Fulton J. Sheen: Joseph the Just

Joseph, the Just and The Sweet Obedience of Jesus

The merit of obedience is less in the act than in the love; the submission, the devotion, and the service which obedience implies are not born of - servitude, but are rather affects that spring from and are unified by love. Obedience is servility only to those who have not understood the spontaneity of love.

Our Lord spent three hours in redeeming, three years in teaching, and thirty years in obeying, in order that a rebellious, proud and diabolically independent world might learn the value of obedience. Home life is the God-appointed training ground of human character, for from the home life of the child springs the maturity of manhood, either for good or for evil.

The only recorded acts of Our Blessed Lord's childhood are acts of obedience to God His Heavenly Father, and also to Mary and Joseph. He thus shows the special duty of childhood and of youth: to obey parents as the vice-regents of God. He, the great God Whom the Heavens and earth could not contain, submitted Himself to His parents. If He was sent on a message to a neighbor, it was the great Sender of the Apostles who delivered the message.

If Joseph ever bade Him search for a tool that was lost, it was the Wisdom of God and the Shepherd in search of lost souls who was actually doing the seeking. If Joseph taught Him carpentry. He Who was taught was One Who had carpentered the universe, and Who would one day be put to death by the members of His own profession.

If He made a yoke for the oxen of a neighbor, it was He Who would call Himself a yoke for men and yet a burden that would be light. If they bade Him work in a little plot of garden ground, to train the creepers or water the flowers, it was He who was the great Dresser of the vineyard of His Church Who took in hand the watering pot, and the gardening tools. All men may ponder well the hint of a child subject to His parents, that no Heavenly call is ever to be trusted which bids one neglect the obvious duties that lie near to hand.

There is an Oriental proverb which says: "The first deities which the child has to acknowledge are his parents." Another says that "Obedient children are as ambrosia to the gods.” The parent is to the child, God's representative; and in order that parents may not have a responsibility that will be too heavy for them, God gives each child a soul, as so much clay which their hands can mold in the way of truth and love. Whenever a child is given to parents, a crown is made for it in Heaven; and woe to those parents if that child is not reared with a sense of responsibility to acquire that crown.

Children placed in the right environment grow in age, too. Place a water wheel in a stream, and it turns; place it in the rocks, and it does not move. As long as we are in the wrong place, we cannot grow. The secret of the growth of Our Lord is that He started in the right place; He was bathed with the warmth 'and the light and refreshment of a home that was dedicated to God. One cannot put a bomb under a child and make it a man.

Each thing has its own appointed law of growth, provided its roots are properly fixed. All growth is silent, and there is not a word out of the home of Nazareth in these eighteen long years between the finding in the Temple and the Marriage Feast. Thus, when nature is baptized in the fullness of the powers of spring, there is hardly a rustle. The whole movement takes place secretly and silently, for the new world comes up like the sound of a trumpet. The greatest moral structures grow from day to day without noise; God's kingdoms come without observation. So, Our Lord stayed in His place, did His carpentry, was obedient to His parents, accepted the restraints of His position, met His cares with a transcendent disdain, drank in the sunlight of His Father's Faith, possessed His soul in perfect patience, although urged by deep sympathy and a throbbing desire to save man. It is in His human nature that Our Blessed Lord gives us a perfect example of obedience.

~ Fulton J. Sheen, Sweet Obedience, 1957.