Joseph the Craftsman

Dear Friends,

This year, the Feast of Saint Joseph will be celebrated on Monday the 20^th, since the 19^th is a Sunday, and the Sundays of Lent are not overridden by any other feast, showing how much Lent is valued in our tradition. But Joseph’s feast is not skipped over, because he is likewise valued – as the husband of Mary and in the eyes of the townspeople, the acknowledged father of Jesus. 

I’ve been looking for a fresh take on Joseph. The story of his early years with Mary and Jesus is well known, told in Luke 1-2 and Matthew 1-2. The only other oblique references to Joseph are found in Mark 6.3 and Matthew 13.55: “Is he not the carpenter’s son?”

The word “carpenter” is a later translation of the word used to describe the work of Joseph. In Greek it was tekton and in Hebrew charash. The word, in both languages, originally means fabricator of any material, a craftsman or builder. Carpenters are a subset of this larger category. Scholars of antiquity remind us that in the time of Jesus, there were few trees growing in Galilee, but stone was plentiful. It’s more likely that Joseph the craftsman was a stonemason.

About seven miles from Nazareth was the city of Sepphoris (today, Zippori). Jesus was probably not quite a teenager when Herod Antipas began a twenty-year project to build up Sepphoris into what would be called “the jewel of all Galilee.” Halfway between Sepphoris and Nazareth was a stone quarry which fed this project. Since craftsmen from the area did the construction, it’s likely Joseph was one of these stonemasons, and over the years, Jesus, who learned Joseph’s trade, worked there as well.

Later, in the New Testament, we find references to stones that connect us with this theme. “The stone which the builder rejected has become the cornerstone.” (Acts.4.11) “You are like living stones.” (1 Peter 2.5)

Joseph could have had a different trade. He could have been a publican, a vineyard worker, a sandal maker, a fisherman, a priest. But he was not. And because of Joseph, Professor David Naugle, of Dallas Baptist University, offers us this way of looking at Jesus: “Jesus is in the human being repair business. He made us. We are broken. Now He is fixing us. Thankfully, He will faithfully complete the job He started in and among us.”

Thank God for Joseph, who worked with his hands and taught Jesus who is “still shaping His followers, fitting them together into a spiritual house, a temple that is built to bring glory to God.” (Robby Galatty, The Forgotten Jesus.)

~Sister Joan Sobala

Welcoming All into Our Lives

Dear Friends,

The Samaritan city of Sychar in today’s Gospel is called Nablus today – a city that is regarded as a dangerous place of overt friction between Palestinians and Israelis, as we saw a few weeks ago on the news.

The ancient well is still there, where weary passers-by can still refresh themselves at its cool waters.

Jesus sat at that well. His disciples had gone off to buy provisions. As Jesus rested, He realized He was thirsty, but had no means to get water from the well. Along came a nameless Samaritan woman with a complicated past. As she drew water, he said to her, “Give me a drink.”

Startled, the Samaritan woman responded: “You are a Jew. How can you ask me, a Samaritan and a woman, for a drink?”

This part of the Gospel story stunned Jewish listeners, for Jews and Samaritans had nothing to do with one another. How dare a rabbi speak in public to a Samaritan woman? Neither religious law nor social convention would allow it. The interaction was unseemly and just not done.

But Jesus, in speaking with this woman, shattered convention and showed that a new order governed relationships. For her part, the woman must have found his kindness as refreshing as the cool water of the well.

By asking her for water and by accepting the water from her, Jesus made a difference to this woman. He honored her dignity. By acknowledging her past without condemning her, Jesus gave her new motivation. By revealing Himself to her as the Messiah, Jesus shared His own gift with her – salvation true and real. She became a missionary to the villagers among whom she was formerly unacceptable.

Who is today’s Samaritan woman? Who do you and I ignore because of the places, ways and communities into which they were born? Whose dignity do we tarnish because they don’t think and feel as we do? Whom do we refuse a drink from our own precious well because they are a stranger? Whose life do we limit because they don’t laugh or love or pray as we do? Who is diminished by our antagonism or worse – by our indifference?

Jesus is presented in this Gospel as the great bridge-builder, the one who breaks down traditional animosities and prejudices. He is the living proof that God’s love extends far beyond our own.

Paul makes the same point about the breadth of God’s love in today’s second reading, where he reminds us that God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us…while we were still enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.

Early on in the journey of God with the Israelites in the Old Testament, as we see in the first reading today, the Israelites in the desert went to Moses with their thirst. Moses went to God who told Moses to strike the rock and there it was, thirst-quenching water. Jesus, Moses and Paul all knew that, in things large and small, God would provide and there would be life-giving changes because God provided.

