Why does the Church have us read about the patriarch Joseph on the feast of St. Joseph?

• What is real and what is not real? There are many things that we know through direct observation. But reality is much greater than what we can observe directly.
• For instance, for centuries, mankind was not aware of the microscopic world. There were some who speculated about it but could not prove that it existed. Regardless of what human beings thought about it, though, that microscopic world was existing.
• Through the invention of microscopes, we are now able to directly observe microbes, cells, DNA and, to some extent, even atoms. Now, no one questions that they exist because we are able to see them directly. We know now that a single drop of water contains 20 million microbes and a single teaspoon of soil contains up to one billion microbes. Teeming with life!
• But there are still many aspects of reality that we are not able to see directly. God wants it to be this way. He wants there to be hidden aspects of reality that we are not able to know by observation.
• Some of those things that we cannot observe directly, He wants to tell us about and ask us to believe that they exist on the basis of faith in His word. This is the case for the truths of our faith. We are not able to observe directly any of the things that we believe in our Catholic Faith. We do not believe in them because we are able to observe them; we believe in them—we consider them to be real—because God, Who is the Master of all reality, tells us that they exist.
• One of the things we are all able to observe directly, as being part of reality, is death. One of the things that we are not able to observe directly, but we believe on faith, is resurrection
• We have all experienced people dying during our life. But none of us has experienced someone coming back to life. We believe that we will rise from the dead because Our Lord told us about it and because He Himself rose from the dead.
• And just like the other aspects of reality that we are not able to observe, some people believe in the resurrection and some people do not.
• The resurrection was something that both Jewish and pagan peoples, in the time of Our Lord, had a hard time to accept.

• During the second half of Lent, the Church does something remarkable in the traditional liturgy: she has us read almost exclusively from the Gospel of St. John. From day 21 until the last day of Lent, there are only two Gospels that are not from St. John, outside the readings of the Passion. During that time, we read about 43% of the Gospel of St. John.
• It is clear that the Church wants us to focus on this Gospel in order to learn about the Passion.
• We know that this Gospel is unique: it was written long after the other three Gospels; it contains more words of Our Lord than any of the other Gospels; it seeks to complete what is missing in the other Gospels; it focuses especially on Our Lord’s claim to be God and His conflicts with the leaders of the Jewish religion.
• I thought it might be helpful for us, on this Passion Sunday, to consider three things regarding all of these passages of St. John that the Church gives us in the second half of Lent:
  • What is Our Lord doing and what are His claims about what He is doing?
  • What is the reaction of those who witness His actions and hear His claims?
  • What does this mean for us today?