Romana

Today, on the feast of St. Joseph, the liturgy offers us many texts, as usual. But in particular, the second reading – from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans – applies to St. Joseph the figure of Abraham: he who, hoping against hope, believed that he would become the father of many nations, and it was counted in him as righteousness (cf. Rom 16-22). This is the connection between faith and hope, which today we are invited to contemplate also in the life of St. Joseph: a faith linked to a firm hope, born of trust in God’s power, love and plans, even when those plans are beyond our ability to understand them.

In St. Joseph we see a man who believes, who trusts, who accepts in faith the immense mystery of the Incarnation. We see him accept a plan that breaks with the most natural human plans, even those that he had surely conceived in his heart. We see him setting out for Egypt almost without preparation, relying solely on the word of God. And we see him always like this: obedient, silent, faithful. In a special way we contemplate him together with Our Lady, years later, when the Child remains in the Temple and both receive from Jesus a response that is truly disconcerting. We have often meditated on it: despite being who they were, Our Lady and St. Joseph did not fully understand the Lord. This is what the Gospel itself says. And yet this faith impelled them to always accept God’s will, to want what God wants. It was a living, active, intelligent faith. A faith that acted through charity. A faith that also manifested itself as the root of a prompt, delicate and total obedience to God’s plans.

Faith itself is already a form of obedience: it is the obedience of faith, the surrender of mind and heart to God. That is why today we can ask you, Lord, through the intercession of Saint Joseph, united with the Blessed Virgin, to grant us a faith this great. A faith that makes us live convinced of your love, because that is, in the end, the great theme of our faith: to believe in your faithful and eternal love.

A love that leads us to accept your plans and demands, even when we do not fully understand them. Today, Lord, in a special way, we ask you for the faith of St. Joseph. It is a bold request, we know. But at least we wish to come closer to that faith, and may it also lead us to a great hope. May we know how to hope against all hope, like Abraham, like Saint Joseph. Specifically, the hope of holiness. The hope of doing your will, Lord, despite the experience of our weakness. May that hope be rooted in a renewed, greater faith, placed not in our strength, but in your power and in your love for us. And from there, may we live open to your will, open with docility, with humility, with trust. Open, in a word, to joyfully obey your plan of love.

With a free obedience, with a great freedom of spirit, with a heart that makes your will its own, Lord. In this way we will not hesitate to obey with joy. Even when your plans are difficult, humanly incomprehensible, as happened to St. Joseph. Pope Francis once said that ‘Joseph did not hesitate to obey, without questioning the difficulties he might encounter’ (Patris Corde, n. 3): ‘He got up, took the child and his mother by night and went to Egypt’ (Mt 2:14-15). A truly astonishing plan… and yet Joseph did not hesitate.

We ask you today, Lord, through the intercession of St. Joseph, that we may know how to obey without hesitation. Not just outwardly, not just out of duty, but with inner freedom. May we obey because we want to, because we make it our own, because we believe with firm faith that what you ask of us is always the best for us, the fruit of your faithful love.

Hope in heaven

Our Father told us that we were his hope, because the Work is in our hands, and we have the certainty that from heaven he continues to help us, and continues to push us. We want to live with that hope which, as Saint Paul writes to the Colossians, is in heaven (cf. Col 1:5). Not in our strength, not in our abilities, but in you, Lord, in your love, in your faithfulness. We trust that you do not leave us alone, that we can always count on your help, and that we will be faithful… if we wish to be faithful. Lord, today we renew that desire: we want to be faithful. And we know that, if we want to be, we will be, because your grace will never fail us. That is why we can live with security, with a certain hope, not based on our strength, but on your power, on your love. A hope that is also security. And that is what we ask of you today, Lord: that you grant us, like our Father, the security of the impossible. Because the impossible that we want to live and achieve is, above all, our own holiness.

Faced with the experience of our own weakness, we must be convinced that holiness is not a utopia. It is not an unattainable goal or an abstract ideal. Holiness is God’s call for each of us. It is his plan for our lives. And he who calls us also gives us all the means necessary to attain it, all the strength, even in the midst of our frailties. This is the assurance of the impossible: to believe that, with God, we can become saints.

We remember those words of our Father, who described St. Joseph as the man with the permanent smile and the shrug of the shoulders. Not a gesture of indifference, but of confident abandonment: whatever happens, we count on God’s help. That is why we too want to live with a permanent smile in the face of difficulties, with that hope which is the source of joy. The Christian hope of which Saint Paul speaks: ‘Rejoice in hope’ (Rom 12:12). A hope placed in the Lord, not in our own strength. For hope is born of faith, and is inseparably linked to it.

The Gospel says little about St. Joseph. It shows us his faith, his docility to God’s plans. And we can rightly imagine – without fear of being mistaken – how he would be with the Lord, how lovingly he would care for Jesus in his infancy. We too want to approach Christ like that: with all the affection we are capable of. And we know that we accompany and love him also when we accompany and love others. That is why we ask you today, Lord, that with faith and hope you may also increase charity in us. May we know how to truly love, with a love that translates into a spirit of service, into a habitual willingness to think of others, to make their lives more pleasant, to pray for them, to make everything that affects them our own.

