Fr. Roy Cimagala.
WE have celebrated just recently the Solemnity of St. Joseph (March 19). Once again we are made to consider the life and example of this great man from whom we can draw precious lessons that can be very helpful to all of us.
The first lesson is that God loves all of us collectively and individually with a love that can be considered a predilection even if we consider ourselves as small, insignificant, very ordinary according to our human standards, and even if we consider ourselves as completely undeserving of such love.
Precisely, what God did to St. Joseph, plucking him out from anonymity and human insignificance, tells us that our ordinary, insignificant status in our life is no problem or obstacle in receiving God’s love as long as, like St. Joseph, we do our part in following God’s will for us, whatever that may be.
Of course, for St. Joseph, God’s will was for him to be the husband of Mary, the foster father of Jesus. For us, God’s will may just be for us to be a simple worker, a father or mother of a family, or whatever. As long as we obey and follow that will, as long as we make ourselves available to that will even if some drastic efforts and sacrifices may be made, we are sure of receiving and enjoying God’s great love for us.
While it is true that we can consider St. Joseph to be truly lucky to be chosen in God’s very mysterious providence as Mary’s husband and Jesus’ foster father, we cannot and should not say that if God wants us to be a simple farmer, for example, we would be less lucky.
The true luck and fortune is not in the kind of position or status that God would like us to have in this life. Rather it is in the love with which we correspond to God’s will and love for us.
Comparing our position with the status of St. Joseph would be nothing less than pure envy, pride and vanity which are an anomaly for us.
What we should rather see and imitate in the life of St. Joseph is his total availability to God’s will, his quick and courageous obedience in spite of the many sacrifices involved. This is what truly matters in our life.
To repeat, it’s not in the position we hold or the status we enjoy. In fact, in the case of St. Joseph, in spite of his very privileged position and status, he remained obscure in the eyes of men in his time.
Another lesson we can learn is that as long as we obey God’s will like what St. Joseph did, everything will be taken care of by God. St. Joseph managed to flee in haste to Egypt, bringing the child Jesus and his mother, to escape the rampage of Herod.
Yes, God takes care of everything. If we would just manage to be close to God the way St. Joseph was, then we would closely follow God’s ways which are always the ways of safety or ultimately those that would lead us to our eternal salvation, even if unavoidable sufferings may be involved. There is really nothing to worry about.
Let us strengthen our devotion to St. Joseph. Let us imitate his virtues, his strong faith in God, his obedience and docility, his simplicity and humility, his fortitude, etc. Imagine that many of the God’s messages to him were conveyed simply by dreams, and yet he managed to believe them and to act on them.
And yes, another lesson we can learn from the life of St. Joseph is that God always intervenes in our life. He never leaves us even if we feel he seems to be very far from us. He is always with us. Just look at the life of St. Joseph.
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God’s word is not just word. Neither is God’s word just an idea, a doctrine, an ideology.
It’s not just a strategy, a culture or a lifestyle. Of course, God’s word involves all these, but unless we understand God’s word as Christ himself, the God who became man to reveal to us all that we need to know, all that we need to do to be God’s image and likeness as God wants us to be, we will miss the real essence and character of God’s word.
We have to realize that the word of God cannot be separated from God himself. That’s because God is so perfect as to be in absolute simplicity. As such, God has no parts, no aspects, no quality or property that are distinct from his very being. His word and his being are just one. There is no distinction at all in him.
Of course, from our point of view, we cannot help but to describe God according to our own terms and ways that cannot help but make distinctions between the essence of a being and its properties and qualities. But in himself, God does not have distinction between his essence and the properties that we attribute to him.
Of course, this is a mystery, a supernatural truth that our reason cannot fully fathom. That is why we need to have a strong faith to be able to accept this truth. And once we accept by faith the absolute unity between God and his word, then we will realize that reading and meditating on the gospel is actually having a living encounter with God through Christ.
Thus, St. Jerome, a father of the Church, once said that to read the Scripture is to converse with God—”If you pray, you speak with the Spouse. If you read, it is he who speaks to you,” he said.
Only when we realize that God’s word is Christ himself and that reading it is like having an encounter with Christ can God’s word truly be as the Letter to the Hebrews described it: “Alive and active. Sharper than any double-edge sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” (4,12)
Only then can God’s word handle any situation and predicament we can encounter in life, since God is everything to us and takes care of everything. Only then can it truly be fruitful as said in that parable of the sower and the seed. (cfr. Mt 13,1-23)
Of course, we have to be that good, rich soil referred to in that parable. Otherwise, no matter how powerfully effective God’s word is, if the reader of that word does not have the right condition, that word would have no effect. It would fail to produce fruit, “thirty, sixty and even a hundredfold,” as Christ assured us.
That means that we should handle the word of God with great faith and piety. We should not just treat it as some literary or historical or cultural reading. We have to realize that we are listening to Christ and that what we hear from him should be taken very seriously.
That means that we have to involve our whole being when reading God’s word. It should not just be an intellectual affair, though we have to make full use of our intelligence and all our other faculties when reading and meditating on it.
We have to put ourselves as one more character in any episode that God’s word presents to us. This is always possible since God’s word is eternal and will always remain relevant, alive and active, in any period of time.
Of course, since God’s word comes to us clothed in some human terms, we have to know how to handle the limitations that its human aspect will always have, so that we would not miss its divine and supernatural character.
E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com