All three readings today are a kind of anticipation of Easter, for it has always been at Easter that the Christian Community welcomed new members into its midst through the Sacrament of Baptism. Jesus’ promise to the Samaritan woman of a spring gushing up to eternal life is fulfilled again and again when women and men in every generation recognize Jesus as savior.

The reality of God’s love which has been poured out into our hearts compels us to be bridge-builders as well. Bridge-building takes imagination, and imagination leads to risk taking.

Jesus showed a lot of imagination and took a big risk in today’s Gospel. The woman was dumbfounded that He would speak with her. The disciples with Jesus were too.

If we really want to think of ourselves as His disciples, if our baptism means anything to us at all, then let’s pray during these remaining weeks until Easter for more imagination in looking at our world and at one another.

Look and look and look

until we really see in one another

what Jesus sees in people.

Pray that we are ready to take the same kind of risk in reaching out to others that Jesus took – and takes in our day.

In the face of all the negativity rampant in our world, with whom have we taken a risk as we rightly ask ourselves:

Who has given me a cup of cold water?

To whom have I given a cup of cold water?

~Sister Joan Sobala

Understanding Our Journey

Dear Friends,

Journeys are an ordinary part of life today as well as a thread through history.

Literature and religion often describe life as a journey, not a destination. Today’s readings offer three valuable commentaries that help us understand our lives as a journey.

Abraham, at 75, is told by God in today’s first reading to go on a journey that would unfold before him. Abraham was not given a destination, nor even a suggested itinerary. He and his family were simply told to “go to the land that I will show you.” What Abraham did would be called foolhardy by some. The proposed journey was daring, with the unexpected, the risky, the potentially dangerous.

Abraham did more than take a risk. He accepted God’s call to an intimate relationship. The attitude that Abraham most needed to exercise is trust, for the circumstances of the journey would be unclear and difficult. Fear could have paralyzed Abraham, but it didn’t.

With Abraham in mind, I can’t help thinking of today’s people, on migration, moving across waters and continents, not knowing what is ahead. Even people who are forced into career changes or are compelled by natural disasters to move have to trust. Abraham could well be the patron saint of and model for all who experience unwanted, unanticipated change. Can we trust God as Abraham did when our journey takes a detour?

In the second reading, Paul reminds Timothy that the journey through life does not end in death. God has robbed death of its power, Paul says. Christ has revealed that death is the entrance into fullness of life. When we are healthy or young, we tend to shut out thoughts of our own death. Then when illness is upon us, we think of death with fear and anxiety. It takes great faith in Christ’s resurrection to internalize the belief that in death, life is changed, not ended. It is not morbid to begin thinking this way now. It puts our journey into perspective.

Our Gospel today is the Transfiguration – the account of a moment in the journey of Christ and three of his disciples – a glimpse of the big picture, a hint of the glory to come. In the Transfiguration, Jesus was revealed as the Holy One, resplendent in glory. But something happened to the disciples as well. They could see Christ more clearly. Their perception became at once more acute and bigger.

But the account of the Transfiguration is sandwiched in between some painful realizations in the relationship between Jesus and His disciples. Just before the mountaintop experience came the first prophecy of Jesus’ passion and the call to embrace the cross as a condition for following Christ. And as soon as the group came down from Mt. Tabor, the tempo of responding to human need picked up again. There was also a second prophecy of the passion and the disciples argued about who was the greatest among them.

Lent, if you will, is a moment in life’s journey in which the meaning of Jesus and the meaning of our own discipleship can be seen with greater clarity.

Lent is a time to face the truth about us and our Christ. It is a six-week school of discipleship when we pause to rest in God on some mountaintop of our journey – to see and embrace more deeply the Lord who accompanies us on the way.

On the far side of Lent will still be an uncompromising world. We will still experience brokenness, contradiction and conflict, the barrenness of human promise. But on the other side of Lent and Holy Week is Easter – the confirmation of all we hope to embrace and become on the journey we call life. That’s where Lent is leading us.

~Sister Joan Sobala

Strengthening Our Resistance

Dear Friends,

On this First Sunday of Lent, we are asked to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus as He is being tempted by Satan. Jesus had to struggle to understand how wily the devil really is and to disentangle the half-truths artfully contained in the three temptations. In fact, Satan offered appealing options to Jesus: food, oversight for His safety, power over all that is desirable in the world. What’s not to like? But Jesus saw through the enticements of Satan and resisted them.

