Fecit Te Deus Quasi Patrem Regis et Dominum Universae Domus eius, Ora
Pro Nobis
If the Word
became flesh because Our Lady said “Yes” to the vocation to “hear” the Word and
take Him into her such that He took His entire humanity from her (“and the Word
was made flesh,” Jn. 1, 14) - so also Joseph said “Yes” and gave Him a name
“Jesus” and a home at Nazareth. Joseph’s “Yes” consisted in taking the Virgin,
now pregnant, as his wife and creating a home for her in Nazareth
What is
significant here is that the act of faith engenders the life of God in us. It
did so in Mary in such fashion that she becomes the Mother of God Himself, and
it did so in Joseph that he becomes “quasi patrem regis” and is thus empowered
to name the Lord, “Jesus.” As John Paul II wrote: “the faith of Mary meets the faith of Joseph. If Elizabeth St. Paul
The act of faith –which always
engenders divine life because it images the divine ontology of total self-gift
and therefore relationality that makes up the Trinity – that Joseph exercised,
consisting in taking the Virgin as wife, now includes establishing a home and
work. Joseph created a home by work, and the Word-made-flesh worked, and He
worked with hands given to Him by our Lady. The Son of God learned work at the
side of Joseph the Worker and thus took Joseph’s work up into Himself. Human
work became integrated into the Incarnation – and Redemption which finds its
created locus in home and house.
Work in
this originating perspective is not principally for profit but the
anthropological (and therefore, theological) act whereby one becomes the Son of
God in act. Human ordinary work and labor is the mediating process whereby the
human person becomes “Ipse Christus” and builds the very image of God, the
human family. Work, then, is to become Christ, and profit which should accrue
to it is for family. Work is an expression of love and not for self.
John Paul II, deploying the tool of
phenomenology, crosses the threshold of sin and enters into the prelapsarian
moment recounted in Genesis 2 which tells of the God’s covenant with Adam to be
obedient by tilling the garden and naming the animals. In the wake of that
obedience, man suddenly experience loneliness, what John Paul calls “the
original solitude,” and this because Adam in obeying had exercised his
subjectivity in mastering himself in order to subdue the earth and master the
animals by naming them. He felt alone because he was the unique subject in the
entire creation of objects. He was alone as a subject, a state which God saw to
be “not good” since the destiny of the human person was to image the “We” of the
Creator. Casting Adam into a deep sleep, he awakens as male and female and the
two enter into a communion of persons (self-gift) as image of the “We” yet to
be disclosed by Jesus Christ as the Trinity of God.
The point
to be made is the nature of human work which activated the subjectivity of the
human person who had responded in obedience to the divine command. The
principal purpose of work is to activate the personhood as image of God, of
becoming an “I” as God is a triple “I,” “to fulfill the calling to be a person…
by reason of his very humanity.”[2]
John Paul II continues: “And so this ‘dominion’ spoken of in the biblical text
being meditated upon here refers not only to the objective dimension of work
but at the same time introduces us to an understanding of its subject
dimension. Understood as a process whereby man and the human race subdue the
earth, work corresponds to this basic biblical concept only when through the
process man manifests himself and confirms himself as the one who ‘dominates.’ This dominion, in a certain sense,
refers to the subjective dimension even more than to the objective one: this
dimension conditions the very ethical
nature of work. In fact there is no doubt that work has an ethical value of
its own, which clearly and directly remains inked to the fact that the one who carries it out is a person, a
conscious and free sublet, that is to say, a subject that decides about
himself.
“This
truth, which in a sense constitutes the fundamental and perennial heart of
Christian teaching on human work, has had and continiues to have primary
significance for the formulation of the important social problems
characterizing whole ages.”[3]
Conclusion
vis a vis economics: Benedict XVI wrote in “Caritas in Veritate” #36:
“The
Church’s social doctrine holds that authentically human social relationships of
friendship, solidarity and reciprocity can also be conducted within economic
activity, and not only outside it or ‘after’ it. The economic sphere is neither
ethically neutral, nor inherently inhuman and opposed to society. It is part
and parcel of human activity and precisely because it is human, it must be
structured and governed in an ethical manner.
“The great
challenge before us, accentuated by the problems of development inthis global era and made even more urgent
by the economic and financial crisis, is to demonstrate in thinking and
behaviour, not ony that traditional principles of social ethics like transparence, honest and
responsibility cannot be ignored or attenuated, but also that ins commercial relationships the principle of gratuitousness and the
logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity. This is a human
demand at the present time, but it is also demanded by economic logid. It is a
demand both of charity and of truth.”[4]
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