A PROPHET DESPISED IN HIS OWN COUNTRY

ST. JOSEPH THE WORKER, MEMORIAL

Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP

Act 15:1-6; Ps 122:1-5; Mt 13:54-58

Theme: A Prophet despised in his own Country

On this first day of May, celebrated universally as the Day of Workers, the Church puts St. Joseph forward for our imitation and reverence. The question for our reflection is: from where does labour derive its dignity? This question helps us to cast our minds back to the very origin or the beginning of all things in Genesis. There, we discover that work or labour is a human thing. By this, we mean that labour is natural to the human person. This is seen in the fact that the account of creation in Genesis presents work as coming from God to man. The first thing to note is that God worked to bring everything into existence. Thus, creation came about as a result of divine work, which immediately tells us that work is a divine activity. God worked and rested. “Thus heaven and earth were completed with all their array. On the seventh day God had completed the work he had been doing. He rested on the seventh day after all the work he had been doing.” The second notable thing is that work was handed on to man as God’s will for him. Again, this implies that work is a divine activity. We see a hint of this in the first account of creation when God handed the earth to man to be its steward in Gen 1:28. The second account is more direct, both on God working to make man and handing over to man he made the responsibility of cultivating the ground. “Yahweh took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it.” 

From the foregoing, it is obvious that work is divine and also part of the divine will for man. Therefore, work ennobles man and does not degrade him. The effect of sin on work was the introduction of toil, which was not part of God’s original plan for man but was allowed in by man’s disobedience to God’s will. The word of God says a curse was placed on the soil or ground to make man realise the consequence of disobeying God’s will; “By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it.” That was the departure of grace from human work. But we now celebrate the return of grace to work, more than ever before, as we celebrate St. Joseph the worker. How is this claim verified? We verified the return of grace to work when we recognised the reality of human redemption given by God in the company of St. Joseph. We see the Woman and her Son under his custody. By this, we know that St. Joseph’s work was graced even more than God intended before the fall. The enmity put in place by God between the Woman and her Son on one side, and the serpent and sin, which his seed, exclude the effect of the fall on Joseph’s work that was for the upkeep of the Woman and her Son. 

The return of grace to work is what the people of Nazareth, the hometown of Jesus Christ, failed to see or understand when they looked down on Jesus because of his profession that came from his foster father. “Where did the man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers? This is the carpenter’s son, surely?” The miraculous power of the carpenter and his Son came from the fact that their work was of divine origin and extended the work of God here on earth. This is the source of every miraculous power and the wisdom of our works or enterprises; namely, their divine origin. Thus, a worker of divine will is a prophet of God. “But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is only despised in his own country and in his own house’, and he did not work many miracles there because of their lack of faith.” This was also the reason Paul and Barnabas opposed the men from Judaea who intended to corrupt the divine Gospel for the church of God in Antioch and Jerusalem. The sanctity of our work flows from our faith in Jesus Christ who embodies the divine will for our salvation, not from what we have done. 

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, through the prayers of St. Joseph and our Mother Mary, the grace to believe firmly in Jesus Christ and to understand that this is to work always according to your divine will.