Saint Joseph

We don’t know much about about Saint Joseph. His life is shrouded in silence. There is a book entitled “Joseph the Silent”, trying to interpret his silences, reading between the lines of his quiet life. We haven’t got anything left from him, not a relic, not a piece of furniture made by him, not the place where he is buried. In the Gospel he doesn’t say anything, not a single word. We always see him in the background, behind Mary, as a shadow, a bit passive. We don’t even know when he died. This is why it is not easy to talk about him.

We say that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was bestowed by God with the best qualities possible in a human being, to be able to fulfill her divine motherhood. God normally gives us the graces we need to carry out our mission. We can also say that after Mary, Joseph. He too had a difficult task, to be the putative father of Jesus, and God gave him what he needed. If it is difficult for us to acknowledge what God did for Mary, it is harder for us to recognise who Joseph was, clouded in the silence of his humility. He could have done whatever he wanted in life. He could have become the Roman Caesar if he tried to; he had the talents to do so. What did he do? He spent his life cutting pieces of timber. He came, he fulfilled his mission, did what God wanted him to do and disappeared. And here we are, twenty centuries afterwards, talking about him, trying to decipher his life. We ask Joseph to help us to know him better, to be able to become closer to him, to learn from him.

He was an ordinary man, a worker, who earned his living working with his hands. He provided for his family and protected the life of his wife and child. We can relate to him. We are trying to do the same, live our lives, working, looking after our families, striving to provide for them and give our children a good start in life, like the lives of most human beings. Joseph lived in a village in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity or any of the modern comforts. He was essentially a worker. This is why we have the feast day of Joseph the Worker on the first of May. He spent his life working, like each one of us; we always depict him at his workshop, labouring as a carpenter.

In the midst of this normal, ordinary, you could say boring life, he had the best two treasures a human being could ever have: Mary and Jesus. You can imagine the life at Nazareth among what we called the Holy Family or the Trinity on earth. No other family can be compared to this. It is the model of all Christian families. This is the life we should try to live, because they are close to us and we can live with them. Saint Joseph is our best teacher because he is more like us. We feel at ease with him; his silent life doesn’t threaten us. We can place ourselves easily in his shoes.

Saint Teresa of Avila had Saint Joseph as her favourite saint. She placed her first convent under his patronage. She says that Saint Joseph never let her down; whatever she asked of him he delivered. The Carmelite nuns still have an image of the Saint who used to talk to her, with his mouth still open. Today we can ask Saint Joseph to talk to us, to show us how to find Mary and Jesus in our lives.

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The blind man

Last Sunday we looked at one of the four natural elements, water, indispensable for human life. It is very much part of the beginning of our Christian life, when we are baptised. Without water there can be neither natural nor supernatural life. This Sunday we consider another crucial element, light, without which life cannot grow either. It is part of the rite of Baptism, when we bring to the newly baptised person a lighted candle, symbolising a cleaned soul, full of light. Christ is the light who came to dispel darkness. On the Easter vigil we are reminded of this reality, when we bring the Easter candle into the darkness of the church, and little by little, by lighting the candles people are carrying in their hands, the whole church becomes illuminated.

Today in the Gospel we come across a man blind from birth. It is hard for us to realise what it is to be blind. Try to close your eyes and keep them closed for a lengthy period of time; you won’t last too long. Blindness from the beginning is a harder reality: you cannot dream with images. Once they tried to explain to a blind man what the colour red was; and after much explanation, trying to compare it with a hot instrument, he said that it must be similar to the sound of a trumpet. Colours don’t have much to do with sounds; imagine spiritual things. We are blind from birth to them, because of original sin, and we need Jesus to cure our blindness, to be able to see him.

Jesus made clay with his saliva, placed mud on the blind man’s eyes and told him to wash himself in the pool of Siloam. Why did he do that? He could have touched his eyes and cured him straight away. It is a reminder that we are made of clay, that our feet can easily break. The pool of Siloam was outside the walls of the city. He could have gone to the nearby fountain and washed his eyes, but it wouldn’t had worked. Jesus wanted him to walk with faith and show others his trust in God. He could go with mud on his eyes because he was blind and knew the way by heart. We also need to show others that we trust in Jesus. God’s saliva cured him, but it had to be mixed with our clay, with our humanity.

