St. Joseph the Worker [Guest Post]

Hi! It’s a pleasure to be writing at jasonjtheobald.com. My name is Will Goggins and I’m Jason’s friend/thorn in his side; I live in Virginia where I am also a youth minister. Jason asked me to guest-post today¹ on the feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

St Joseph is the Patron of the Universal Church. What’s really great about St. Joseph is today May 1st is not his only feast day, and in my family on our Saints feast day we get to pick dessert. This is great because my Patron (my middle name)² is Saint Joseph, and so I get to do this twice.³ As the saying about Joseph goes: “The Saint so nice we feast him twice.” Along with picking dessert, I like to use these two days to remember something specific about Saint Joseph’s life.

March 19th is Saint Joseph’s first feast day, and this feast is to remember in particular the role we know best about Saint Joseph. This main role is the Husband of Mary, the role of Joseph taking Mary and Jesus into his home even though Jesus wasn’t his child, going to Egypt, and walking to Bethlehem⁴. Even with all those adventures, Saint Joseph still doesn’t have a speaking part in the Bible. As Bl. Pope John Paul II says, though, “even without words, he shows the depth of his faith, his greatness . . . He is great in faith, not because he speaks his own words, but above all because he listens to the words of the Living God.” That’s the model he is to all Christians: take Christ into your home, make him at home in your heart, and then listen to him and do as he asks of you. (Jason wrote a post on that back on that day: St. Joseph Husband of Mary).

But on May 1st, what’s left? You may feel like we've already covered everything there is to cover about Joseph, but not quite. One of my favorite parts of the Gospels is that there are parts of Jesus life that are hidden, where he didn’t have people asking for miracles or disciples following him. He was just hanging out with his family, working with Joseph as his handyman’s apprentice;⁵ picture Joseph and Jesus working side by side all of those hidden years.

This bonding of Jesus to work is remarkable if you think about it. If you were God ⁶, would you spend 30 of your 33 years on earth working in a blue-collar job? Christ did. I think He did that to show how all our work is important, and that every thing we do is an opportunity to be with Him and to follow Him. He showed that even our work can be transformed to worship because the ordinary can be transformed to the extraordinary, and today is the celebration of how Joseph points to this great truth.

The name Joseph in Hebrew means, “God will add.” St. Joseph’s example shows God will add to our life in the ways that we are called if we follow Joseph’s example and take Jesus to work with us.

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1 Kind-of; really I just know his password.
2 Saint William was a writer, now that I think about it I should have asked for his intercession more.

3 I cannot tell you how badly my sister Mary enjoys this family ritual.

4 I left off loosing Jesus in the temple, because let's not ruin the mood.

5 A lot of times when the crowd would bring up St. Joseph in the Gospels it was a slight to Christ. In today’s speak it would be like teasing someone “your dad he fixes our plumbing”

6 Take a moment to be thankful you're not.