The celebration of the Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker this year marks the 70th anniversary of its establishment by Pope Pius XII in 1955. 

In the face of the exploitation of workers — in abuses both socialist and capitalistic — this feast’s institution served as a loud and clear message from the Church regarding work’s sanctity and the worker’s dignity.

Affirming the role of St. Joseph as he carried out his apostolate as a working layman, this feast underscores the mission of the laity, drawing attention to the royal dignity of any layman’s work. In contemplating this feast and the figure of the Galilean worker behind it, it’s worth highlighting work’s relationship to our baptismal kingship.

Work and the Layman’s Kingship

God commissioned humanity to serve as his viceroys in creation from Eden onwards. We’re to be his workers who work on his behalf. Created in his image, we’re his co-workers, and as such, his co-rulers. Working with the material God made by the work of his hands, we exercise royal authority in creation by making the work of his hands the work of our hands. We leave our mark on things that bear the divine mark.

Work was already kingly, then, before the Incarnation and the sacrament of baptism. But as a youth being raised by Joseph and Mary, Christ the Worker — collaborating with Joseph the Worker and Mary the Worker — brought to fulfillment Adam and Eve’s royal mandate as workers to till and keep the garden of the earth. 

Adam was called to exercise his kingship by way of a loving and authoritative stewardship of God-made matter. Jesus the carpenter-apprentice was called to do the same, bringing this task of royal stewardship to definitive fulfillment. As we are baptized into Christ’s fulfillment of the Adamic kingship, our baptismal union with the Incarnate Son of God renders us an eschatological royalty.

Baptized Ecclesial Workers

We are, in a real sense, baptized into the Holy Family of Nazareth. Joseph’s workshop is where he and Jesus brought Adam’s kingship to fulfillment. Joseph’s workshop is found wherever the baptized are called to labor — in fields, high-rises, factories, auto shops, construction sites and gravel pits. Joseph’s workshop is present wherever work is to be done. We’re commissioned as God’s co-workers in this workshop. 

It’s primarily by way of our work that we exercise the kingship Jesus learned from Joseph. We join Christ and Joseph in their workshop in bringing to fruition Adam’s primeval kingship. 

Christ learned to arrive at the fulfillment of this task precisely at St. Joseph’s side, in his workshop, working alongside him, learning from him. The baptized worker is called in like manner to realize the kingship for which all humanity, in Adam, was created, alongside the paternal figure of Joseph the Worker.

Baptismal Union with Christ the Worker

The baptized worker is called to learn to be a worker like Joseph, collaborating with God in the divine-human task of work (Genesis 2:2a; John 5:17). Our labors as baptized workers, we see, participate in Christ’s royal fulfillment of Adam’s kingship. Joseph’s collaboration with Jesus models the work of baptized laymen.

Baptized laymen are commissioned with the priestly task of uniting their labors to the singular offering of Jesus Christ on the Cross. This is an offering that the young Jesus was already making in Joseph’s workshop. And Joseph’s labors were likewise united to the offering of the Cross that was to come. 

King David, the royal ancestor of Joseph and Mary, as King of God’s people Israel, was called to bring expression to humanity’s Adamic kingship to a new level, as royal steward of God’s people Israel. He was called to till and to keep the garden kingdom of Israel. David’s heir Joseph was thus called not only to exercise his Adamic kingship, but his inherited and hidden Davidic kingship as well. And he gave expression to this Davidic kingship as a carpenter, wielding tools with a royal Davidic authority. He was to be a builder of the eschatological Davidic kingdom.

Joseph thus taught Jesus — David’s definitive heir and the definitive builder of the eschatological Davidic kingdom — to wield the tools of manual labor and to care for his workshop with the royal authority with which a king tends to his domain.

The Working Layman as Royal Priest

Joseph taught the heir of the Davidic throne to work with the care and responsibility of a king — to work as a king. Joseph and Jesus, then, by way of their manual labor, served to bring the meaning of the Davidic kingship to fulfillment as well as the meaning of the Adamic kingship.

St. Joseph brought to fruition his kingship as son of Adam and son of David, which is expressed in his tasks as a manual laborer. 

Joseph was the paternal steward of the proto-ecclesial household for which he cared. He made an offering of his life, and with it, all his life’s labors. In Matthew and Luke, we see that St. Joseph makes a priestly offering of his life in a peculiarly lay manner and a peculiarly royal manner. As a layman and a hidden priestly king, Joseph is himself existentially united to the world’s saving victim, the definitive Lamb of sacrifice, who was the child for whom he cared. 

This lamb of sacrifice, for whom Joseph cared, offered his labors alongside Joseph in the workshop with Joseph. It is in this way that Joseph’s and Jesus’ shared labors were united to the singular sacrifice of the Cross. This union of the layman Joseph to the sacrifice of the Cross renders Joseph an anticipatory icon of the priesthood of the lay baptized, who are united to the sacrifice of the Cross and whose labors thereby participate in that singular sacrifice.

Joseph the Worker and His Offering

Before Jesus and Joseph lived side by side in Nazareth, Abraham and his son Isaac lived and worked side by side as well. By dint of his lay paternity united to the offered Son, Joseph fulfills the lay-priestly role of Abraham in relation to his offered son, Isaac. Joseph the Worker stands in a paternal relationship to the offered Son as one offering the Son of God the Father. He makes this priestly offering as a working layman, by way of his hidden life with the Son, working alongside the Son as the offering who takes away the sins of the world, and preparing him with his woodwork to make that singular and definitive act of offering on the Cross of wood.

In his labors, Joseph maintains a paternal union with the offered Victim. This puts the layman Joseph alongside John the Evangelist whose union with the offered Victim at the foot of the cross becomes the basis for his existential offering as a disciple of Christ, and as a bishop who labored and shared a home with Mary. 

By dint of his mysterious paternal vocation, Joseph in his work, like Abraham before him and like John the Beloved after him, bears within himself an existential union between God the Father and God the Son. He stands in relation to God the Son in a manner parallelled only by God the Father, which brings him into an intimate proximity to God the Father. The offering that Joseph makes participates in God the Father’s very own salvific offering of the Son. It’s an offering that John later made and that Abraham made previously and prototypically. 

Indeed, it is God the Father who first offers his Son, in an eternal act of self-dispossession that renders the Son an utterly given-away gift for the salvation of the world. Joseph, a mere mortal called to assume a father’s role in relation to the Eternal Son of God, participates in this eternal offering. 

Joseph thus embodies an existential union between the priest offering sacrifice and the victim being sacrificed. He has a paternal bond with the Son such that when he places the Son upon the existential altar of his heart, he himself is placed on that altar as well. Joseph is thus the grammatical subject of the Passion of the Son before the Good Friday Passion. He is likewise the lay-priestly offeror of that sacrifice beforehand. 

Joseph is united to the Son by way of an intimate proximity. He is in a posture of offering and being offered. This posture is his in advance of the passion. It is his at a temporal distance from but existential proximity to the grueling cross of Golgotha. It is his at home and in the workshop.

Hence, in commemorating the striking figure of St. Joseph — the royal priestly layman and worker — may our own work and our own lives be utterly taken up into the singular offering of the Eternal Son of God who was Joseph’s collaborator and apprentice in the workshop of Nazareth. May our work and our lives become ever more like his.