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St. Joseph — The Saint Who Raised the Son of God and Never Said a Word · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

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  There is a man tucked quietly right into the very beginning of the greatest story ever told.
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  A man who raised the son of God, protected him as a fragile baby when the walls were closing
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  in, scooped up his family in the pitch black of night and ran for the border to save a life
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  that wasn't biologically his. Spent hours standing at a wooden workbench, teaching the creator
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  of the universe how to swing a hammer and build things with his own two hands. and across every
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  single page of ancient scripture. This man never says one single word, not a greeting, not a
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  complaint, not an explanation.
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  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. This is episode 17. If you're new here,
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  welcome to the porch. Pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee and stick around. And if this
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  hits you the right way, make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss next week. We look at a new
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  saint every Thursday. Before we jump into today's story, just two quick pieces of housekeeping.
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  First, if you usually listen to the show over on YouTube or Rumble, you're going to notice
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  that it's just the audio track this week without the usual graphics on the screen. It will probably
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  be audio only there for the next few weeks. I am right in the middle of packing up my house
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  and moving back to North Carolina. So getting these boxes packed has to be my top priority
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  right now. If I find some extra time, I'll get back to the visuals, but for now we are keeping
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  it simple. Second thing, some of you have already stumbled across it, but the new website officially
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  went live this past week. You can find it at EverydaySaintsPodcast.com. I would love it
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  if you could head over there, click around, and give me some feedback on what you think.
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  All right, you all already know this man's name. This is the story of Saint Joseph. To really
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  understand Joseph, you have to picture where he started. The Bible doesn't spend time romanticizing
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  him. Joseph was a working man living in a small town called Nazareth. The kind of place most
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  people would have called a dusty nothing, barely worth a map marker. The New Testament calls
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  him a tecton. It's a Greek word usually watered down to carpenter, but it meant a general builder.
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  Wood, stone, martyr, whatever the job required that week. This was a guy with calloused hands,
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  dust in his eyes, and sore joints at the end of the day. Not wealthy, not powerful. just
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  a normal guy engaged to a young woman named Mary living an ordinary, invisible life nobody
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  writes books about. Then everything blew up. Joseph found out Mary was pregnant, and he
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  knew without absolute certainty this child wasn't his. Now put yourself in his shoes for a second.
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  In our modern world, if an engagement falls apart, it's messy, but you move on with relative
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  privacy. but in first century Jewish culture, being betrothed back then, think of it like
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  an engagement that already carried the legal weight of a real marriage, meant breaking it
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  wasn't like calling off a modern day wedding. It was closer to a formal divorce, complete
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  with public scrutiny and a massive community fallout. A woman found pregnant outside of
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  that bond could face severe social danger. Under strict traditional law, things could go terribly
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  wrong for her. Joseph had every right to make a massive scene, expose her publicly, demand
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  a trial, and walk away vindicated while she faced total ruin. But the Bible specifically
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  calls him a righteous man. To a first century Jew, being righteous meant you followed the
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  law of Moses to the letter. And the law was very clear. He couldn't just sweep this under
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  the rug and marry her anyway. His strict faith in righteousness meant he had to break the
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  betrothal. But this is where you see the absolute brilliance of his character. He was bound by
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  his faith to walk away, but he refused to let the law be used to destroy her. He didn't demand
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  his rights as a wronged Instead, he decided to handle it as quietly and privately as the
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  law allowed. He was fully prepared to absorb the whispered questions and the silent judgment
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  of his neighbors himself, rather than hand her over to the mob. Before he knew about a virgin
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  birth or divine plans, he looked at a devastating situation, found the only path that honored
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  God without destroying a vulnerable woman, and chose to carry the weight of it himself. He
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  didn't need a vision to tell him how to be a decent human being. Then, after he made that
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  merciful choice, an angel showed up in his first recorded dream to drop the rest of the puzzle
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  pieces into place. The child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Take Mary as your wife. Name
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  the boy Jesus. Joseph woke up and he did exactly what the angels said. No argument, no hesitation,
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  just pure, quiet obedience. Before Joseph even had a chance to figure out how to build a nursery,
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  he had to deal with the government. If you read the Gospel of Luke, it tells us that Caesar
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  Augustus ordered a massive census across the empire. And because Joseph was a direct descendant
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  of King David, Roman law required him to go all the way back to his family's ancestral
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  hometown to register. That meant packing up Mary, who was heavily pregnant and leaving
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  Nazareth to travel down to Bethlehem. If you look at a map, that is nearly a 90 mile journey.
