Daily Reading for March 31 • St. Joseph (transferred)
We know that Joseph was concerned about his future with Mary because they were not yet married when she conceived. We know that he considered divorcing her, as the Jewish law allowed. So Jesus’ life began in a difficult and even dangerous situation in that small town in Israel.
This difficulty provides us with what is perhaps the most important ethical lesson we can learn from the Nativity of Our Lord. Not only in his teaching but even in his birth, Jesus showed us that the way of life is a difficult way, and may even collide with the rules of polite society. We can never say that we have fulfilled righteousness because we have followed the rules; Jesus went beyond the rules to the mercy that often lies on the other side of them.
We might object to this idea, saying that the case of the Holy Family was a special case, a case involving a miracle, not like our cases. And so it was. But the purpose of miracles in God’s plan is always to show us something about the way God works in the world, to show us the fullness of what God intends for us. None of us is the Blessed Mother or St. Joseph. But by showing us these people in the context of their world, a difficult one as ours is, the Scriptures challenge us to live up to the miracles we see in their pages.
From A Year of Days with the Book of Common Prayer by Bishop Edmond Lee Browning (Ballantine Publishing Group, 1997).