Making our self-giving new

St. Joseph’s faith is a faith that translates into faithfulness. Today’s Gospel sums it up: ‘Joseph did as the angel of the Lord commanded him’ (Mt 1:24). A faith that becomes obedience, docility, persevering fidelity. And that is what we want to renew today, Lord: our surrender. May this renewal be not just a memory, but a real act. May our self-giving be truly new today. May we offer it to you with renewed love, with the sincere desire to be faithful to you, like St. Joseph: always, in everything, with joy.

And how can we make our self-giving new? First of all, with the conviction that it is possible to make it new. That it is possible not to live by inertia, but with a nunc coepi, a ‘now I begin’. To make a new commitment is to make love new, it is to renew the struggle, and with it also faith and hope. Because we can renew the conviction that the Lord wants us to do the Work, and gives us the means to do it. He gives us the grace to become saints, to be very effective in ordinary life, in the little things, which become great when they are lived out of love. Fidelity is renewed, and that renewal is fidelity to our vocation; therefore, it is fidelity to Jesus Christ, because that is what it is all about.

We do not strive only to be faithful to an idea – although it is also an idea – but above all to be faithful to a person, to Jesus Christ. We want to be faithful to you, Lord. And today we especially want to renew that faithfulness to you. This means being faithful to the path, to the vocation we have received. But this faithfulness is not to abstract concepts, but to the Lord. That is why we want to make very much our own words of Saint Paul to the Romans: ‘Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord’ (Rom 14:8-9). We want everything to belong to God: our work, our rest, our entertainment, our dreams, our sorrows and sufferings… everything. Because everything can be the Lord’s. And because the Lord wants everything to be his, since we are his, and we want to be ipse Christus, Christ himself.

And we are, and we will be more and more, if we renew our dedication with God’s grace, which we do not lack and will never lack. All the strength to fulfil this sincere desire for renewed fidelity is, logically, where it needs to be: in the Lord himself. Therefore, it is in the Eucharist, in that central moment of each day, where we experience an intimate and real union with Christ – a physical identification with the Lord – where we find all our strength. And there we also live that Ite ad Ioseph, ‘Go to Joseph’.

Today we can ask St. Joseph to help us to be Eucharistic souls, to teach us to be deeply immersed in the tabernacle, to find there the strength to be faithful. The daily strength to renew our fidelity, day by day. So that our renewal may be, truly, to make our fidelity new.

And logically, for us, to be faithful to the Lord is to be faithful to what he wants of us: to be faithful to the spirit of the Work, and therefore also faithful to our Father. Today, of course, is also a day to keep him very much in mind. Perhaps we are reminded of the advice Paul VI gave to Don Alvaro when he began his mission as Father: ‘Whenever you have to resolve a matter, place yourself in the presence of God, and ask yourself: in this situation, what would my founder do?’ Don Alvaro remarked with simplicity that this was exactly what he had been clear about from the beginning: to do things as our Father would do them.

Today, on the feast of St. Joseph, we can also recall the words of St. Josemaría, who told us in one of his homilies: ‘The name Joseph means, in Hebrew, God will add. God adds, to the holy life of those who do his will, unsuspected dimensions: what is important, what gives value to everything, what is divine’ (Christ Is Passing By, no. 40). In the smallest things – in our work, in our prayer – we touch the whole world, we reach immense horizons. The greatness of our works is given by the Lord. He gives that greatness. And when we place in your hands, Lord, even the smallest thing, it reaches to the end of the world, to all regions, to all tasks. Even in the works that seem to us – and humanly perhaps they are – small, limited in time, you, Lord, can make them reach the nearest and the farthest souls. Faithful… it is worth it. Today is also a day to sing to ourselves: ‘Faithful, it is worth it’.

As we renew our faithfulness, we realize that it is worth it. It is worth it even when it involves the weariness of our work, the more difficult task, the aspect that we do not understand. It is worth it, yes, it is worth it. And like our Father, when he heard that song, he repeated softly that ‘it is worth it’, as an expression of a living experience: it had cost so much effort, so much work, so much sacrifice, to carry the Work forward. We ask you, Lord, through the intercession of St. Joseph, to impress upon us more deeply this idea, so simple and so true: that it is worthwhile. Whatever we have to do, whatever work, whatever suffering is needed to carry the Work forward… it is worth it. We already have the experience that it is so, and we want that experience to become more constant, more profound, and therefore also more joyful.

Saint Joseph, our Father and Lord, patron of the universal Church… today is also an occasion to pray for the Pope, remembering Saint Joseph as patron of the whole Church. And we finish, logically, by uniting our prayer to Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Our Father used to say that when he woke up in the morning, the first thing he saw was a picture of this trinity on earth: the Blessed Virgin with the Child and St. Joseph. We too want our daily awakening – not only physical, but also the awakening of our conscience in our work, in our circumstances – to be, in a way, a glimpse of that trinity on earth, which leads us directly to the Trinity in heaven.