Good and faithful servant, enter into the banquet of your Lord. These words of the Communion Antiphon of the Mass would one day be heard by St. Joseph for the loving and joyful fulfilment of his mission on earth. They are very happy words that one day the Lord will also say to us if we have been faithful to the vocation we have received, even if we have had to begin again many times, with humility and simplicity of heart. In another prayer of the Mass of the day, the word fidelity is repeated as applied to St. Joseph: Almighty God, you entrusted the first mysteries of the salvation of mankind to the faithful care of St. Joseph..., we pray in the collect prayer. It seems as if the Lord wants to remind us today to be faithful to our commitments to Him and to others, faithful to the vocation received from God, to the call that each Christian has received, to his or her task in the world according to God's will.
Our life has no other meaning than to be faithful to the Lord, at whatever age and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. We are well aware that our happiness in this life and, to a large extent, the happiness of those around us depends on this. Saint Joseph went through very different situations and not all of them were humanly pleasant, but the Holy Patriarch was as firm as a rock and always counted on God's help. Nothing diverted Joseph from his appointed path; he was the man whom God, trusting in Him, put at the head of his family here on earth. "What else was his life but an entire dedication to the service to which he had been called? Husband of the Virgin Mary, legal father of Jesus (...), he spent his life with his attention fixed on them, devoted to the fulfilment of the mission to which he had been called. And since a man who is dedicated is a man who no longer belongs to himself, he ceased to care about himself from the moment when, enlightened by the angel in that first dream, he fully accepted God's plan for him, and by receiving Mary as his wife he began to live for those who had been placed under his guardianship. The Lord entrusted his family to him, and Joseph did not let him down; God leaned upon him, and he stood firm in all circumstances. God, for many great things, relies on us.... Let us not let him down.
Let us tell the Lord today that we want to be faithful, dedicated to our divine and human work on earth, as St. Joseph was, knowing that the meaning of our whole life depends on it. Let us examine slowly in what we could be more faithful: commitments to God, to those we may be responsible for, in the apostolate, in our professional work?