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  We always picture Mary riding comfortably on a donkey, but the Bible doesn't actually mention
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  one. What we do know is that a poor builder and his pregnant fiance had to make a grueling,
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  exhausting trip across rough terrain just to fill out government paperwork. When they finally
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  made it to Bethlehem, the town was packed. They ended up in a space meant for animals, which
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  is where Jesus was born, a stable. The dust settled, the shepherds showed up with their
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  wild stories, and for a brief moment, you would think Joseph could finally catch his breath.
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  Forty days after Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary brought the baby to the temple in Jerusalem
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  to present him to the Lord. While they were standing there, an old prophet named Simeon
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  approached them, not to be confused with last week's story about Saint Simeon Stylite, born
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  in 3090 AD. He took the baby Jesus in his arms and began to prophecy. He looked right at Mary
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  and told her that this child would cause the falling and rising of many in Israel. and that
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  a sword would pierce her own soul too. And Joseph was standing right there for all of it. He
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  heard every word. As the human protector of this family, Joseph had to silently absorb
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  that massive, terrifying weight. He knew from that exact moment in the temple that protecting
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  this child was not going to be simple. He knew pain and opposition were coming, and he stepped
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  up to carry that burden anyway. The danger Simeon hinted at didn't take long to arrive. While
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  they were still in Bethlehem, Joseph got his second dream. This time, it wasn't a gentle
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  message of comfort. It was a five-alarm fire. King Herod, ruling the region as a brutal puppet
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  of Rome, had caught wind of rumors that a newborn king of the Jews had been born. Herod was not
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  a stable man. History outside the Bible confirms his final years were marked by a vicious paranoia.
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  He routinely executed members of his own family over the slightest suspicion of treason. But
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  a rumored king, born in his own backyard, was all it took to make him lose his mind. The
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  angel's warning in the dream was blunt. Get up. Take Mary and the baby. Flee to Egypt tonight.
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  Do not wait for sunrise. So what does Joseph do? He doesn't ask for a meeting. He doesn't
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  wait to see if things blow over in the morning. He gets up in the middle of the night, gathers
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  whatever meager belongings they can carry, wakes his exhausted wife and newborn baby,
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  and starts walking toward the Egyptian border. Think about the sheer weight of that moment.
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  A young family walking away in the dark from everything they have ever known, heading into
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  a foreign country where they don't know the culture. They don't have a job lined up and
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  they likely don't speak the language. Why? Because a tyrant wanted their innocent child dead and
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  an angel in the dream spoke to Joseph. Harad soldiers arrived and went through Bethlehem
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  and slaughtered every boy two years and younger. Joseph's split-second obedience, packing up
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  the middle of the night without a single argument, is literally the only reason Jesus survived
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  the massacre. They lived as refugees in Egypt for an unknown stretch of time, waiting in
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  the shadows of a foreign land until the danger finally passed. Let's pause the narrative for
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  a second and do something completely different that we haven't done on this show. A few things
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  get said about Joseph constantly, repeated so often that people assume they are rock-solid
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  history, but when you dig into the text, you find out they aren't. So, let's play a game.
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  I'm going to give you three common claims about Joseph. Some are true, some are pure legend.
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  So see if you can guess which is which. Claim number one, when Joseph presented baby Jesus
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  at the temple, the specific offering he brought proved that his family was living in poverty.
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  Claim number two, Joseph was an old man, already a widower with grown children from a previous
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  marriage. by the time he married Mary. Claim three, Joseph died with Jesus and Mary both
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  kneeling at his side, which is why he is traditionally considered the patron saint of a peaceful death.
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  Got your guesses locked in? Okay, so let's look at them. Claim one is true, completely true.
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  In the Old Testament, the Book of Leviticus laid out the rules for a new baby. The parents
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  were supposed to bring a lamb to the temple for a sacrifice, but the law included a specific
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  exception. If the family was too poor to afford a lamb, they could bring two doves or two pigeons
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  instead. When we read the Gospel of Luke, that is exactly what Joseph brings. It is solid
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  biblical proof that the man raising the son of God was genuinely poor. Claimed too is legend.
