God, in his supreme goodness, gives to each particular person the grace appropriate for his call. To Christ’s sacred humanity, full of grace and truth (John 1:14), he gave the absolute plenitude of every grace. To Mary’s immaculate humanity, he gave the second apportioning, for she was the nearest of any human person to the Source of grace itself. The third, proposes an overwhelming tradition in the Church, he gave to St. Joseph.

Now, it is generally little use to attend to rankings of grace. Our allotment of grace, after all, is fixed—determined by God from all eternity. In that classic image of St. Therese: some of us are thimbles, others buckets. What matters is not the quantity of our allotment but that we are filled to the brim with an intensity of divine love.

Yet the unique paternal grace given to St. Joseph—that low man on the podium of predilection—is well worth our pondering. For St. Joseph shows us that God can and indeed does work salvifically through the basic, ordinary structures he has built into human nature: fatherhood and family.

First, God predestined Joseph to be the real human father of Jesus. Certainly, Joseph made no biological contribution to the humanity of Christ. But he also is not simply a foster father (which often implies temporary care) nor an adoptive father (which implies the child of another man). Rather, Joseph is the real human father of Jesus because he is the legitimate (from lex, legis “law”) human father of Jesus, who is the legitimate Son of Joseph’s legitimate wife. And Joseph was such not by mere human law but, even more, by divine law as specified in the Jewish Talmud.

As Mary gave the eternal Son his temporal flesh, Joseph gave Jesus his heredity. It is Joseph, not Mary, who “called his name Jesus” (Matt 1:25). It is through Joseph’s lineage, not Mary’s, that Jesus is inscribed in the roll of humanity (Luke 2:1-5). Both of these—his humanity and his Abrahamic and Davidic line—are essential to the Incarnation. “Anyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 4:2); “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).

Second, God predestined Joseph to be the Head of the Holy Family, “the faithful and prudent servant whom the Lord set over his household” (Matt 24:45). Yet we know with dogmatic certainty that Joseph was incomparably exceeded in virtue by the two whom he governed. This required a deep grace of humility and prudence: humility to know his place and prudence to carry out his role. God afforded Joseph a regnative “power made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9), ever evident in his swift adherence to the quartet of divine dreams that time and again upended his life. By Joseph’s obedience to the Lord, the Lord’s own life was saved (Matt 2:13-23). By Joseph’s obedience to the Lord, the Lord himself “was obedient” to him (Luke 2:51).

In the Incarnation, God reordered all things to himself in an arrestingly earthy manner. That he chose to do this in a family—nature’s (God’s) masterpiece—is instructive. The Father deigned to use Joseph so that the human mother of his human Son should have a human spouse who would be a human father, thus giving mankind a paradigm for family life. Indeed, by his virginal paternity, Joseph, more than any other human father, most approximates the virginal paternity of God the Father, the prime analogate “from whom all paternity on heaven and earth is named” (Eph 3:15).

At first glance, imitating St. Joseph might seem an impossibility. But it is not so. God provides to each as each requires. For his headship over the holy family, through which all saving grace came into the world, St. Joseph was granted a capital grace analogous to that of his Son—a grace which still radiates throughout the universal Church that boasts his universal patronage. This Josephite grace is on offer to all in a manner proportioned to the particularities of each. For every human being has a father, and every human being comes from a family, and every human being has benefited from his headship. Especially the Son of God.