Year C / Christmas Season / Feast of the Holy Family
Readings: 1 Samuel 1:20-22,24-28 / Psalm 83.2-3,5-6, 9-10 (R/v cf 5a) / 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24 / Luke 2:41-52
Sisters and brothers, have you ever savoured how good it is to break open an egg? And see its silky texture, the richness of the yellow egg yolk, the goodness it promises? I think most of us don’t. Those who cook and bake do.
This image of breaking open is a surprisingly odd image to consider for the Feast of the Holy Family. I think it is most apt, however. It invites us to ‘break open’ the Holy Family’s life together and consider how it offers us wisdom to live better as Christian families.
To do this, allow me to use three characteristics Pope Paul VI described the Holy Family in Nazareth to have in a homily from 1964. They are silence, love and work.
Silence
Today’s gospel breaks open the hidden life of Jesus. We hear nothing of Jesus from his birth until this moment when he is twelve years old, lost and found in the temple. The gospels are silent about his childhood.
Yet we believe that growing up with Mary and Joseph, Jesus deepened his love for God and practised a love for others because this is how they lived their life and faith as a family. Yet all this happened in silence – a silence that nurtures one’s soul and spirit.
For Pope Paul VI, “The silence of Nazareth should teach us how to meditate in peace and quiet, to reflect on the deeply spiritual and the value of a well-ordered personal spiritual life, and of silent prayer that is known only to God.” The fruit of silence spent with God is love.
I cannot help but imagine that Mary and Joseph taught Jesus to love God and to share God’s love with neighbour took place in this nurturing silence of family love. We believe and we know the family is the origin of Jesus’ holiness with God and selfless for all. Can we say the same of our families? Do we nurture each other to become holy?
Our world is noisy. We need silence. Silence not just to be with God but the silence to be together as family. The kind of silence that lets me stand by my brother and sister as they struggle with being loved as they are? The kind of silence that helps me know how much my parents have labored in love for me? The kind of silence that opens me up to the secrets my children need to share for me to love as they are?
We need this silence. Our families should be spaces where we find it and we are nurtured into the fullness of life like Jesus was in his family.
Love
The Holy Family reminds us of the love they shared as a family. It is a love rooted in God and shared with one another. This is what we really celebrate: the love of God in the life of the family.
Do we appreciate God’s love in our families? Celebrating this, do we share God’s love with one another generously?
If we agree that God’s love must the heart of family love and that God is indeed our Father, then, we not just children of our parents. We are God’s children. St John expresses this well in our second reading: “Beloved: See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. And so we are.”
As God’s children, we share in God’s family life. This is why we bear the name Christian by our baptism. It calls us to embody God’s life and love like Jesus did when he walked and preached, healed and reconciled, lived and loved, played and prayed.
Christian discipleship is God’s invitation for us to become more like Jesus who reveals God’s life and love to all. Our discipleship is therefore really about sharing in the family resemblance that God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit have.
It therefore makes complete sense that family life on earth should always be directed towards heaven. For example, we can give many gifts to our children and to one another in the family. But wouldn’t the best gift we can give to each other – as parents to children, as children to parents, as siblings to each other – is the gift of God’s love?
Did we do this at Christmas, instead of some expensive gift bought from the stores? Like forgiveness and reconciliation? Like a second chance to start over? Like hope for a brighter future? Like an embrace that simply loves, no words needed? In fact, do we share this gift of God’s familial love and life that we have with one another and many others, daily?
Work
There are many beautiful images of the Holy Family with halos around their heads and bright smiles. They are consoling to look at.
This is however not the holiness of real life. Holiness in real life is found amidst the realities of everyday life, especially family life, with all its tensions and struggles, its differences and disappointments
In today’s gospel, Mary and Joseph have lost their child Jesus. For some, this is bad parenting; they were careless. For others, it revealed their love; they anxiously looked for him for three days. They finally found him in the temple.
We too can lose Jesus. We too can anxiously seek for him. Losing and seeking are in fact how we can become holy. Consider how our mediocrity and complacency leads us to lose Jesus because we forget about him. In such moments, we miss him or we need him even more. Consider how we then anxiously look for him through prayer, conversion, good acts.
We have all had such moments. They are grace-filled opportunities to grow, to move on in faith – otherwise, we stagnate, we forget and in time we lose Jesus. Jesus said “Seek me and you will find me,” if you seek me with all your heart. The problem is that sometimes we don’t search with all our heart, only part of it.
These moments of losing and seeking, of laziness and restless searching, of forgetting and remembering are indeed blessings. They make us work a little more on improving our spiritual lives.
Isn’t family life the same? When we take the family for granted or we don’t work to strengthen family ties, we forget what binds us together. When we focus too much on the petty differences, hurtful disappointments, broken promises, we break apart as a family because love can no longer forgive, heal and reconcile. Then we lament and work hard to seek out and rebuild our family.
It takes hard work to build a family, be family and stay as a family.
I am convinced that Mary and Joseph taught Jesus this. By practising faithfulness, trust and hope in God and others, they laboured to become God’s holy family – not for themselves but for others to see God at work in their family. Their holiness as a family is the fruit of their hard work of working with God to live as the family God wished them to be. Do others see God's love and life alive in our families?
For Pope Paul VI, Nazareth, the home of a craftsman’s son, is indeed where we can learn about work, the discipline it entails and its value – demanding yet redeeming – to help us grow in holiness no matter the work be material or spiritual. All this is work happens in the family.
Silence. Love. Work. Each is integral to how the Holy Family lived. Each can also help us live better family lives today. We simply need to break open each characteristic as we experience them in our families to help us do this.
And what will we find if we do this? Today’s gospel tells us: “Not finding him, they returned to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple.”
If we feel we have lost Jesus be reassured that we can find him in the experiences of silence, love and work in our families. It may take us “three days” to find him, like the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection, but the good news is that we will find Jesus in no other place but our families. And when we do, he will say to us, “I am here in your family: this is my Father’s house; it is yours too.”
Based on the writings of James McTavish, FMVD
Preached at St Ignatius Church and Church of the Transfiguration
photo: Internet (britanica.com)
Add a comment