Make Space
Our Lord seems to have found this world a cluttered place. Luke 2:7 says that there was no room for the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem. Thirty years later, the same Evangelist tells us, there would be no room for Jesus in Nazareth, either (Lk 4:23–30), and the Son of Man would have nowhere to lay his head (Lk 9:58). In many human hearts, his Word would find “no place” (Jn 8:37).
Yet there were some who made room for him. We might think of Simon and Andrew’s house in Capernaum, which St. Mark can call Jesus’ “home” (Mk 2:1), or of Martha of Bethany who “welcomed him into her house,” as would Zacchaeus in Jericho (Lk 10:38; 19:1–6). This hospitality never came without a cost. Simon and Andrew’s house would be overcrowded and sustain roof-damage (Mk 2:2–4), Martha would be admonished to adjust her priorities (Lk 10:39–42), and Zacchaeus would make expensive restitutions for his earlier malpractice (Lk 19:8).
Above all, the Virgin of Nazareth incomparably offered her whole self as a gift to make space for Jesus, “with love beyond all telling,” as the Roman Missal puts it. And the Blessed Virgin’s gift was honored and protected by another, that it might bear fruit. “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit,” said the angel, and Joseph humbly obeyed (Mt 1:20). In the early second century, St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote that Mary’s virginal motherhood was a mystery concealed from the prince of this world.[1] Precisely by accepting his role as husband and father, St. Joseph made room in this world for the mystery of Jesus and Mary, keeping it safe from the prideful, prying eyes of the devil, to whom humility and self-giving love are incomprehensible.
Making room for Jesus and Mary—or for anyone, for that matter—does not mean backing off, getting out of the way. In Joseph’s case, quite the contrary: he created space by not backing off and getting out of the way, even when he would have preferred to (Mt 1:19–20). Space, as the context for authentic flourishing, is not about anchorless indeterminacy of meaning or unfettered libertarian choice. Space entails order. St. Joseph made room for Jesus precisely in the context of a divinely ordained Plan. “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet…” (Mt 1:23). That Plan sweeps across the centuries of Israel’s glorious and heartbreaking sacred history, coming to an unlikely culmination in “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ” (Mt 1:16). It is Joseph who was “son of David.” But by naming and thus claiming Mary’s Son (Mt 1:21, 25), Joseph made room for Jesus at the climax of the royal genealogy that opens St. Matthew’s Gospel. He created space in this world for Jesus’ messianic identity.
Joseph thereby also made room for Jesus’ saving mission. It is often repeated, and it is perfectly true, that Scripture records not a single word of Joseph’s—at least not directly. But Scripture does strongly imply that he said at least one specific word: “And he called his name Jesus” (Mt 1:25). The one word we can be confident that Joseph uttered was “Jesus,” a name that sums up the mission of Joseph’s Son: “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21; see CCC 432, 2666).
The sole episode that Scripture recounts from Jesus’ childhood shows that Joseph did not always fully grasp his Son’s mission. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus asks his parents, but “they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them” (Lk 2:49–50). This unsettling sign reminded Joseph “that he was a guardian of the mystery of God.”[2] But that guardianship would be lived in an apparently normal family life. “And [Jesus] went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them” (Lk 2:51). What did that mean for Joseph? Nothing more glamorous than the ordinary work of a craftsman to provide for his family. In the Litany of St Joseph, he is invoked as Almae Familiae praeses—“head of the Holy Family.” His was a real authority. Yet, as Pope St Paul VI observed in 1966, it was an authority that he used only “in order to make a total gift of self, of his life and work,” to Jesus.[3] It was an authority he used not for himself, but for others. And with it he made space for the ineffable mystery of the Incarnate Word to flourish in this cluttered world: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Lk 2:52).
Jesus’ submission to his earthly father adumbrates his total fidelity to his heavenly Father (Jn 5:19; 8:28). The saints have therefore called St. Joseph the “shadow of the Father.” Joseph’s shadowing-forth of the Father extends to his work. As St. Joseph would work to make space for the Second Adam, in the beginning God worked to make space for the First Adam. He not only created but also arranged and adorned the universe to be a place of order and meaning rather than a chaos “without form and void” (Gen 1:2). He prepared the garden for the man, appointing it with all he would need to flourish (Gen 2:8–9). And he invited the man to the dignity of imitating his maker by working and keeping the garden (Gen 2:15). We are no longer in Eden, but this invitation is still extended to all workers. No matter how “menial” the labor might seem, work that is done in love participates in the dignity of the Father’s work of making space, of establishing order, of pursuing the common good.
Based on Joseph’s absence after Jesus’ childhood, Christian Tradition has reasonably concluded that he died before Jesus began his public ministry. Protected by Joseph, the “shadow of the Father,” Jesus was prepared for his great work: “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (Jn 5:17). He came, he told his disciples, to accomplish the work of the one who sent him (Jn 4:34; 5:36; 17:4). That work, the work of redemption, was to be completed in his Paschal Mystery. This too was a task of creating space.
“In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (Jn 14:2). The Father’s house—the new and definitive Temple—is Jesus’ own body (Jn 2:21). Where, then, is the “place” that Jesus prepared for us? When Christ’s side was opened, blood and water flowed out, symbols of the Sacraments of salvation that draw us in, bringing us into union with him. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,” Jesus had solemnly predicted, “will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12:32).
Accordingly, patristic and medieval interpreters saw the wound in our Lord’s side as a portal. For St. Augustine, it was the door of the Ark of salvation.[4] For St. Ephrem, it was the gate through which we return to Eden.[5] A millennium later, Christian mystics expanded on the image. In the 1330s the Flemish priest Blessed John van Ruysbroeck wrote, “The open wound in his side will be your door to eternal life and your entranceway into that living paradise which he is himself.”[6] Just a few decades later, Julian of Norwich saw that same wound as “a beautiful and delightful place, large enough for all mankind that will be saved to rest there in peace and love.”[7]
Coming into this cluttered and inhospitable world, our Lord has made room for us in his Body. He has made room for us in his own identity as Son of the Father (Jn 1:12). This divine gift was made possible by the quiet righteousness of Joseph’s ordinary work, by which he made space for Mary and for Jesus, and thus guarded the mystery through which the Lord would make space for us all. Through Joseph the Worker’s intercession, and in imitation of his faithful work, may we too create space for those around us to flourish in accord with God’s plan. Above all, may we make room in ourselves for Jesus’ Word (Jn 8:37), that he and his Father might come and make their home with us (Jn 14:23).
