Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family

The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, whose relationship we honor and celebrate today, presents both a challenge and an invitation for us as we consider family life in our own time, place and culture. The challenge might be to compare our own families with the Holy Family which could lead to great difficulties and feelings of inadequacy: after all, the father was a man docile and completely given to the Will of God… the mother was sinless from the moment of her Conception… and the child was no less than God Incarnate.

 

Th real challenge, however, is to be open and honest about the realities and struggles of “holding it together” as a family in modern life. The term “dysfunctional” has been used frequently in recent times to describe the difficulties of real, imperfect, and even sinful people attempting to live together as a cohesive unit. But, every family has some sort of dysfunction, some more evident than others, so this should not be used as an excuse not to work at developing family life, healing the ties that bind.

 

The invitation this Feast offers is to look at the life of the Holy Family, and to develop within our own families that which we have in common, especially our faith and the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

 

We know very little about the day-to-day life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph; today’s Gospel gives us a small peek, and an eye-opening surprise. One would presume that their life together at home was completely problem-free. But what we read, instead, is a story of confusion, misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and pain. The story shows us that good people, even very holy people, can sometimes hurt each other deeply. It is the recovery from the hurts that bonds a family together. Our Gospel story says little about the Holy Family’s recovery, except that Mary prayed and Jesus obeyed. This combination of prayer, obedience and mutual reverence can help every person, every family, to “advance in wisdom, maturity and favor before God and man.”

 

Looking beyond this story to other references in Scripture about the life of the Holy Family, we find there were many tensions and difficulties:

a betrothed man feels jilted

words at the child’s presentation in the Temple cause anxiety

a political threat causes the family to become refugees in a foreign country

the child blows off his parents on a trip to Jerusalem

the Mother has difficulty with her son’s plans at a wedding reception

the son is arrested and executed in his prime

the Mother is left without family at the foot of the Cross

 

Theirs was a family fraught with the same — and worse — ups and downs, joys and sorrows of our own families. How did they cope? They did more than cope by allowing their faith to be the mortar that held together a rock-solid love for one another.

 

Their faith was manifested in two very evident ways: in reverence and in prayer. Mutual reverence is what the Old Testament sage Sirach and the New Testament Apostle Paul wrote about: Paul, about the mutual reverence needed between husband and wife; Sirach about the reverence necessary between parents and children.

 

Reverence in this context means to serve one another, to seek the good, the holy and the wise in one another — fully aware of the incomplete and the sinful — and to draw forth that goodness and holiness for a family life that works. The obedience of children toward their parents reflects, and is nourished by, the respect and reverence with which their parents treat each other.

 

The second “coping mechanism” is prayer. Scripture stories show us that Mary and Joseph prayed alone, and together, proving the adage that the family that prays together, stays together. Prayerfully, Mary and Joseph pondered in their hearts the Will of God, and acquiesced, even without the security of fully understanding God’s Will. 

 

To this prayer and reverence, Saint Paul adds the search for virtue, calling for kindness, humility, goodness, patience and forgiveness, as well as:

 

the subordination of one’s own will for the good of one’s marriage

loving one’s spouse more than one’s own self

obeying one’s parents because obedience pleases God

and, above all, to attempt to be Christlike in all that we do

 

This choice for virtue, enabled by grace, makes family life work and grow. It is this choice that makes continual forgiveness, without which family life cannot work or be possible, become practicable.

 

The Old Testament wise man Sirach wrote at a time when Greek culture had become attractive to the Jewish people. Concerned about this cultural influence, not for the better, he encouraged the cohesiveness of the Jewish family. He knew that it was within the family that future believers were nurtured physically, morally and spiritually.  He reminded people of the prescriptions of the Torah: Caring for one’s parents in old age was considered a sacred duty; reverence and obedience within the family was equally sacred. 

 

Within Christian family life there comes a “primal Church” where parents become first ministers of the sacred, through teaching and living domestic customs and traditions of faith that enrich and even define religious and family life. This is a solemn and sacred responsibility for parents. On the other end of the family life spectrum, Saint Luke reminds children of their role in family life.

 

Jesus, though wise and learned, is not presented as a child prodigy of a messiah. Although He had youthful stirrings of self-awareness, His place in God’s plan for salvation, and an identity free of His parents’ watchful eye, He chose obedience to his parents as the way in which to grow in wisdom, age and favor. It would be years before He would make another public appearance, until that time He remained in the nesting ground of family. through Jesus’ adolescence and young adulthood He allowed His self-awareness the time to grow and develop within the embrace of His family. 

 

He who was God Incarnate allowed Mary and Joseph, mere mortals, to form and develop His consciousness of who He would become as Messiah and Savior. The faith and family values He learned in family life were the basis and the context in which He revealed the Kingdom of God to mankind. 

 

Like Jesus, much of who we are and what we might become is formed in family life. And so, on this Feast of the Holy Family, let us pray for our families, that in considering the life of the Holy Family, we might find hope for ourselves. May we grow in mutual respect and reverence, in virtue and in holiness, in order to manifest the love of God for one another, and hand down Faith from one generation to the next, so that we might bring about, with God’s Grace, the Kingdom of Christ in our world.