Today, March 19, as our church celebrates the Solemnity of Joseph, Husband of Mary, we are first invited to read and reflect on a passage from the letter of the apostle Paul to the Hebrews (11:1-6) entitled "The faith of the ancients." Our treasure, which follows, is from a sermon by Saint Bernardine of Siena, priest.
The Bible pays Joseph the highest compliment: he was a "just" man. The quality meant a lot more than faithfulness in paying debts.
When the Bible speaks of God "justifying" someone, it means that God, the all-holy or "righteous" one, so transforms a person that the individual shares somehow in God's own holiness, and hence it is "right" for God to love him or her. In other words, God is not playing games, acting as if we were lovable when we are not.
By saying Joseph was "just," the Bible means that he was one who was completely open to all that God wanted to do for him. He became holy by opening himself totally to God.
The rest we can easily surmise. Think of the kind of love with which he wooed and won Mary, and the depth of the love they shared during their marriage.
It is no contradiction of Joseph's manly holiness that he decided to divorce Mary when she was found to be with child. The important words of the Bible are that he planned to do this "quietly" because he was "a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame".
Saint Bernadine lived from 1380 until 1444. Most of the saints suffer great personal opposition, even persecution. Bernardine, by contrast, seems more like a human dynamo, who simply took on the needs of the world. He was a greatest preacher of his time, journeying across Italy, calming strife-torn cities, attacking the paganism, he found rampant, attracting crowds of 30,000, following Saint Francis of Assisi's admonition to preach about "vice and virtue, punishment, and glory."
Compared with Saint Paul by the pope, Bernadine had a keen intuition of the needs of the time, along with solid holiness and boundless energy and joy. He accomplished all this despite having a very weak and hoarse voice, miraculously improved later because of his devotion to Mary.
As early as the second century, this treatise, which is of great rhetorical power and force in its admonition to faithful pilgrimage under Christ's leadership, bore the title "To the Hebrews." It was assumed to be directed to Jewish Christians.
The author saw the addressees in danger of apostasy from their Christian faith. This danger was due not to any persecution from outsiders but to a weariness with the demands of Christian life and a growing indifference to their calling. The author's main theme, the priesthood and sacrifice of Jesus, is not developed for its own sake but as a means of restoring their lost fervor and strengthening them in their faith. Another important theme of the letter is that of the pilgrimage of the people of God to the heavenly Jerusalem. This theme is intimately connected with that of Jesus' ministry in the heavenly sanctuary.
