I operate a small business and the Covid restrictions have had a devastating effect on this vulnerable business sector. I essentially work on “straight commission”. Saint Joseph, with his carpenter’s shop, in Nazareth, was in the small business, straight commission niche. He knew what it was like to be forced to temporarily shutter his business because of government policy, in his case the census. Not only that, he was compelled to take his wife, Mary, at a vulnerable time in her pregnancy, and make the perilous journey to Bethlehem only to have the privilege of discovering that there was no room in the inn. That first Christmas night, it was the shepherds, who lived at the bottom of society’s privilege pyramid, who were the witnesses to the Blessed event. Fittingly, it was Mary Magdalene who was the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection who, being a woman, was vulnerable to the social exclusions, of first century culture.