The Fourth Sunday of Advent [A]
Isaiah 7:10-14  +  Romans 1:1-7  +  Matthew 1:18-24
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
December 21, 2025

Christmas, of course, is a time for giving gifts:  gifts which are signs of our love.  Spiritually, Christmas is a time for us to give gifts to God.  Christmas is a time for us to give God signs of our love for Him.  So naturally, we want to give God our best.

After all, that’s what He did for us.  God the Father gave us His only Son.  His most precious possession did God the Father give us as the first Christmas gift.

Spiritually, because God is a loving Father, He doesn’t want us only to give Him gifts.  He wants His children to shower each other with gifts, also.  Just as Jesus summed up what it means to be His disciple in two great commands—to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself—so our own gift-giving during Christmas must also bear this two-fold mark:  giving gifts to God, and giving gifts to our brothers and sisters.

Advent is a season that helps us to do just that.  During Advent, there are three key figures who show us how to prepare for the birth of Christ:  that is, the Father’s gift to us.  Whether and how we accept this Gift from the Father determines how well we can give gifts to God and our brethren.  These three key Advent figures and St. John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St. Joseph.  Today’s Gospel passage focuses our attention on the last of these three.

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Saint Joseph is a curious figure in the Gospel.  You may actually have heard people at times dismiss the significance of St. Joseph’s vocation.  After all, they ask, how hard could Joseph’s life have been?  His wife was sinless, and his foster-child was the Son of God!  What husband and father could possibly have it easier than Joseph?

But that sort of dismissal of St. Joseph overlooks one very important principle of the Christian spiritual life.  On this Fourth Sunday of Advent—just days before the start of Christmas—the Church wants us to reflect upon St. Joseph, and ponder his vocation within the Holy Family, so that you and I can see how that same principle needs to be observed in our own spiritual lives.

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St. Joseph was a very blessed man.  He was blessed to have Mary as his wife, and he was blessed that God gave him and Mary custody of God’s Only-Begotten Son.  But with God’s gifts inevitably come challenges.  The two cannot be separated.  In God’s way of living life, God’s gifts and God’s challenges cannot be separated.  This is a bedrock principle of our Christian faith.

Put another way (which might sound a little strange at first), God’s gifts are equipment.  God’s gifts are equipment.  What does that mean?  It’s to say that when God gives us gifts, His gifts equip us to carry out some work on God’s behalf.

So it was with St. Joseph.  Yes, Joseph was greatly blessed by God with tremendous gifts.  But these tremendous gifts were given to Joseph because God had tremendous plans for him.  Joseph’s vocation involved tremendous sacrifices (perhaps the greatest example of which was the flight to Egypt because of the threat to the life of the infant Jesus).  God was calling Joseph to tremendous service on God’s behalf, and thanks be to God, Joseph was a “just man” (or “righteous man” as today’s Gospel passage puts it).  Joseph knew that it’s in giving God His due that any of us find peace in this life and in the next.

In today’s Gospel passage, what we hear gives us only a small idea of Joseph’s vocation.  Here, as in all four Gospel accounts, Joseph is never recorded as saying a single word.  You might say that Joseph is the “strong, silent type”.  He prefers actions to words.  He’s a man of just deeds rather than a man of just words, like so many of us men are:  just words.

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We might ask, then, “Where does that leave us?”  What does St. Joseph have to teach us?  As a teacher, he will have to teach us by his example, since we have none of his words to learn from.  Although God issued Joseph great challenges, Joseph faced many smaller ones, also.  Joseph’s small challenges, and his corresponding small sacrifices, can be a mirror for us to look into, to see what our daily lives might look like with greater faith.

It is as the spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary that we honor Saint Joseph.  When Matthew, at the beginning of his gospel account, introduces Joseph, he calls him “the husband of Mary.”  It is the spousal nature of Joseph’s life that mirrors in the sort of fidelity that God asks of us.  The life of Saint Joseph is one of silent fidelity to the Lord.  In him, we see that we are called to be people of faith even when appearances suggest that we should give up on others, ourselves, or even God.

Like his wife Mary, Joseph has an open ear.  He listens for the Lord to speak to him.  As we make our final spiritual preparations for the Christmas season, we should rest in the fact that the Jesus whom God invites us to receive in our lives is indeed Emmanuel:  He is God, who is with us, who is born for our salvation, and who has Good News for us to listen to.