A Reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Find today’s readings here.
If you look at some of the most popular and iconic video game characters of all time, one very unexpected quality that many of them share is a lack of specificity. Pac-Man, Mario, Zelda—they’re each pretty basic visually. None has much backstory either. Who knows why Pac-Man is in a maze eating pellets, or what the heck those things are that are chasing him.
Many stories in the Bible actually function pretty similarly. So many beloved characters are given little more than thumbnail sketches. For instance, we know that Abraham was a good man, but that’s about it. We have no stories of Abraham’s life before he and Sarah were called by God to leave their families. Likewise, we know that Ruth married Naomi’s son, but we don’t know anything about her relationship with him or really anything at all about her other than that she married him and then he died.
It might seem strange that a lack of definition would make characters more attractive, but the fact is, because we don’t know much about them, we’re more able to make them our own. Their lack of specificity becomes a gap that we naturally fill ourselves, even with ourselves.
Joseph’s lack of definition is an invitation for us to step in and imagine for ourselves what it must have been like to be the stepfather of God’s Son and the husband of Mary.
St. Joseph, whom we hear of in the Gospel today, is another such character. For as essential as he is to the story of Jesus and therefore to the story of our salvation, Scripture tells us almost nothing about him. In fact, you might be surprised at just how little. For instance, despite the conventional wisdom to the contrary, there is nothing in the Gospels about Joseph having died before Jesus’ death. There is also nothing about him being an old man when he married Mary, though he has often been depicted in this way. And if you have recollections of Joseph having spoken to Mary or Jesus, you might have made it up: In two Gospels he never appears, and in the other two he never once speaks.
In the end, all that we’re given to know about Joseph is that he was a carpenter, he was descended from David, and, in two stories from the Gospel of Matthew (including today’s), he had dreams that told him what was happening and what to do. That’s not a lot.
Some might call that a deficit in the story. But I choose to think of it instead as an opportunity that the writers gave us to put ourselves in the story of Jesus from the very beginning. Joseph’s lack of definition is an invitation for us to step in and imagine for ourselves what it must have been like to be the stepfather of God’s Son and the husband of Mary. What was he feeling as he helped Mary deliver her baby? As he watched Jesus take his first baby steps, or catch his first cold? As he taught him how to use a hammer and nail?
It’s true, the Bible doesn’t tell us. But as a result there’s so much room for us to dream.
