Joseph is known to have been a humble and quiet man, but the Scripture also makes a point of reminding us that he was of the line of David, King of Israel.
David has been called “a man after God’s own heart,” and for all his failings, his Psalms tell us he was a man deeply attuned both to his sinfulness and his need for the loving kindness of God. His poetry has served as the prayer book for the people of God for millennia. If nothing else, this should tell us that the yearning for God exemplified in David’s words is the baseline for our own approach to the Almighty.
In his book Engagement with God, Hans Urs von Balthasar points out that what set the God of Israel apart from all the other gods is that He chose his people. What’s more, he chose them not primarily as a display of his power, but as a manifestation of his love.
The psalmist David was especially attuned to this love, and to the fact that God’s loving kindness is what should animate all authentic prayer. Our prayer is not something we “do” so much as it is a gift God gives us.
At Harmel Academy of the Trades, we run the lesson this way: “God gives us time. We give God attention. God gives us prayer.”
So what of Joseph, whom the Litany of St. Joseph names the “Illustrious Son of David”?
While his forefather, David, knew that it was God’s loving kindness that established a relationship with his people, it was Joseph himself who was privileged to receive that gift in its fullness. Joseph – a son of David, a man of Israel — was he to whom God entrusted the care of his most precious gift, his “most precious treasure.”
If David was a man after God’s own heart, we might say that it was David’s son, Joseph, to whom God entrusted that desire, to whom God entrusted his own Sacred Heart.
Today, may our prayer be born from the recognition that we are not the one who initiates our relationship with God, but the recipients of God’s loving kindness. And may St. Joseph pray for us as we discern just how we are to offer thanks for such a gift.