The Name of Joseph: Eros, Death, and Resurrection
An Essay by Danny Fitzpatrick
About the year 130, some 60 years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, emperor Hadrian began to build a new Roman outpost amid the ruins. Five years into the construction of Aelia Capitolina, he commanded that a cave containing a rock-hewn tomb be filled with sand to serve as foundation to a new temple to Venus. When St. Helen, mother of Constantine, undertook her catalogue and recovery of the sacred sites, Constantine ordered the destruction of the Venereal temple and its replacement with a church. The foundational cave was uncovered, its interior excavated, and the rock-hewn tomb recognized. Construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre commenced. In its seventeen centuries the Holy Sepulchre has seen destruction at the hands of the Persians and the Muslims, renovation by Patriarchs and Crusaders, the ravages of fire and earthquake, and a most recent restoration beginning in the 1960s.
The evangelists tell us that Joseph of Arimathea, a follower of Christ, though in secret, for fear of the Jews, begged the body of Christ from Pilate, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb hewn in a rock in the Garden of Gethsemane against the day of his death.
The name of Joseph echoes up and down the history of salvation. It has the ring of a kind of typological tuning fork, establishing that vibration whereby we might read aright the mysteries the carpenter’s son broke open on the road to Emmaus. We know well the correspondence between that Joseph who dreamed dreams and saved his brothers from death, having been seated at the right hand of pharaoh, and that later Joseph, the righteous man to whom the angels spoke in dreams and who likewise saved Israel by flight into Egypt. In the travails of the son of Jacob, sold into slavery via the Ishmaelites, we hear an early strain of that wonder and terror with which the apostles would behold the empty tomb of Christ. Reuben, returning to the cistern to set his brother free, finds it empty and cries, “The boy is gone, and I—where can I turn?” (Gen. 37:30). Mary Magdalene, peering into the tomb to find two angels seated, one at the head and one at the feet, says, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him” (Jn. 20:13).
Joseph, beloved son of Jacob by Rachel, was not to be found in the cistern because Judah had contrived to sell him for twenty shekels of silver. Jesus, beloved son of God by Mary, was not to be found in the tomb supplied by the new Joseph. He, too, had been sold for a purse of silver. Dreams did not save him, but in the donated tomb the Father exalted him by the miracle of miracles.
Odd enough to give another man our tomb, to offer up the place we had thought to rest in eternity, to wonder where death will leave us now. How much more strange to give our tomb to God, to find it empty, to wonder how we will rest once death has fled.
What happens within this tomb? It lies pregnant a single sabbath, from Friday evening into Sunday morning. And coming at dawn, the disciples find it empty, that is, empty of the one who was there laid to rest. The burial clothes are laid aside. The two angels are seated upon the tomb as if it were a new Ark of the Covenant. The glory of the Lord, which departed in Ezekiel 11 and went out to the East and had not returned, has now entered Israel again by a means beyond imagination. The temple thrown down has been rebuilt. The ark, hidden by Jeremiah, has been restored. The promise made to Abraham that his descendants would be a blessing to all the world is beginning to unfold.
The history of the Church in whom this promise has been fulfilled is one of lives given over to others. Saint Maximilian Kolbe rises and says, “Take me in his stead.” St. Damien Molokai gives himself to the lepers. Mother Teresa vanishes into the depths of poverty. In Joseph of Arimathea we find one who lays down not his life but his death, giving the place where he had thought to be laid forever to rest and watching in astonished faith as that place becomes the end of all death’s grim permanence. And after the days of Aphrodite and Hadrian, of Constantine and Helen, of caliphs and patriarchs and crusaders, that space which lay pregnant one Sabbath remains for our veneration, delivered of the Word, never to harbor the dead again.
Here we are reminded of Joseph the carpenter and the Marian womb which was a tomb to his desire, paternity, and will. It was the altar on which he offered up his natural fatherhood for a supernatural one. The virginal tomb of Joseph of Arimathea bore another man’s body and never knew death again. The womb which would have born Joseph’s seed knew instead the quickening of the Holy Spirit and never knew the presence of man again, eschewing that brief ecstasy the Elizabethans called death.
It is fitting that a temple to Aphrodite should have been erected and again destroyed on the site of Christ’s triumph. The fledge and ascent of eros by which the lover, moved by beauty, gives birth to progeny both biological and artistic, as Diotima divines for us in Plato’s Symposium, was for the ancients the supreme act of human endurance. In eros is the death by which death is pushed momentarily away.
In Christ is the death by which death itself is shattered. At our twenty centuries’ remove from the provincial events of the Gospel, we tend blithely to rejoice in the fact of the Resurrection. Yet the apostles trembled in those days. “Fear was upon them all” (Acts 2:43). What was most certain—the fact that man dies—had suddenly been undone. How can this be, for I know not man, says Mary at the Annunciation. How can this be, for he is man, says Mary Magdalene at the Resurrection. And what do we do now? Do we seek to anoint the body? Do we wait in the upper room? Do we go out onto the sea and fish as we once did?
Joseph’s eleven brothers did not recognize him when hunger drove them down to Egypt in search of wheat. The eleven who had walked with the Lord, who had watched him multiply bread, had heard him say “This is my body,” did not recognize him when he stood on the beach of Tiberias and called them children. Christ had risen; their faith was not in vain. Yet the very faith which heard the Lord’s promise, “a little while and you will see me,” had still to be trained to see the promise fulfilled.
Gone is the coldly consoling finality of the grave, and in the end of death all certitudes not founded on faith must shatter. Perplexed by the sight of the one who has died, we can only cry out, “We believe; help our unbelief.”
Our culture is founded on the belief that death has at long last put off the specter of resurrection. We have erected our own temples to Aphrodite, the squat grey buildings across America where children are sacrificed in the assurance that neither they nor we will on the last day rise again. Ours is a culture of eros, seeking partners in the dark in a bid to fend off death while believing with desperate fervor that death is the end. Far off in the technological rush of the age we hear the cry of the falconer, calling on a new imperial eagle to shake off the erotic stupor of the American empire and unearth, with a sweep of its wings, the empty tomb the resurrection has hewn into the hardness of our hearts, the space where the grain of Eucharistic wheat might die and root and transform the weary garden of the soul into Paradise.
It belongs to us to learn to dream again. Sold into Egypt, armed only with our dreams, it is our portion to provide for our brothers when famine strikes, to observe the sabbath and go with aloes and spices to the tomb of the crucified if we would be astonished by the glory of the Lord.
St. Joseph, pray for us.
Danny Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings and editor of Joie de Vivre.
