JOSEPH, JESUS' STEP-FATHER

I’ve been asked to ponder Joseph, the step-father of Jesus, as a figure capable of restoring qualities of fatherhood that would help us in our scrambled times. The rules of work and relationship seem to have gotten into a new juxtaposition that is destructive to us all. We are confused about who is and who is not a father, what a father is supposed to do, how we should think about good and bad fathers.

Joseph is a figure of the Gospels, which are the enunciation of a new religion focused on resurrection. The Ultimate Father for the first time promises to restore life after death to everyone who believes in His Son. The Old Testament is patriarchal at a particular point in history. The patriarch who had been the head of the tribe (think Afghanistan) was just at that period transitioning into being the head of a family and the mayor of a town (think Tony Blair -- oh, all right, think Corleone). A man’s duty was changing from hunting and fighting to accumulating and managing. Sacrifices were changing from blood (even sons) to bread and wine from the field and vineyard.

In the New Testament Jesus tries to get these men to have compassion on the weak, the poor, the dispossessed, the outsiders. Otherwise the fathers may get so focused on protecting their crops, their homes and their walled cities that they become corrupt. Yet to survive as agriculturalists, they must be hoarders. They must save enough seeds for the next crop (resurrecting the plants) and they must teach and protect their sons because that’s how the life of the family is continued (resurrected generation by generation). This pattern continues today in Valier. I don’t get so much the feeling that individuals yearn to be immortal or resurrected, as they seem to want their family and their land to continue on into the future. And yet prosperity appears to demand that the sons must become educated and that means leaving for the city. Not just one new lifetime job but a sequence in order to follow the job market. Their lives will be full of trade-offs and adaptations, always moving -- hopefully up. Probably in intimate relationships as well as work.

In order to certify Jesus as the Redeemer who was predicted in the Old Testament, his provenance had to be stipulated begat by begat, because he had to descend from Joseph. His father, of course, was God, but Jewish heritage is traced through the mother. Yet she had to be married and the tradition of Gods is that they don’t bother with weddings. So it is probable that Joseph the husband of Mary who stood by her through her pregnancy, delivery and at least the first twelve years of Jesus’ life, was largely developed in retrospect. Our understanding of the figure mostly responds to three crucial aspects of fathers: their family roots and locations (Jesus had to collect on all the predictions of a coming savior), their conferral of legitimacy (otherwise Mary would have been stoned to death for having a baby out of wedlock), and their economic viability. Joseph is described as a “tekton.” A technician or craftsman. This is usually translated as an artisan, a carpenter rather than a peasant or a prince.

He’s pictured as an old man, a widower, so that we’d not think about him going to bed with the mother of Jesus, though Jesus is described as having brothers that might not have been metaphorical, maybe from Joseph having an earlier marriage. The rather lovely story about how Joseph was chosen to be Mary’s husband has the walking staffs of all the widowers collected and laid out together. To indicate God’s choice, Joseph’s walking stick burst into flower, another sign of dead wood being resurrected. (Of course, an artist might like to think of resurrecting wood in a carving, but no one suggests that Joseph was an artist.)

It occurs to me that not all men are suited to being townsmen or even carpenters, though my agriculturalist grandparents were also carpenters, one of them capable of paneling a finely-finished library for a modest mansion in South Dakota and the other a contractor whose family built the big Dutch barns of the Washington dairy country that have now collapsed of old age. My sculptor ex-husband did a lot of building but in the end his heart was out hunting. I mean, I think a lot of men never really made the transition from hunting to farming and towns, never accepted having a patriarch boss them around to make them into images of their fathers. Maybe these are the men who can teach today’s youngsters who must leave the ag world (some call it God’s country) to become techies roaming the globe from contract to contract, free-lancing as hunters did, like artists, writers, musicians inventing survival all over again. We know that Jesus would approve -- it was, after all, his lifestyle. But what would Joseph tell these people?

It appears that Joseph is no longer on the scene by the time Jesus is crucified. A different Joseph (of Arimathea) has to supply His burial tomb so He could be Resurrected out of it. Every wandering artist needs a patron. Of course, there’s nothing to prevent one’s patron from being one’s father. But in the end maybe the figure of Joseph is more of a comfort for the patron than for the dead prophet. The trouble with many charities is that they become all about the patrons: we multiply the image of Mother Theresa instead of looking at the dying paupers. And we are distracted from analyzing the social conditions that create dying paupers in the first place. There are societies for the veneration of Joseph.

It’s interesting and even useful to look at the humanness of Jesus through our own lives of relationships and to see the relevance to us. But in the end perhaps we would be more true to the issues if we observed the Islamic prohibition on images, which always lead to the problem of misplaced concreteness, taking metaphor as real and insisting that real-ness means what WE know and not what the other guy lives through. The consequence is quarrels about what race, how tall, what gender. We must not reduce Joseph to a little figure in a dimestore creche. Or anyone else either.