Solemnity of St Joseph 2012
Verbum Domini
The Solemnity of St. Joseph is a very appropriate day to line out some ideas about the Word of God, and interpretation of the Word. We can easily focus on the “unity of the whole of Scripture,” which is the first of the three marks of authentic biblical interpretation. We can focus on this because the genealogy of Jesus Christ, in His human nature, comes through His foster father, Joseph. In fact, the reading today appears to record the finding of Jesus in the Temple, a day when He first began referring in public to God the Father as His unique Father. Joseph had been, until then, a stand-in, the human being who was modeling how to be a man to the God-man, Jesus. About fifteen Nazareth years then elapsed before Jesus was ready to teach the rest of us how to be like God.
The unity of the Scriptures shows up here in our three readings. David, founder of the dynasty of Israelite kings that bears his name, has been an obedient son and servant to God. God promises David, as He had done for Abraham, a long surviving lineage, an eternal reign. We would have to regard these words as mere poetic hyperbole without David’s descendant, Jesus. Jesus would become the king, in the angel Gabriel’s words, whose reign would never end.
This was the second promise. The first promise was made to David’s ancestor, Abraham, the man whom our Mass calls “our father in faith.” Abraham believed he would be the father of Sara’s son, even though both of them were quite old. Then, when the miraculous child was born and came of age, Abraham believed that God would fulfill His promises of a vast multitude of descendants, even when God asked Abraham to slay his son in sacrifice. That takes faith of an uncommon kind. Jesus, seen here in the Temple in what we would call an “interactive” class with the teachers of the Law, was and is the fulfillment of promises to David and Abraham.
So the Gospel text from St. Luke is a writing of sacred truths with an eye to the earlier texts, certainly this one from Samuel, and the Abraham story from Genesis. In another writing, Pope Benedict describes what is happening: Older texts are reappropriated, reinterpreted, and read with new eyes in new contexts. As St. Luke writes the story from the point of view of his faith community, the Holy Spirit works in his mind to help him see how this story fleshes out the meaning of the OT passages the story is based on. So Luke is acting not merely as a storyteller, and a good one, but as a theologian. He is telling us something new about God’s loving action in history by writing with a new understanding about God’s older loving actions.
A one-dimensional view of biblical studies would ask restricted questions, much along the lines of a chemist experimenting with a new substance. Such a student would look at the story of Jesus in the Temple all by itself, as a human family story with no theological meaning. He might conclude that Jesus was a precocious brat who cared nothing about his parents’ feelings of terror and dread when they missed him. Or he might see Joseph identified as Jesus’s father and question Mary’s perpetual virginity. Or he might ask how a 14-year old from a nothing village could even dare to enter a dialogue with scholars who had studied the Law three times longer than he had been alive.
Only by adding the second dimension, the theological one, and by considering how the Scriptures form One Word of God with one divine author, can we understand this story in all its richness. For instance, the critical response by Jesus: Did you not realize that I must be in my Father’s house? With the eyes of faith and a willingness to see the whole of Scriptures at once, we see the reference to God the Father, whose house was the Temple. But we also see the reference to David, Jesus’s great-grandfather many times removed, and even to Abraham, the father of all the Hebrews. And, even more, we can look forward to the incident recorded in John’s Gospel, when Jesus entered the Temple at the beginning of his ministry, drove out the merchants and declared that His Father’s house must be a house of prayer.
But we can also see the wisdom of another translation: don’t you see I must be about my Father’s business. The business of the ever-faithful Father was done in the ever-faithful Son. It is the redemption of the world. It is the salvation of every human being who has a mind and heart humble enough to allow himself to be saved. Let us be that human being, and let’s also share with others the joy we have in knowing that God loved us so much that He acted in our behalf even against His own best interests.