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  It does not come from the Bible at all. That idea comes from a piece of Christian fiction
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  written more than a century after Joseph's lifetime, which tried to invent a backstory explaining
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  why Jesus later has people in the gospels referred to as his brothers and sisters. That image
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  stuck around for centuries. which is why old European paintings show Joseph looking like
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  an ancient grandfather standing awkwardly in the corner, but it's tradition, not history.
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  Serious historians think he was likely a young man, much closer to Mary's own age, ready to
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  raise a family from scratch. Claim number three is the trickiest one. The Bible never actually
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  records Joseph's death. We only infer that it happened before Jesus launched his own public
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  ministry simply because Joseph completely drops out of the narrative. Later on, when Jesus
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  is dying on the cross, he entrusts the care of his mother to his disciple, John, rather
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  than her husband, a husband who was almost certainly no longer alive. The deeply moving tradition
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  that Joseph died a peaceful death in a cozy bed with Jesus and Mary holding his hands?
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  Well, that's a sweet devout piece of later devotion built on a reasonable guess. You won't find
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  it written down as objective fact in scripture. Some of what gets attached to a saint over
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  the centuries is rock solid. Some of it is a reasonable guess, and some of it is just makes
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  for a really nice painting on a church wall. All right, let's continue on with Joseph's
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  story. While they were hiding out as refugees down in Egypt waiting out the tyrants wrath,
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  Joseph received his third dream. The angel told him that Herod had finally died and it
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  was safe to head home to Israel. But Joseph, well, he was a protector and he was cautious.
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  When they crossed the border back into the region, Joseph found out that Herod's son, Archelaus,
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  who was just as unstable and violent as his father, had inherited the throne of Judea.
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  That's when Joseph got his fourth and final dream, a specific urgent divine warning to
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  steer completely clear of that territory. Instead of settling near Jerusalem, he rerouted his
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  family all the way back up north to the safety of the Galilean Hills, settling back down
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  in the quiet tiny town of Nazareth. He picked his toolbox back up and spent the next several
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  years raising a boy who learned what honest, hardworking integrity looked like by watching
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  his adoptive dad work day in and day out. Fast forward to when Jesus is 12. Every year, the
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  family made the trip down to Jerusalem for Passover, usually walking with a huge crowd of relatives
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  and neighbors. On the way home. They make it a full day down the road before they realize
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  Jesus isn't with them. Now, if you are a parent, that sounds crazy. How do you lose your kid
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  for an entire day? But I caution that thought. Think of this like a giant family reunion on
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  the move. You just assume your 12 year old is hanging out with his cousins or walking with
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  the neighbors a little further back in the crowd. It isn't until the sun starts going down that
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  you realize nobody has actually seen him. They panic. They turn around, retrace a full day's
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  walk and search the chaotic streets of Jerusalem for three agonizing days before they finally
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  find him. Mary bursts in completely stressed out and running on zero sleep. She asks why
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  he would do this to them. And she specifically says, Your father and I have been searching
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  for you in agony. Jesus answers her directly asking, why were you searching? Didn't you
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  know I had to be in my father's house? Do not miss what just happened there. Three sleepless
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  nights, three days walking every street in Jerusalem, imagining the worst. And the second they finally
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  find him, Mary doesn't hold back. She says, Your father and I have been searching for you
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  in agony. Your father. She means Joseph, plain and simple, the man who raised him. And it's
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  Jesus' answer that stings. He doesn't correct her about who raised him, but he answers by
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  pointing somewhere else entirely. Didn't you know I had to be in my father's house? Capital
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  F, not the workshop back in Nazareth. Not the man who just spent three days combing every
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  street in Jerusalem for him. God's house. If you are a dad or you've ever wanted to be,
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  sit with that for a second. You show up every single day. You do the work nobody sees. And
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  in the very same breath where your own wife calls you father, without a second thought,
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  your son's answer quietly points past you to somebody else. But I also want you to listen
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  to what Joseph does with that. He doesn't correct him. He doesn't get his feelings hurt or pull
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  rank as the man of the house. He just stands there, silent, exactly the way he stood through
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  everything else. Because somewhere along the way, he'd already made peace with the fact
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  that this boy was never fully his to begin with. He was raising the son of God. And if that
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  meant swallowing the sting for the sake of something bigger than himself, Joseph was going to swallow
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  it. It is wild when you look at church history and realize how long it took institutional
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  Christianity to figure out what to do with Joseph. For much of early Christian history, devotion
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  to Joseph was surprisingly quiet. While Mary and the major apostles were getting massive
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  cathedrals built in their honor, Joseph sat in the background of church life. That started
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  shifting during the Middle Ages and the momentum picked up steam over the last couple of centuries.
