Adam And St. Joseph: A Comparison

 

Sr. Roobini Chinnappan CTC,
Journalist, Vatican Radio, Rome, Italy


    There are number of stories of people who fell in love with God and did incredible things. Whether they see Him face to face or not, men fall in love with God for various reasons. Some fall in love looking at the created wonders, and see God in the winds and waves, snows and rains, in joys and sorrows of life. Some fall in love with God even in the fatigues of their lives. There are some who encounter the Almighty in the silence of their heart. We have examples from the Bible: prophet Elijah with his zealous love towards God,[1] the mother who loved God even to the point of sacrificing all of her seven children to be torn apart and burned in the frying pan,[2] the love of the soul in search of the beloved in the Song of Songs, the unshattered love of Job even in his loss of every possession, children and in the misery of bodily illness,[3] the unfailing love of the three young men in the furnace,[4] the love that compelled St. Paul to declare, “it is not I but Christ who lives in me”[5] and Peter’s wet eyed confession to the Lord, “You know that how much I love you.” [6] Therefore, we find people in all walks of life falling in love with God in their contexts of life.

Adam
    But there is also an incredible story of God who is in love and creates the world narrated in Genesis. Even though everything He created out of His love was beautiful; God was unsatisfied, until He created Adam in His own image and likeness. Adam was the fruit of His love and He made an extra effort in His creation and breathed on to him His life giving breath. He blessed Adam with every possible good and made him head of all His created universe. He also gave a female companion to Adam to avoid his loneliness, whom Adam recognized as the bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. God, Adam and his wife used to converse and have evening walks, and the three lived in perfect harmony with each other and nature. Yet was Adam in love with God? The story gives us a lot of grounds to doubt. For, Adam with all that God blessed him with, was an unsatisfied man. He desired to become God himself. And on a fine day heeding to the temptation, he moved against God. It upset all the plans of God. With a saddened heart God punished him and sent him out of Paradise, but not without a promise of hope. God would not abandon them, he promised them a Saviour.

Joseph
    Joseph was the man chosen by God to father the promised Saviour, the Son of God. When we read the Bible we understand Joseph was a man in love with God. He lived around God. God was in his dreams.

    It is true that Joseph had heard about God only from his forefathers. He knew Him only in his dreams. But he was a just man who marked his love without even leaving any remarkable sign of his existence and disappeared from the scene. [7] He had a hidden hard life. He spent all his energy to be faithful to the call God gave him, to protect His beloved Son on earth and His mother. The Bible states about him with a very assertive acknowledgement that he was a righteous man.[8] It is not very difficult to find the reason behind such a statement. But we can understand its deeper meaning if we compare the man Adam and Joseph.

Adam Vs Joseph
    The world and everything in it were the materialization of God’s infinite love. In his infinite wisdom God created Adam in His own image and likeness, to carry out the works of God. He put him in charge of taking care of His creation. Adam saw, touched and listened directly to his creator.[9] Yet he could not remain faithful to God. When God saw that His plans were at stake, He had to punish His own image and likeness. But He promised to save it by a salvific plan in the future.[10] It is here that He had to find a man who would be faithful to Him. And God brings in Joseph, the righteous man, to safeguard His vision of salvation. If Adam did not do justice to God’s expectations, here is a man Joseph who is righteous in every sense.

Seeing and Believing
    If God communicated all His desires to Adam directly, clearly and without any intermediary and let him live in all happiness, the communication with the man chosen for the new salvific plan was entirely different. The New Testament, especially the Gospel of Mathew puts it down as communication that comes in dreams through the angel of God.[11] In dreams God asked him things that were absurd for a human mind to conceive. Let alone a carpenter.

    Adam had the role of the husband of a woman called the mother of all living, whereas Joseph’s role was to be the husband of a woman called the mother of God’s own Son. [12] If Adam was entrusted to be the guardian of the created world, Joseph was given the charge of safeguarding the Son of God. Thus, Joseph becomes the guardian of all that is very dear to God, the salvific plan, and the incarnated Son and His mother. Therefore, by becoming the guardian of the Son of God, Joseph enjoys the privilege of being the Guardian of God himself. If in the case of Adam, it was all seeing, for Joseph it was all believing.

The Trusted Guardian of God’s Dreams
    It may seem an exaggerated statement. Does the omnipotent and omniscient God need a guardian? But it was the will of God, that His plans upset by a man be restored by the faithfulness of another man. It was Joseph who was chosen for that task.

    There are certain things I see when someone entrusts something to another for keeping it safe. First-of-all, the thing that we entrust must be dear to us and we fear for its safety. We entrust these not to any passerby, but to a person most trustworthy. The more the value, the more the trustworthy element that we search. When God created the world and entrusted to steward His dear creation to Adam, He had all His faith and love in him. Yet Adam failed and brought God’s creation to peril. But in the plan for the new creation, entrusting it to Joseph, God found the realization and fulfilment of it. By becoming the guardian of His dear Son who was sent to become man to save the creation and the lady who mothered the blessed plan, Joseph becomes the guardian of God’s dreams of the new creation in Christ.

The Coward and the Courageous
    God’s creative wisdom is a wonder that surprises us when we examine every aspect of it. It is even more surprising to know that in womanhood, He hides the power of motherhood. Whatever we may say, the strength of a woman is her womanhood. The one who safeguards her womanhood is considered by her like God. God created Eve when He found Adam sad in his loneliness, to give him company. In the holiness of Paradise, God entrusted her to Adam to protect her womanhood. Adam himself called her ‘Isha’ as she was taken from him ‘Ish’ and she was the bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh.[13] Yet in the trail of her life, even though he himself was an accomplice in the fall,


[1] 1Kg. 19: 10
[2] 2 Mac. 7: 1-41
[3] Job 19: 26
[4] Dan. 3: 16-18
[5] Gal. 2: 20
[6] Jn. 21: 17
[7] Lk 17: 10
[8] Mt 1: 19
[9] Gen 2: 9-25
[10] Gen 3: 14 ff
[11] Mt 1: 20
[12] Gen 3: 20
[13] Gen 2: 23