My father supported his family by working with his hands. He was an “Iron Chef,” at least in my eyes (right up there with Bobby Flay and Mario Batali), long before the Food Network made cable TV celebrities of people who make their living by spending long hours toiling in the kitchen. With early mornings, long days, and late nights, impatient customers and hot-tempered bosses, being a cook wasn’t an easy job.

But there were bills to be paid, and kids to be clothed and fed and sent to Catholic school. As if that weren’t enough, when he came home from work, my father would often make his way to his carpentry workshop in the garage. That was his refuge, with his home-made workbench at which he kept his tools.

There were power tools of every imaginable description, not to mention slotted screwdrivers, Phillips screwdrivers, hacksaws, miter saws, box planes, claw hammers, ball-peen hammers, round files, flat files, and boxes full of nails of every size and shape. The kitchen may have been his workplace, but the garage was where he practiced his art, the do-it-yourself carpentry with which he labored with pride to make our house a home.

Like father, like son? Not exactly! While my father saw to it that all his sons knew their way around a kitchen, only my older brother inherited my father’s knack for knowing how to fix what needs to be fixed.

Is it any wonder that St. Joseph, the carpenter saint, is at the top of the list of my favorite saints? Let me add that it’s not just because Joseph is one of my middle names that he’s one of my heroes. It’s especially because he is one of the unsung heroes of the New Testament.

His name is only mentioned 16 times in the New Testament: nine times in Matthew’s Gospel, five times in the Gospel according to Luke, just twice in the Gospel according to John, and he is never mentioned by name in the Gospel according to Mark.

We don’t know very much about him, and we are not even absolutely certain of his father’s name: according to Matthew, Joseph’s father was a man named Jacob; yet according to Luke 3:23, his father’s name was Heli. Luke’s Gospel tells us that Joseph was from Nazareth, and that he made his way to Bethlehem with Mary to be registered there in the census of the Roman province of Judea “because he was of the house and family of David” (Luke 2:4).

It is also in Luke’s Gospel that the boy Jesus gets Himself into trouble with His parents during their Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After three days of searching the crowded city high and low for their 12-year-old, they finally find Him in the Temple, with the boy wonder dazzling the scholars there with his wisdom and understanding (Luke 2:41-51).

When the adult Jesus shows up at the synagogue in Nazareth and begins to teach them, the folks are astounded at the hometown boy all grown up: “Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?” (Matthew 13:54-55).

Just about all that we know about Joseph is found in the first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew and the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke, in the narratives that these evangelists provide of the extraordinary circumstances of Jesus’ conception and birth.

After that, the New Testament falls strangely silent about this man who figures so prominently in the unfolding of God’s plan of salvation. That silence didn’t keep the earliest Christians from wondering about who Joseph was and what became of him.

Some early Christian writings that didn’t make it into the New Testament (for good reasons!) speculate that at the time of his marriage to Mary, Joseph was already an old man. According to one such document, the “History of Joseph the Carpenter,” which dates to the second century AD, he married at the age of 40 and raised six children – four boys and two girls – during a 49-year marriage with his first wife.

The same document speculates that only after the death of his first wife did the widower take Mary to be his wife, so that Mary the mother of Jesus was also stepmother to Joseph’s children from his first marriage, among them James, a leading figure in the early Church who was often referred to as “the brother of Jesus.”

Although the New Testament is silent about how long Joseph lived, the “History of Joseph the Carpenter” suggests that he died at the ripe old age of 111.

When we meet Joseph for the first time in the text from Matthew that is the Gospel reading for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the carpenter is sleeping an uneasy sleep, wondering how to deal appropriately with the dilemma he has on his hands. Mary is pregnant, and he has to do something about it. He has a plan, but it’s just then that he learns that he’s just a carpenter, and not the architect.

God has other plans, and reveals them to Joseph in a dream: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

Joseph does just as he is told. A man of few words – the New Testament never records a single word of his – he does his part to accomplish what the Divine Architect asks of him, making a home for Mary and for Jesus. The righteous carpenter was a man of action: by his example and through his intercession, may we have the wisdom to know what God asks of us, and the courage to make God’s plan the work of our hands!

    Readings for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

    Isaiah 7:10-14
    Psalm 24:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
    Romans 1:1-7
    Matthew 1:18-24