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  In 1870, Pope Pius IX formally declared Joseph the patron of the entire universal church,
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  a massive elevation for a guy who never uttered a single line of dialogue. Nearly a century
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  later, in 1955, Pope Pius XII established a second feast day specifically for him, St.
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  Joseph the Worker, deliberately placed on May 1st to align with the Global Workers' Holiday.
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  And as recently as 2021, Pope Francis declared a special year of St. Joseph. A guy who never
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  says a word in the text somehow keeps getting more attention as the centuries march on, not
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  less. All right. Back to the porch. I honestly don't think Joseph ever set out to prove anything
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  to anybody. I don't think he was trying to leave a legacy or get his name carved into stone.
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  I just think he woke up every single morning and kept doing the next necessary thing over
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  and over again without ever once needing a pat on the back. Look at the trail of what he actually
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  does across these stories. He protects a young woman's dignity before he has any legal or
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  social reason to do so. He wakes up in the middle of the night and drags his family across international
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  borders to save a child that doesn't even share his DNA. He spends three panic days tearing
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  through a crowded city looking for a boy who wasn't even lost on purpose. Every single one
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  of those things is an action. Not one of them comes with a press release or a quote attached.
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  We live in a world that trains us to believe that the things we say out loud are the things
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  that actually count. Post it online, announce your intentions, explain your reasons to the
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  crowd, build your personal brand. Joseph never got that option. And looking at his life, I
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  don't think he would have taken it if he had. He just did the next hard, necessary thing,
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  and he let the doing be the entire statement. Here's what I keep landing on with him. And
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  it hits a little different than the story of St. Simeon we talked about last week. Simeon
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  tried to disappear from the world by climbing to the top of a pillar, but the crowds found
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  him anyway. He couldn't escape the spotlight. Joseph, he never tried to disappear at all.
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  He just never made himself the center of anything. Fading quietly into the background is simply
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  what happens to a man who refuses to make everything about himself. Two very different guys standing
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  in different centuries, but both of them telling us something desperately true. The loudest
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  part of your life isn't always the part that matters the most. So here's the question I'm
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  sitting with this week. Where in your own life are you doing the right thing quietly, with
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  nobody watching and no grand plan to ever explain yourself to anyone? And can you find a way
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  to let that just be enough? Not because someone is going to put a plaque up with your name
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  on it, but because it was never about being known in the first place. Think on that. It
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  is now time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Joseph. Thank you for a man who protected,
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  provided, and obeyed without ever needing to be heard doing it. For anyone listening
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  right now who feels like their quiet faithfulness is going completely unnoticed, let them trust
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  that you saw every single one of Joseph's silent choices and you see theirs too. Give us his
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  kind of courage, the kind that acts first. and explains never. Amen. Well, St. Joseph
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  is recognized as the patron saint of workers, of families, of the dying, of the universal
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  church, and of immigrants and refugees. His primary feast day is celebrated on March 19th
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  with a second feast, St. Joseph the worker, marked on May 1st. Well, that's episode 17.
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  If this one gave you something to sit with, do me a favor. and send it to somebody who
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  needs to hear it today. And hey, if you did make it this far, all the way to the end,
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  can I ask you for something? Hit follow on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and if you got 30 seconds,
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  leave a rating. I'm not chasing numbers just to chase them. I'm trying to get this show
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  into the top 200 in the religion category. And follows and ratings are exactly what moves
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  that needle. That's the whole ask. Next week, we are back to an unknown saint. This one
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  starts with a father who couldn't let go of his grief, and it ends with an entire town
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  that centuries later is still taking in the very people the rest of the world turns away.
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  I do think this one's gonna stick with me. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on the
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  porch with me, and I will see you next week.
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  you