By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

My eyes rested upon the icon of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt as I prayed during liturgy in 2009. I had just moved across the Atlantic and was pregnant with my first child—pregnant and uninsured, because in the United States pregnancy was, at the time, a “pre-existing condition,” and no insurance company would cover it. I was staying with my parents until my husband would arrive from Egypt after his ordination, and we could look for a place to live together.

A prayer welled up inside me to St. Joseph as I contemplated the icon. St. Joseph, whose dream led him to take the Theotokos and the Lord Jesus to Egypt to escape Herod. As my eyes rested on his image, I thought about him and his role in protecting the Holy Family. They were traveling into the unknown, and so was I—new parenthood, new ministry, new roles. So I asked him to protect my family, too.

Soon after, we found a doctor who could see me until my insurance problems got sorted out. He had two hospital affiliations. The closest one to me turned out to be St. Joseph’s Hospital, and there is where I birthed my first child, thanks be to God.

Since then I have always had a special place in my heart for St. Joseph, and often still ask him to pray for my family. I considered his example, a model for Christian parenthood, at the baptism of each of my children. Although my children are biologically my children, when they were baptized, they became children of God, and I became their steward, responsible for raising them in the faith. In this way, St. Joseph’s role in the life of Christ as His steward is a model for Christian parents.

The Coptic Orthodox Antiphon of St. Joseph draws from the Church tradition in which Christ says to him, at the hour of his repose, “Hail to you Joseph, who brought Me up in the flesh, who has an alert mind and pure understanding.” St. Joseph’s “alert mind and pure understanding” due to his nearness to God is what all parents need to raise their children.

His pure understanding allowed him to hear God’s voice when the angel told him to take St. Mary as his wife, and to register the child that didn’t belong to him as his own. We need this nearness to God to direct us to love and care for our children no matter how difficult it can be.

His alert mind allowed him to know when he needed to flee to protect the Holy Child, and when and where he could return in safety to raise Him. We need this nearness to cultivate our own wisdom as parents, to know what we must do to protect our children and what we should do to raise them.

St. Joseph is often called “the righteous” or “the just” (Matthew 1:19). These days, as we consider important issues of justice in society, I meditate on St. Joseph’s justice. His initial decision to divorce St. Mary quietly so as not to shame her seemed not an act of justice but an act of mercy. Not knowing that she was bearing the Incarnate Logos conceived by the Holy Spirit, the news of her pregnancy could only mean that she was adulterous, and in fact worthy of death according to the law.

St. John Chrysostom writes, “Thus, whereas to keep her in his house seemed like a transgression of the law, but to expose and bring her to trial would constrain him to deliver her to die; he does none of these things, but conducts himself now by a higher rule than the law” (Homily IV in Vol X, NPNF). And we know that the “higher rule,” the “more excellent way,” is love (I Corinthians 12:31). St. Joseph judged the situation not by the rule of law but by the rule of love.

Perhaps St. Joseph considered her young age and the fact that she had been raised in the temple. Perhaps he wondered if she had been taken advantage of by some older man, and thus did not want to publicly shame her for this either. After all, he must have read the story of Susanna, who was falsely accused of adultery by two elders and was almost stoned for it.

His loving act of mercy might have indeed been an act of justice, even before he learned that she was pregnant with the Savior. Or, as St. Jerome writes, “this may be considered a testimony to Mary, that Joseph, confident in her purity, and wondering at what had happened, covered in silence that mystery which he could not explain” (Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew). In his wisdom, St. Joseph may have decided to dwell in this perplexity rather than act with brash certainty.

In the Antiphon for St. Joseph in the Coptic Orthodox Church we sing, “Hail to You Joseph, the blessed elder for you accepted unto yourself, the Mother of the living God. Joseph the righteous, rejoice and be glad, for you accepted unto yourself the throne of God.” In Coptic hymnology, one of St. Mary’s names is the “throne of God,” and thus by accepting her he opened the doors of his household to seat the throne of God Himself.

In his nearness to God, St. Joseph was told to take St. Mary for his wife, and he did. Doing so he became not only St. Joseph the Righteous, but St. Joseph “the servant of the mystery of the Divine Incarnation,” in the words of the Coptic Synaxarium (the Coptic Reader version). He protected his Protector. He gave his name to the Name above all Names. His home became the throne room of the King of Kings.

Just meditating on this takes my breath away.

Yesterday marks the commemoration of his departure on the Coptic Orthodox calendar. May his prayers be with all parents, all families, and everyone who seeks to live in righteousness and justice. May we follow his model of nearness to God so that we might hear God’s voice in our own lives. May we strive to have his alert mind and purity of heart so that we also might make the right decisions, even when they seem counterintuitive. May we be just, the way St. Joseph was just, according to the “higher rule”: the rule of love.

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