Joseph the Fool

Advent is nearly over. The big day is almost here.

As we have perhaps come to expect, this week's Sunday gospel again includes something that, if we are listening intently, probably should strike us as comic. It's Joseph. Poor old Joe discovers Mary, his bride-to-be, is pregnant. He knows, of course, that he is not the father. He draws the inevitable conclusion.

Then an angel in a dream tells him that the conception was supernatural, involved no sex, that Mary is still a virgin, and that the father of the child is the Holy Spirit.

Well that's alright, then, isn't it? The very next morning, he takes Mary in as his wife, no problem, no questions asked.

Sounds like how most of us would react, right? Not. No, I'm afraid Joseph is an example of that classic comic type, indeed the classic comic type, the fool.

St. Joseph in his coat of many colours.

The decision requires no great reflection on his part, no mental or moral struggle—the gospel specifies that he took Mary back as soon as he awoke.

The gospel makes clear in detail how remarkable this act of Joseph's is. The claim of the angel in the dream violates, of course, everything we or Joseph know about the laws of nature, and all his and our previous experience of the world. It also expressly violates all social convention, which obliged Joseph to reject Mary at this point. As the gospel notes, this is what “righteousness” called for.

Nor is Joseph relying on religious authority. Yes, there is that passage in Isaiah, quoted in the gospel, about a virgin bearing a son—Joseph, if he were a learned man, might have known it. But note an important discrepancy: the prophet said the child should be named Emmanuel; the angel says instead that he must be named Jesus. If Joseph were relying on the prophesy as authority, this discrepancy should have been crucial—and at least would have dictated that he give his son the name Emmanuel.

But Joseph, like his biblical namesake, is a man of dreams. He automatically accepts the dream as authoritative against all knowledge of natural law, against all personal experience, against all social pressures, and against all established authority as well. The dream is real; nothing else is by comparison.

This is why Joseph of Nazareth, uniquely among men, was fit to be the father of the Christ.

It would be too much to say Joseph's attitude is incredible. I think there really are people like this, and we may have met them. But they are certainly comic figures: fools. We would think of someone who acted decisively in this way on the authority of a dream as simple, otherworldly, childlike. We would laugh at them. They are the ones who wear the coats of many colours, the motley, carry a bladder as a sceptre, and wear a coxcomb cap and bells.

This is what a good person is like. The wisdom of this world is folly; so true wisdom will appear as folly to this world. This is what it means to be in the world, but not of it. This is what it means to be one of the “little” of the Beatitudes. This is what Jesus meant when he said we are to be as little children.

In pure philosophical terms, terms accessible to unaided human reason, Joseph is right. It is the dream that is real. The dream is, almost self-evidently, a window into the spiritual world. It is only blind faith to assume that this spiritual world is not a real world that exists apart from our perception of it. As Bishop Berkeley beautifully demonstrated, the reality of the spiritual world is self-evident and impossible to doubt; it is really the physical world the reality of which is only arbitrarily assumed.

We ought all, like Joseph, to listen carefully to our dreams.

If God wished to say something directly to us, gently, without frightening us to smithereens in the process, how else would he say it, but in a dream?

And, when we lament that there is no answer to incessant prayer, only silence from heaven—

...are we listening?

15th century court fool. A tough job, but somebody has to do it.

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.

When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, 

but before they lived together,

she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.

Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man,

yet unwilling to expose her to shame,

decided to divorce her quietly.

Such was his intention when, behold,

the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said,

“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.”

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 

Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel, 

which means “God is with us.”

When Joseph awoke,

he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him

and took his wife into his home.