Joseph of Nazareth

‘Joseph of Nazareth’
A sermon by Kenneth Padley

St Joseph, whom we commemorate today, is very much a background figure in the story of Jesus. Often he is literally in the background, rendered by countless artists behind the more prominent figure of Mary. In Mary’s shadow, Joseph is variously depicted as watching, warding, wondering, waiting.

The role of Joseph as a background figure is reinforced by showing him as an older man, wizened and with a white beard. This iconographical commonplace developed because Joseph is only mentioned in the infancy and childhood narratives about Jesus and, traditionally, it has been assumed that he was dead by the time Jesus was an adult. The assumption that Mary was younger than her husband has proven additionally useful to those who place significance on the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity. This is because they explain the reference to Jesus’ brothers and sisters in Mark chapter 6 as half-siblings from an earlier marriage of Joseph.

Background figures are secondary to the plot of a story but they can illustrate important aspects of it. Joseph is a good example of this. A consideration of two words associated with him will serve to illustrate what I mean.

The first word concerns Joseph’s job. We assume that Joseph was a carpenter because that is what tradition tells us. However, the Bible is a little less clear and a little more cryptic. In that passage I mentioned in Mark chapter 6, we meet Jesus at the synagogue in his hometown. The locals deride him because they think they know him and his position in society. With reference to his job, they rhetorically ask, “‘Is not this the tektwn, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’”

Is not this the tektwn? When Matthew adapts this passage into his own gospel, he tweaks Mark’s words so that they read “‘Is not this the son of the tektwn?…’” Maybe Matthew knew something about Joseph which Mark did not. Or maybe Matthew assumed that Jesus had learned his father’s trade. Or maybe Matthew, writing to a relatively elite and affluent readership, felt that the profession of a tektwn was a little undignified for Jesus, choosing instead to associate it with his father.

Tektwn is a generic term. It is from the family of words which give us the English word ‘technical’. It may be translated as a carpenter, but it can also refer to other skills in fabrication and construction. Homer uses it for a joiner, a worker of wood, but Plato and Xenophon use it for masons, Euripides for a worker of metal, Sophocles for a sculptor of stone. On the one hand, it might refer to a highly skilled artisan – but, on the other, it might also reference a jobbing labourer.

Whatever Jesus did before his ministry of preaching and healing, and whether or not he learned his skills from Joseph, I hope it is not straining a theological gnat to see in the job of a tektwn a paradox about the creator becoming incarnate. Christ’s earthly trade echoes the heavenly truth: hands that flung stars into space now skilled at the plane and the lathe in the Works Yard of Nazareth.

The second word about Joseph which might illuminate his character and also the wider gospel may be found two verses before the reading we heard tonight. St Matthew does not open his story of Jesus with that infancy narrative which we heard, rather with the family tree of Joseph. Matthew begins at the patriarchs and moves by stages through King David and the exile in Babylon, all the way down to Jesus’ immediate paternal forebears. In the early English Bibles this is translated as a long line of begetting: Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Judah. With a few interesting irregularities and asides, the line carries on through several dozen names until we read that Eleazar begat Matthan, and Matthan begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary. And here, in Matthew chapter 1 verse 16, there is a crucial change. Because, after all that fathering in the active voice – begat, begat, begat – there is an unexpected shift to the passive: Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary – of whom was begotten Jesus who is called the Christ. Passive voice – of whom was begotten.

The doctrine of the Virgin Birth owes much to St Augustine who lived several centuries after Matthew. Augustine had a dim view of sex because he thought it transmitted sin from Adam and Eve to successive generations. Augustine needed the Virgin Birth to interrupt that cycle of sinful transmission. Now we do not know whether Matthew held such a theology about Mary. However, he was clearly of the opinion that the conception of Jesus differed from the biological norm. Jesus’ patrilineage was deeply important for Matthew because it demonstrated his Hebrew roots. However, what Matthew tells us about Joseph, the husband of Mary – of whom was begotten Jesus, is meant to make us sit up and listen. We are being alerted to the fact that God is doing a new and miraculous thing by manifesting himself among us.

So Joseph, from his position in the background of the scene, recalls us to some vital truths. As the husband of the one from whom the Christ was begotten we are awakened to the uniqueness of God’s intervention in salvation history through the incarnation. And in his potential trade as a tektwn we are reminded about of the dignity of work, about the value of craftsmanship as an echo of our heavenly creator, and about the Christian vocation to become living stones built into spiritual temple of God’s Church.