This is the first time but not the last time we experience the resistance of Jesus in the Gospel.  Resistance is the refusal to accept, be part of, grasp and take in what others presume to be eminently valuable. Resistance recognizes and refuses to accept options that are in conflict with our values, moral  principles and commitments and loyalties. As His public ministry unfolds, Jesus chooses to resist His enemies, as well as well-meaning people who want Him to do things their way. He resists the plaudits of the crowds, self-satisfaction, the desire to be first or to have much. We’ll see much more of Jesus the Resistor as He approaches His Passion.  

For our part this Lent, let’s follow Jesus’ example by becoming more resistant to the things that diminish us as disciples of Christ.

Like what?

In our search for a full life with Christ, resist being limited by commonly accepted boundaries. Boundaries are often separations of human making: race, nationality, gender, wealth. What boundaries are you ready to resist this Lent?

Resist being other than who we are. It’s easy to make-believe we have qualities we don’t. God accepts each of us as we are. Shall we do in like manner?

Resist taking, but not sharing.

Resist despair and fear.

Resist authority that leads us down into the pit instead of upward to life.

Strengthen your sense of resistance to temptation by eating the bread of Life that God gives to nourish us. Mass on the weekend joins us with the largest set of believers with whom we can unite, but if that’s not possible, go to a weekday Mass, where the nourishment is likewise given. We cannot resist alone. We cannot resist without dependence on God.

The good news of the Gospel comes at the end of this passage, where it is said that at the end of 40 days, the angels came to minister to Jesus.

That means that God is with us in our resistance to temptation and sin and even in our temptation and sin. It means that God who has created us so lovingly and has seen us as good, will not abandon us to our quirks, our rebellious moments, to the beaten down aspects of our lives.

Finally, it means that Jesus is God for us and with us in the hard, hidden struggles of our lives.

Take Jesus the Resistor by the hand and go with Him into these Lenten days. Go on! Don’t be afraid! Emerge at Easter strengthened by the convictions savored throughout your journey together.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Work of Relationships

Dear Friends,

In Honolulu, Hawaii, there is a road called Easy Street. I turned into it one day to see where it went. It was a dead end.

This little story makes us laugh because it bespeaks a certain truth, namely, that easy streets do dead end.

Things that are important, on the other hand, take work. We know that.

Of all the aspects of life that are the most demanding of us are building, sustaining or letting go of relationships.

Relationships begin by choice or by chance. We spend a lifetime being accessible to loved ones, to groups that share deep realities with us. We struggle a lifetime to be accessible to our God, who is always accessible to us. We share seemingly unimportant stories and daily routines with loved ones until that day the crisis of holy darkness comes. And then, nothing is ever the same as it was before. It seems almost contradictory to say this, but in the crisis of holy darkness, we see our relationships in a new light. When we are caught in a crisis not of our own making, we want to phone or text family and friends to say I love you, lest we don’t survive the moment.

Crisis make the relationship. But it may also break the relationship. Relationships are broken by death, by choice, by misunderstanding or by means beyond our control. Some relationships, like bones that are broken, become stronger when mended. More mature than ever. Some broken relationships are better left in pieces. We need to walk away from those relationships which are personally destructive of ourselves or others.

While our hearts are hospice to some relationships, they can be midwives to new or renewed relationships.

Some relationships engage us personally and directly, others are personal but push us beyond our preset boundaries. What I mean here is that we are called by our baptism into Christ to relate to others in unexpected ways – as peacemakers and truth-seekers, truth-tellers and reconcilers, builders of a culture of life. It is more comfortable to limit our boundaries to family and friends. But that is not Christ’s way.

We won’t find Him on Easy Street. His is not a dead end, though we might fear that.

Jesus’ way is the narrow road where we draw strength by staying close together, where our companions are the lion and the lamb who have befriended each other, where Christ’s light illuminates us from within, so that we and others can walk into the future with confidence.

In this 21st Century, if we are not mindful of what is happening, we may be shaped more by our social class, desire for economic security and ethnic patterns than by Christ’s question “Who are my mother and brothers and sisters?” (Mark 3.33)

Who are we as we go forward in this effort to love one another? The 13th century scholar, Thomas Aquinas, in a moment of poetic brilliance tells us who we are:
            “Our hearts irrigate the earth. We’re fields before each other.
            "How may we live in harmony?
            "First we need to know we’ re madly in love with the same God.”

~Sister Joan Sobala

Choosing Life

Dear Friends,     

Our readings today take their cue from a phrase in Deuteronomy 30: “Hear O Lord,” says Yahweh. “I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. Choose life and you will live.”

No one of us would ever deny we want to choose life. The problem is recognizing what life really is.

