Just as Mary teaches us how to live Advent, Joseph is a symbol and a companion for Lent.

In Church tradition, March is dedicated to St Joseph — and in the Church’s calendar, Lent falls mostly in March. That makes Joseph our Lenten leader each year. That makes a lot of sense. He is a Lenten leader in the way the Blessed Mother is the “Advent Woman.” 

St Joseph shows us how to keep Jesus in our Lent.

While Advent is the season of receiving Christ, Lent is the season of caring for Christ — where we care for, guard and protect the great gift of Christ in our life. We are waiting for Christ in Advent, but we are waiting with Christ in Lent. Christ has come, and he has asked us to stay with him to the end. We journey with Him through His Passion to the joy of the Resurrection. There is no better model for that than St Joseph. St Joseph’s March 19th feast day is the Husband of Mary, when we celebrate the builder from Nazareth who first had to change his life because Jesus had come into the world. When the Gospel says, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us” the Greek actually says he “tabernacled among us.” In other words, the Word entered Joseph’s family, lived in Joseph’s house, and entrusted Himself to Joseph’s care. In the Old Testament, David offered to build a house for God, but God refused. But Joseph, of the House of David, built a home for Jesus, and his own household became a Holy of Holies housing God himself. That is what our Lenten task is: To be better custodians, carers, of the gift of Christ by shaping our ‘house’ and life to His needs and His ways by our pray, fasting and alms giving.

The other major focus of Lent is the Passion of Christ. As we take up our cross and follow Jesus, St. Joseph is our model once again. His whole life was dedicated to sacrifice, prayer, and self-giving as he lived a celibate marriage literally centred on Christ and responded obediently to the Lord who called him again and again. But he was a model of the Passion in another way, too, according to St. Mother Teresa.  “Saint Joseph is the most wonderful example!” she said. “When he realized that Mary was with child, he only had to do one thing: To go to the head, to the priest and say, ‘My wife has a child, not mine.’ … They would have stoned her; that was the rule.” Instead, according to Mother Teresa, “He decided, ‘I’ll run away.’ And the rule was that … if he had run away and left his wife pregnant, they would stone him.” If that is what Joseph had in mind — and it does make sense — then each March, we commemorate the man in Jesus’ life who was a model for taking the ‘sins’ of his loved ones on to himself.

Last, St Joseph is the model of the virtuous man or woman Lent exists to help us become. The Gospel of Matthew identifies Joseph as a “just” or “righteous” man. Pope Benedict XVI pointed out that Matthew’s Jewish audience would have known how a “just man” is defined — by Psalm 1. It says, “Blessed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked … whose delight is the law of the Lord, and who ponders his Law day and night.” Think of that as a description for St. Joseph, a man who was strong and silent and steady, who didn’t detract from Mary and Jesus but complemented them, “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season.”

Pope Francis once said, “St Joseph celebrates all those who, like Joseph, are ordinary people, people often overlooked. People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines, or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history.”  Lent is the time to shape our hearts in Joseph’s virtues, shaping the future without fanfare, for Jesus. Something we all can do in our own quiet way for Him this Lent.

Fr David Jones OLW