Christmas Retrospective: The Sunday After Christmas—What Does It Mean to be Divinely Guided?

    The Gospel passage that we heard today is framed by the account of the two dreams, which were sent to St. Joseph by the angel of the Lord. The Angel of the Lord appears in a dream to tell St. Joseph to take the Lord Jesus and the Mother of God and flee to Egypt. Later, the Angel of the Lord appears in another dream, and tells Joseph to return to the land of Israel.
    The dreams show that St. Joseph enjoys divine guidance in his governance of the Holy Family, and that he is open to the Word of God, allowing it to guide him through difficult circumstances. In this way, St. Matthew means to evoke memories from Israel's history. The first aspect of Israel's history that we think of when we read this passage is the story of this St. Joseph's namesake, St. Joseph the Patriarch. The elder St. Joseph was given the ability to interpret dreams. His wisdom evolved slowly over time. In the beginning, as a young man of seventeen, he had his first portentous dreams, but he could not interpret them. He angered his brothers, his father and his mother by relating the content of his dreams to them. It was only later that God gave to him the ability to interpret dreams as well. When he is cast into prison in Egypt, he is tasked with interpreting the dreams of his fellow prisoners. He is gifted by God with a knowledge of the ultimate fate of these other human beings. Finally, he is brought before Pharaoh himself, to interpret a dream that none of the king's magicians had been able to interpret. Because of his great wisdom, Pharaoh promotes him to be his prime minister, to be in charge of food distributions through the land of Egypt.
Joseph, whenever he is called upon to interpret dreams, stresses very strongly that the wisdom comes through divine guidance. Without the guidance that comes from God, nothing could be understood at all.
In a similar way, the Prophet Daniel, during the Babylonian Exile, about 1500 years later, is presented as a new Joseph. Endowed by God with tremendous wisdom, Daniel surpasses the dream abilities of Joseph, when he accepts the challenge presented to him by King Nebuchadnezzar, and tells the king the content of the king's own dream. Daniel, just like Joseph before him is very insistent upon the Lord's role in feats of interpretation. It is the Lord's gift. It has nothing to do with personal intelligence or merit of Daniel himself.
In a similar way, we can benefit from divine guidance (not only in an occasional dream, but always), if our hearts are attuned to hear the counsel of the Lord, just as St. Joseph, Joseph the Patriarch and the Prophet Daniel were. In order to experience the guidance of the Lord in our everyday life, we have to have our hearts on high. Having our hearts on high is what we pledge to do in the Divine Liturgy at the beginning of the Anaphora, when we are invited: "Let us lift up our hearts." To this, we should sincerely and thoughtfully respond, "We have lifted them to the Lord." We have to have hearts that are yearning for the fulfillment of God's promises in His Kingdom, or we will never get there. It is this yearning which we express so often in prayer, by turning our faces to the East (remembering our homeland, the Paradise that is in the East). The Letter to the Hebrews is equally insistent. It says, "Here, we have no lasting city, but we look for that which is to come."
Naturally, it is hard to yearn for something of which we have no concept. For this reason we have to learn from the Scriptures and the tradition of the Church concerning what we are to expect in the Kingdom of God. Then, we need to raise our minds in prayer and meditation to the source of these expectations. When we have our minds on high in this way, we enjoy the kind of divine guidance that we observe in our heroes, the saints, and not just in our dreams, but at every moment. So, first learn what to expect in the Kingdom of God, then raise your mind to it often, think about it and yearn for it.