We miss something when we don’t have it. We don’t normally realise that we are blind to the spiritual world. Once we cannot see, we notice our eyes, as when they hurt or we need glasses. We have two of them because they are very important. We have also two ears, to listen better; but only one mouth not to speak too much. We know we are blind because we realise that the saints can see things we don’t see. We would like to see what they see. Better, we would like to see with Jesus eyes. Saint Teresa of Avila wanted to know the colour of Jesus’ eyes when he appeared to her; she says that when she tried, the apparition disappeared altogether.

Today we ask Jesus to cure our spiritual blindness. First we need to acknowledge that our soul has eyes and that they are closed. Then we have to allow him to put mud in them, and walk with a dirty face for a while, showing others our blindness, till we reach the waters of the Sacrament of Confession. And we need to do this not once, or twice, but a thousand times. Slowly we are going to start seeing; first some shadows, then some sparks of light. The more we clean them, the more light we are going to see. We cannot see the full light from the beginning: it would destroy our eyes completely. And slowly we are going to discover the wonders of the spiritual life.

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The Samaritan Woman

Today we meet a different Jesus, less attractive, more human, more like us. After two days journey from Jerusalem, he is tired, dirty and thirsty. He is all alone, sitting at the edge of Jacob’s well. His disciples had gone to the nearby village to get some food and water. Nobody stayed with him; they were too hungry or too thirsty to keep him company. Jesus couldn’t go on and had to sit down to rest. Or may be he was there waiting for the Samaritan woman and for each one of us. How many times we leave Jesus alone, entertaining ourselves, or giving in our silly little pleasures. And we forget about others.

It is noon, the sun is up in the sky, the time of the day when everything is quiet and silent, but for the sound of the cicadas. Jesus looks at the fresh water at the bottom of the well with an impossible desire. And a woman comes alone carrying a jar on her head, moving her body in a provocative way. She comes at this hour to avoid other women who didn’t like her, because she stole their husbands. She is beautiful and Jesus is full of dust. Two different attitudes in life: a frivolous woman with a bucket, and a dirty, thirsty God. We are more inclined to notice her than to look at Jesus.

She ignores Jesus; Jews and Samaritans didn’t talk to each other. And a woman alone didn’t talk to a man. Her situation in life was very messy. But Jesus overcoming his tiredness and her messiness, begins to talk to her. We are all represented in this woman, in her sinfulness, in her desire to draw water and find happiness. Jesus gives us an example of how to reach souls, even the ones that are far away from him. He begins to talk to her about what is important to her, about the water she comes to draw from the well. We normally talk about what is important to us and we find it difficult to know what is important to others.

Jesus asks her: “Give me a drink.” God thirsty and without a bucket to draw water. He says the same from the cross: “I thirst.” You can find these words in every chapel of Mother Teresa’s nuns. Even though he doesn’t need anything, God always begins asking for things. He is thirsty for our love; he expects us to give ourselves to him, to place him at the centre of our lives. Better: he is telling us what is really happening to us, that we are thirsty of him. We are like the deer in the Psalm that is longing for streams of pure, clear water. And we keep coming back every day to draw water from an earthly well, that will never fill us up. Our heart is a bucket full of cracks, impossible to contain the muddy water we are trying to get from the pot holes in the road.

Only God can give us this clean, fresh water. This is what he tells the Samaritan woman: “I am the only one who can give you a living water, a water that when you drink it, you’ll never be thirsty again.” A living water, alive, full of energy, with enough nourishment that leads to eternal life. Then, you won’t have to come back again to this well; you won’t have to look for impossible ways to quench yours thirst. It is the water that flew from his side on the cross, when the centurion pierced his heart. It is the grace that flows from the Mass every time we come to drink from his open wound. If only you knew the gift of God!

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