5. JOSEPH AND MARY, A MAN AND A WOMAN
The Holy Family arrives in Nazareth after having escaped the devastations of Herod and after a time of exile in a foreign country. Wars and migrations happen not only today. Every age has its dramas and contradictions, and every family, today as yesterday, is affected by them. Even Joseph and Mary experienced their fatherhood and motherhood with hardship. Let us go once again to Nazareth to contemplate in evangelical light the truth of man and woman according to the eternal will of God and the events of the times.
The sexual revolution in the modern narrative
If the problem of ancient times was dynastic violence, the problem of modern times is ideological violence. From domination over things and people, we move on to the negation of things and people passed off as self-evident. From the Marxist maxim of equality and the Nazi myth of race, we have now moved seamlessly to the myth of the pure relationship and the pure individual, devoid of natural and supernatural foundations, without family roots and gender identity, oblivious of all tradition and bent on our own desires. The fallout on family ties is immediate and devastating, because man is with all evidence a social being!
And indeed, it is not difficult to recognise that the two greatest tragedies of our time are abortion and the death of the father, the physical slaughter of children and the cultural slaughter of fathers. In addition to the mortification of the maternal destination of women and the paternal destination of men, there is now an attempt to level out, devalue or even eliminate the natural difference between the sexes: being male or female would no longer be an objective fact, but a subjective preference. All this in open contradiction to the common sense of all time and today's scientific acquisitions: there is in fact no doubt that what a child needs is a family, a father and mother clearly distinct in their sexual position and clearly united in their conjugal love.
Those who accompany the educational, psychological and spiritual journeys of young people see this well: the confusion of family roles and sexual identities, i.e. the confusion as to what a father and a mother really are, and the obscuring of what the specific gift and task of a man and a woman are, seriously compromises the affective maturation of boys and girls, not without disorientation on the part of the adults themselves: Thus affection is disrespected, dialogue turns into conflict, sentiment descends into resentment, and intimacy gives way to estrangement. Here is the result of the sexual revolution: not true liberation, but the inability of men and women to understand what they want and need. As Elizabeth Badinter has observed, making a careful review of the history of feminism, the changes brought about by the 1968 protest and the sexual revolution 'destroyed in a short time five thousand years of distinction of roles and universes'. In reality, Pope Francis affectionately says in one of his beautiful catecheses on the family, 'to solve their relationship problems, man and woman must instead talk to each other more, listen to each other more, know each other more, love each other more'.
Sex education in the biblical account
One need only pause a little in Nazareth to rediscover the grammar of the sexes necessary for the phrasing of love. The biblical narrative, which presents salvation history as a succession of generations, is always careful to emphasise the difference between men and women. It does not even need to give it great prominence, because it is the most natural and most sacred thing in the world: it is the difference that makes us exist and makes us the image and likeness of God!
Meanwhile, one of the most surprising facts of the sacred story in comparison to the narratives of other religions, is that God is definitively revealed in the space of a family. In it, the Son of God becomes man as a boy, not as an androgyne, and Mary is presented as the virgin wife of Joseph, a man of the house of David. Remarkably, Mary is hailed as the 'full of grace', while Joseph is referred to as the 'son of David': the one experiences a divine pregnancy, the other ensures a historical descent. The language is markedly different: Joseph is foreshadowed in the prophetic words addressed by Nathan to King David: 'I will secure after thee the seed out of thy womb, and I will make his kingdom established. He shall build a house in my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever (2 Sam 7:11-13). Instead, it is the angel Gabriel who speaks to Mary in the name of God: 'Fear not, Mary, for you have found favour with God. Behold, you will conceive a son, give birth to him, and call his name Jesus" (Lk 1:30-31). As we can see, Mary cooperates with God in the order of generation, Joseph in the order of generations. Mary, like every woman as such, is tenderness, while Joseph, like every man as such, offers stability. Ultimately, God enhances by his own revelation that fact of reality experienced in the family: that the woman is herself the man's home, while the man builds her a house.
The woman's maternal orientation is ultimately a direct symbol of God's mercy (in Hebrew, 'mercy' literally means 'mother's womb'!), while the man's paternal orientation better represents God's justice. Mercy and justice are then one in God, because God exercises his justice exactly in optics and in terms of mercy. Faced with the interpenetration of God's justice and mercy, we understand by analogy the common fruitfulness of man and woman: In it, the man cannot be fruitful without the woman, nor the woman without the man, nor the man without giving himself totally to her, nor the woman without welcoming him totally.
As Card. Ratzinger wrote in his beautiful letter on the collaboration of man and woman in the Church, the woman is called to contain, the man to transmit. Or, as a fine theologian like L. Bouyer used to say, 'the man represents, the woman is': the one represents, because only the Father who is in heaven is Life and the source of life, while the other is in itself the host of this life. In this sense, the woman is always the owner of her relations, while the man is often called upon to be ministerial, to represent another: the woman's physical pain in the mystery of generation and the man's relative physical 'marginality' are in this sense not trivial things, but are the object of specific feelings and educational care, which are usually completely absent in the modern formative processes! And yet these are simple things, written and explained by God in our very flesh, and not only in the evidence of the receptive form of the female body and the active form of the male body, but also in the greater propensity of women to relationship and men to action, in the connective inclination present in the brain of the one and the distinctive inclination present in the brain of the other. Thanks to these wonderful gender characteristics, man and woman can mature together: the woman sensitises the man's soul and the man stabilises the woman's soul, for otherwise, as we too often see, the woman will remain a victim of her own complexity and inner richness, and the man will remain dispersed in things and unconcerned with people. This is why the Pope says that the craft of the family is above all this: "perhaps the greatest mission of a man and a woman in love is this: to make each other more of a man and more of a woman. To make each other grow is to help the other shape his or her own identity' (AL 221).
Roberto Carelli SDB
