proofs from other holy and learned writers, forming a catena of evidence down to the present day, including the last Doctor of the Church, St. Francis de Sales, might be adduced, but the opinion of the great Angel of the Schools may well be left to close the list. The opinion expressed by St. Ambrose that Joseph was expert in iron-work, as well as in what more immediately belonged to a carpenter’s trade, may suggest an explanation of all apparent discrepancies with regard to his occupation.
For this reason the holy Evangelists may have been inspired to call Joseph’s occupation by a comprehensive term, in order that all artisans, whether in wood, iron, metal, marble, stone, or in the precious metals, might recognize in him their special patron, and deem it both a duty and a privilege to place themselves under his particular protection. Thus, in this our age, when the question of the working classes is so prominently before the world, and certain evil teachers are abroad who would make them regard their condition as a misfortune and a wrong, and urge them to seek redress by forcibly appropriating the goods of others, it has pleased God to exhibit Joseph in all his glory as the most sublime model of the laboring man, so that all may turn their eyes upon him, learn from him their true dignity as Christian artisans, and, faithfully imitating his virtues, find under his patronage health to labor and needful employment for the support and maintenance of their families.
Let us admire, then, the profound humility of St. Joseph, who, although he came of royal blood, preferred the humble and laborious occupation of a carpenter to any other profession more noble and agreeable, in order the better to please God by a hidden and toilsome life, and avoid those perils which often attend a more elevated position in the social scale. Joseph, the scion of kings, from voluntary humility condemned his hands, worthy of bearing a regal scepter, to wield instead the hatchet and the hammer, or, rather, he consecrated with his holy hands all the instruments of labor, teaching clearly thereby that it is the duty of all who in this transitory life have to gain their daily bread by the sweat of their brow to regard their life of toil as providentially assigned to them, in the mercy of God, to be the means by which they may work out their eternal salvation and secure to themselves an exalted position in the court of Heaven.