In the work of creating life, our culture embraces the new. “New” is the most frequently used word in marketing. The second most frequently used word is “improved.” Most of the time, they go together: new and improved. And whatever is new and improved appeals to the listener, the reader, the consumer as superior to what is being replaced. Newness sells.

Jesus did not have much market appeal when he told His listeners in the Sermon on the Mount that he did not come to abolish the Law and the prophets but to fulfill them. At first glance, it seems there was nothing new and improved about that, but actually there was. What was new was that Jesus was bent on fulfilling the Law, not merely literally keeping it.

We know from other Gospel stories that Jesus broke the rules of ritual obligation on numerous occasions – when these did not serve compassion and human need. Jesus was that free.

But when the Law touched the essence of human life and relationships, Jesus reinterpreted the Law in a far more demanding way.

Jesus tells us today that when we denigrate, despise, exclude, refuse to communicate honestly, we do violence to others. These may not be murder – but they are destructive behaviors. Evasions, deceit and half-truths weaken the fabric of integrity that holds life together. Jesus calls us to the fullness of the Law – to make free choices that are wise and generous and interpret the Law in a freeing, creative way.

Years ago, the movie Amadeus contrasted Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with another composer of stature named Antonio Salieri. Salieri composed carefully with attention to form. He played with great technical precision. Salieri kept the law of musical composition and rendition. Mozart also knew the rules of music, but he was not burdened by them.

In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Mozart added a few touches of this genius to one of Salieri’s compositions, and gave his listeners a lively, memorable melody. Mozart’s innovation increased Salieri’s animosity and according to the story, blocked Mozart from the king’s favor. Increased poverty, illness and finally the death of Mozart at 35 followed.

As a rule-keeper, Salieri resented Mozart’s reinterpretations of musical law and his free spirit. Both Jesus and Mozart would have led easier, longer lives if they had adhered to the letter of the law. But the fulfillment of the Law, the grasp of the depth of the law was more important to them.

Scanning the many incidents in the Gospel where the opponents of Jesus deride Him for His attitude toward the Law, we see that, for Jesus, fulfilling the Law has to do with being creative in our human relationships, taking the initiative in bringing about reconciliation, recognizing that external actions are good or bad depending on what’s in the heart and mind of the person interpreting the law.

It takes a certain wisdom to live like this. Paul today encourages us to find and put into practice the wisdom of God in all that we do. This wisdom is cultivated by each person who makes a commitment to choosing life.

~Sister Joan Sobala

The Feast of Transition

Dear Friends,

Last Thursday, February 2, was Groundhog’s Day, when Punxsutawny Phil determined the length of winter by his shadow. But in our liturgical calendar, the Catholic Church celebrates February 2 as the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.

This feast has been part of our church year since the 4^th century – long before Punxsutawny Phil emerged. It has been known by a variety of names with different emphases.

Jewish law required that Jesus be brought to the Temple 40 days after his birth. His presentation was tied into another aspect of Jewish law, namely that his mother was considered ritually unclean for 40 days after his birth. (It was 80 days for a girl baby.) This day marked her Purification.

By the 5^th century, the term Candlemas was used for this feast. People came to church and received blessed candles to take home for protection from encroaching darkness. The Light of Christ was among them. Candles were also seen as a sign of prosperity. The really poor could not afford to light a darkened house.

By 1969, the thinking of people at large had changed. Women and men agreed that ancient blood taboos that rendered women unclean were unacceptable. Electricity had rendered candles unnecessary to light a room.

So, February 2 became more commonly known as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus. And what might it mean for us in our day?

The Rev. Wilda Gafney, Episcopal priest and Scripture scholar, invites us to think of this as a feast of transition. Mary, the Mother of God, in her time, moved from being ritually unclean to being welcomed for who she was.

In our day, some people are unwanted in their churches or families. Think of people who are gay, lesbian, and transgender. They are also the beloved of God. Who is to say they are not? Yet some churches don’t accept them as they are. The work they have had to do in order to be true to themselves and their God is not recognized.

Or in some families, sons, daughters, cousins, parents are rejected because they have been divorced or married outside family norms or have otherwise embraced a way of life that is unacceptable from within a group that has power over them.

Just as Jesus, Mary and Joseph were recognized and welcomed by Simeon and Anna, elders of their faith community, this feast invites us to recognize people who have made significant transitions in their lives. “Without either passing judgment on another culture or co-opting the specific practice of another religion, we can make physical and ritual space for human bodies in all their life-stage changes and welcome and re-welcome to and back to the community upon and after significant transitions.”  (Gafney)

The gospel for this feast provides us with a meditation on the meaning of this welcome and how to make it happen.

~Sister Joan Sobala