What Mary and Joseph teach us about parenting

If you believe, as I do, that Jesus was the son of God, then it’s instructive to consider the man and woman God chose to serve as earthly caregivers for his child.

Theoretically, the Lord could have picked any couple on the planet. But he entrusted Mary and Joseph with this monumental task.

It seems like an odd choice.

She was a young virgin, likely in her early teens. Joseph was a working man, a small-town carpenter who is believed by some to have been significantly older, although the scriptural accounts are vague about most things regarding him.

It would be nice if the writers had filled in some gaps about Mary and Joseph — their parenting philosophies, the story of their courtship and marriage, whatever exactly became of Joseph (who disappears from the narrative after Jesus is 12).

Yet there’s enough information that we can piece together a sketch of the parents they must have been and several of the challenges they faced.

We can learn from them about what it takes to raise children who will eventually be of service to both God and humanity. And about the costs of parenting.

Here are several takeaways:

Their own lives were committed to God. Matthew describes Joseph as already a righteous man before Jesus was born, and Mary speaks of herself in Luke’s gospel as “the Lord’s maidservant,” meaning she was submitted to whatever God’s plan for her might be.

They were gentle. Of course, Mary has been hailed through the ages as an icon of kindness and patience.

But Joseph, too, was tenderhearted. He was engaged to Mary when he discovered she was pregnant. They’d been sexually abstinent, so he reasonably assumed she’d slept with another man — an allegation even more serious in ancient times than today.

Rather than expose her to humiliation or punishment, he sought to end the engagement quietly, without harm to the young woman he believed had betrayed him. A good guy.

They recognized Jesus as God’s child, not theirs. Mary and Joseph held an advantage over other parents then and now: They knew their son had been conceived by God, who was his real father, and that they were mainly just stewards.

This must have affected everything they did. They surely felt they would be held to account by the Lord for every parental decision they made, whether wise or selfish.

But in a sense every child born on earth is God’s child. All parents are just stewards. We’ll answer for how we treat his kids.

They protected Jesus, even when that meant upending the whole family. When Jesus’ life was in danger, Mary and Joseph left their home and kin and undertook a long, harrowing flight to a foreign country, where they lived as aliens until the threat had passed.

They accepted Jesus for who he was. From early on, Jesus was a different kind of kid. At 12, he slipped away without a word to go study in the temple in Jerusalem. Joseph and Mary were understandably terrified to discover him missing, and furious when they found him.

Yet Mary “treasured up all these things in her heart,” and pondered them. She seems to have assumed that somehow it was all for the best. (We’re not told what Joseph thought.)

When a child turns out not to be not exactly who we had expected or does things we might not have preferred, it would behoove us to consider that God might have his own plans for her, which are greater than ours.

Even they couldn’t create a perfect family. The striking thing about the holy family is how normal — that is, dysfunctional — it was.

Even as adults, Mary and Joseph’s children quarreled. The younger kids were jealous of the attention Jesus got, and skeptical of his calling. And Jesus occasionally disrespected not only his irritating siblings, but his parents.

There’s no flawless family, apparently, even when you’re handpicked to raise the savior of the world. We can all take perverse encouragement from that.

They suffered with Jesus. Early on, the prophet Simeon told Mary regarding Jesus, “a sword will pierce your own soul.” Mary got to see Jesus in all his divine power, but she also wept by the cross as he was tortured to death.

When you become a parent, you sign on for a great deal of joy — and a fair measure of agony. Somebody said that after your children arrive, you’ll forever be only as happy as your unhappiest child.

This story was originally published December 23, 2019 at 10:22 AM with the headline "What Mary and Joseph teach us about parenting."