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Commemoration of the Relatives of the Lord: Saints Joseph, James and David

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Today we celebrate three important saints who are connected with Jesus: David the King, Joseph His foster-father, and James the Just.

Saint Joseph belonged to the house of David, and through Joseph, Jesus obtained His legal status as a son of David. God had promised David that the Messiah would come from his descendants. David is the author of many of the psalms, especially Psalm 50/51, the poignant Miserere. It is in David’s hometown of Bethlehem that the Messiah was to be born, and so Joseph and Mary went there. David’s life foreshadows that of Jesus: both are born in Bethlehem; he used five stones to kill Goliath and so save Israel, reflecting the five wounds which save us from death to sin and the five Books of the Law; he was a young shepherd, Jesus is the Good Shepherd; both are betrayed by a trusted helper; and of course the psalms are filled with imagery that are seen by Christians as referring to Christ.

Joseph is a just man, a man devoted to obeying God’s commandments as we see in Matthew’s Gospel, where he immediately gets up after each dream with an angel’s message and acts upon it. Joseph is willing to give up everything – the possibility of having his own children, abandoning his business to go to Egypt, and abandoning life in Egypt to return to the Holy Land – so as to do what God wishes him to do. Joseph is the male figure in Jesus’ life, and we see in the Gospels just how well Jesus grew up as a Man as a result of Joseph’s influence! Joseph died before Jesus’ public ministry began, leading to the devotion to him as a patron of a holy death since he died in the arms of Jesus and Mary.

James the Just is the “brother of the Lord” (Galatians 1:19) and the first bishop in the New Testament Church, as the bishop of Jerusalem. In Catholic and Orthodox theology, James is a relative of Jesus, but not a brother in our sense of the word. Aramaic used the words brother and sister for people whom we consider to be cousins. The great Scripture scholar Saint Jerome wrote that this James is the son of Mary and Clopas / Cleophas; his mother was one of the holy women who came to Jesus' grave. James was a major leader of the early Church, and the Christians turned to him for help in deciding what Gentile Christians had to observe of Jewish law (Acts 15). It was written of him that his knees were swollen from the hours he spent on them in prayer. He was stoned to death by order of the notoriously corrupt high priest Ananas, circa 62-64 AD.