St. Joseph was a tradesman from the backwoods of Nazareth. Other than a handful of quick references in the opening chapters of the New Testament, he is all but invisible to history. So why should such a seemingly inconsequential, nearly invisible man be called “Light of the Patriarchs”?
Of all the men of the line of David who preceded the Messiah, Joseph was the nearest in time and space to the Messiah himself. Should it be a surprise that, standing so close to Christ, he disappears in the brightness of Christ’s light?
Yet, is Joseph’s near invisibility simply a matter of temporal, spatial, or even ‘narrative’ proximity to Christ? Is there another aspect to his proximity that might illuminate Joseph as patriarch?
Other than being the legal father of Jesus, Joseph is a father of faith in a way very similar to the way Abraham was a father of faith: he “put his faith in the Lord, who attributed it to him as an act of righteousness” (Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:3). Like Abraham, Joseph acted because God asked. There was no attempt to argue his way out of what God wanted, and he did not run the other way. He acted on what he knew to be true. In this, Joseph showed the integrity of faith and virtue.
The highest virtues are effortless because they are born from love. Perhaps the ease with which Joseph acted could simply have resulted from habitual obedience to God’s law. But perhaps it was due to a profound love.
Perhaps when a man loves God—that is to say, when he shares in God’s superabundant love— he responds to God with such an alacrity that he disappears into the brightness of that Love.
Perhaps, as playwright Eugene O’Neill put it, in “seeing the secret, [you] are the secret.”
Perhaps St. Joseph is the Light of the Patriarchs because he stood so close—in time and space, yes, but more fundamentally in love—to the one who burns with love for us, and in standing so close to the Fire, was consumed by it.