The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
Anyone who has lost their car keys when trying to leave for work will tell you that “looking with great anxiety” doesn’t quite do justice to the landscape of their heart during the frantic search.
Now imagine you are St. Joseph: despite having a literally perfect wife and four personal visits from an angel of God (which helped you survive multiple cross-country journeys and a few persecutions), you lost the Messiah for an entire day. Gone from your mind are all the miraculous moments you have experienced; in their place is great anxiety.
In today’s readings, Samuel and Paul allude to St. Joseph’s role in the fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants. They show us how God uses ordinary people, like us and St. Joseph, throughout salvation history. Pope Francis expands on St. Joseph’s role in his apostolic letter, Patris Corde. He describes St. Joseph as creatively courageous, an ordinary man who engaged with his problems and turned them into possibilities…all while trusting in divine providence. “If at times God seems not to help us,” says Pope Francis, “surely this does not mean we have been abandoned, but instead are being trusted to plan, to be creative, and to find solutions ourselves.”
Luckily for St. Joseph and Mary, the solution was clear: find the Son of God whom the Father had entrusted to their care. In a somewhat anticlimactic fashion, their moment of great anxiety ends with Jesus’s alacrity: “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus’s casual response reminds us that it’s normal to experience moments of great anxiety. The Patron of the Catholic Church and the Mother of God did too.
Let us give ourselves grace while experiencing moments of great anxiety. Let the very next movement of our hearts be remembrance of God’s providence in our lives. Let us use that remembrance to inspire creative courage and cooperation with God. Whether our challenge ends in a watershed moment or a simple encounter with Jesus, let us once more fall in love with the God who grants us the dignity of causality in this life.
Chris is a stoked husband and father of three wonderful children. When he’s not playing with his kids or closing cabinets he left open, he likes to read or ride his fixie.
