Solemnity of Saint Joseph, husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Lectionary: 543

The LORD spoke to Nathan and said:
“Go, tell my servant David,
‘When your time comes and you rest with your ancestors,
I will raise up your heir after you, sprung from your loins,
and I will make his kingdom firm.

When I was nineteen I looked at old men and wondered, "Will there be a world to live in when I get that old?" When I think of the future of the world today, I wonder what forms of government will survive. Will our experiment in democracy continue? Democracy is, after all, a theory that can be tested but never proven; and forever is a very long time. 

Recently I heard another story about SETI -- the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Given the little I know of history, I have to wonder how long such an expensive and hopelessly futile project can last. As its proponents know, the odds of actually detecting intelligible signals from somewhere out there are astronomical. If they detected every radio wave from every exoplanet within a thousand light-years of Earth, which would take a thousand years to collect, the odds are not much reduced.

Earthlings have never sustained a commitment to such an expensive project with so little hope of success. We have built highways and bridges, cities and nations, tribes and peoples, and all have disappeared in far less time than a mere millennium. We're just not that interested in anything we can accomplish in this world.

As King David faced his own mortality and wondered how long his kingdom would survive, God promised him through the Prophet Nathan, an “heir, sprung from your loins, and I will make his kingdom firm.”

A thousand years later that promise seemed to have failed. Perhaps its expiration date had passed. Though David’s descendants ruled Judah and Jerusalem for over five hundred years – which is a long time by political standards! – the kingdom was finally washed away by the sweeping wars of the ancient near east. The great armies and powerful economies of Egypt, Persia, Syria, Babylon and Rome rolled through Palestine on their way to conquest somewhere else. They hardly slowed to clean the gore off their boots.

But the Word of the Lord abides forever and the Chosen People of God, nationless and largely dispersed throughout the known world, still remembered the promise to David. As nations rose and fell, cities appeared and vanished, and peoples boldly claimed their precious values before succumbing to cultural amnesia, Jerusalem remembered. The Spirit of God would not suffer them to forget.

And so God spoke to Joseph one night in a dream,

“Joseph, son of David,
do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.
For it is through the Holy Spirit
that this child has been conceived in her.
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins.”

And Joseph, of course,

... did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.