Lutheran Volunteer Corps

December 19 - Joseph reflects...

Tradition says that Joseph died in the arms of Jesus and Mary, at a ripe old age, before Jesus' ministry had even begun. I often wonder what he thought as he took his final breaths. Here, for lack of more time to work out the narrative, are some out-of-body thoughts from the grave.

Life got interesting when I met Mary. I was a simple man who found an honest woman, and we were arranged to be married. When it became apparent she had become pregnant by another, I was heartbroken. I planned to divorce her quietly because I was compassionate and I loved her still. I would go back to my carpentry, tend to my craft, make useful things and enjoy a measure of freedom from domestic niceties. I had no aspirations to raising royalty.

The lineage of Abraham, and Jesse, and David, and Solomon was a proud one, but I certainly had little to show for it. Perhaps mine was a branch better used for firewood on the altar to the Great Unknowable than as the raw materials with which to build a wooden ark for a wooden tradition (my religion was overrun by little men who kept Yahweh in line with the law, you see). The promises given to my ancestors of a messiah would be passed down through others, not me.

Then I had a dream, and in it an angel told me that Mary had conceived the child by a spirit that was holy and that the child's name should be Jesus, which meant "God with us." Maybe that's all it was - a dream. But it didn't matter—Mary was holy anyway, and her son had heaven in his eyes. Those who came long after I died wrote about my genealogy, but I know that God was bypassing my bloodline, snubbing the adulation of royal ancestry, in favor of Mary's humble acquiescence to the divine.

By the time death came to take me away, Solomon's ancient words felt strangely hollow - there was something new under the sun. It came in the form of a child who grew in a love greater than any I—even Mary—could have nurtured in him. It came in the form of a strange power which brewed beneath the surface of every word that passed through the lips of my adopted child. He was intense, brooding at times. I cared for him like I was his own father, but there was always a distance. Yet he was filled with a love that was as piercing as a woman's touch and as diffuse as a sunrise.

As I died, Mary and Jesus sat near me, holding my aged body in their arms, but there was a fierce strength to Jesus' grip which Mary lacked. It was as though he knew something I did not. Many fathers and sons depart without full knowledge of each other, but there was something sublime in this distance…something immense, yet comforting. It was then I first heard him speak of another father, and another kingdom. As my eyes slid shut, the last thing I saw was a dove hovering over us both…I was calmed. And then, death took me.

Joseph, I think, not having been around for the ministry, death or return of Jesus, would have been in a curious position, bewildered by the budding mystery and miraculous occurrences surrounding his son. Did he know Jesus far less or infinitely better than those who outlived him? One can only wonder.

-- Phil

posted by Scott @ 2:13 PM