The silence of a man, Joseph, and that of a place, Nazareth, are closely linked; and they are absolute. The adoptive father of Jesus remains mute in the Scriptures. He is the patriarch of silence. Not one word of his is to be found in any of the Gospels. When Jesus lingered among the doctors in the Temple of Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph were alarmed by his absence. However, it is his mother, not his father, who reproaches him. In Bethlehem, Joseph says nothing. When he receives in a dream the word of the angel who tells him to leave for Egypt (Matthew 2:13), he remains totally silent, then obeys without uttering a single word. Joseph’s death in Nazareth is silent. In short, he responded with silence to everything that concerned him in the gospel of Matthew. His silence is the understanding heart, absolute interiority. This man has contemplated Mary and Jesus all his life, and his silence goes beyond words.
Joseph illustrates what Bossuet, in the double panegyric he devoted to him, calls the gravity and the humility of silence. For Bossuet, Nazareth was, as much as a place, a time, the great time of silence. Nowhere else were the silent emotions felt, over time, so strongly.
It is probably Charles de Foucauld who has meditated most deeply on the silence of Nazareth. He wished to place it at the heart of his spiritual thinking. In his writings he constantly reiterated his desire to make his life a ‘life of Nazareth’, that is, a life of humility, poverty, work, obedience, charity, reverence and contemplation. He tried to explain, to relive it better, the silence of this obscure life. Mary and Joseph, conscious that they were blessed with a marvellous treasure, remained silent so as to possess it in the solitude and silence of a secluded life; and no one has practised silence like them.
Charles de Foucauld heard Jesus say, one day, referring to the ten-elevenths of the length of his life: ‘I have instructed you continually, not by words but by my silence.’1 He thought that it was when Jesus had still been in his mother’s womb that the silence of adoration must have been at its height. Mary and Joseph believed, he said, that they would never again ‘be able to enjoy Him . . . in a silence so perfect’.2 With the approach of Christmas, Charles de Foucauld meditated on the life of Mary and Joseph, shared between ‘immobile and silent adoration, caresses, and attentive, devoted and tender care’.3 He imagined Mary and Joseph, when night fell, returning to sit by Jesus in his cradle, silent and content.