Year A / Christmastide / Feast of the Holy Family
Readings: Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 / Psalm: 128:1-2, 3, 4-5 / Colossians 3:12 / Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23
Sisters and brothers, we are almost there: the end of 2019. Just three days more after all the ups and downs this year.
We have all had a year filled with many blessings and many challenges. We have had good days and bad days. We have had people who loved and supported us and people who disappointed and hurt us. We have done likewise: touched their lives, making them happy and better, but we have also wounded them with our words and actions
This past year we have also experienced God’s faithful accompaniment daily, God’s merciful forgiveness repeatedly, God’s life-giving providence always. If we are honest God’s love has constantly called us to become a little holier. Hasn’t God helped us do this?
If you look back on this year, what are you grateful for?
Today is the Feast of the Holy Family. It is a joyful feast; it celebrates the family and all that is good about belonging, living and loving together.
It is also a difficult feast. Some experience brokenness and separation in their families. Others, the lack of love and understanding, the absence of forgiveness and reconciliation, the poverty of being family or knowing how to be a family. It’s hard to be thankful if our families are struggling to love, hurting when forgiveness is withheld, aching when others misunderstand us.
Yet here we are almost at year’s end. Haven’t our families, because of their love that supports or their failings that make us hope more, revealed God walking with us? Is this good enough to give thanks for?
Our gospel reading is about the difficult, challenging, even painful experiences the Holy Family face. They are persecuted. They are refugees. They are poor. They depend on the goodness of others, like the innkeeper who provided the stable, the shepherds with their company, the wise men with their gifts.
If we focus on the Holy Family’s struggle more closely, we may see clearer God’s action in their lives. God’s enduring goodness provides, protects and prepares them to grow in holiness as a family.
What does it mean to be holy? A family that is holy?
Listen to these concrete behaviours the First Reading suggests: honouring and respecting each other and obeying one’s parents. In the Second Reading, St Paul has the same instruction to families and the Church as a family: be compassionate and kind, be humble and gentle, be patient and forgiving.
Is this how our families, at home and as a parish, interacted this year? Is there room for improvement?
Holiness is not a goody-goody, otherworldly mode of living. It involves living realistically by engaging life in all its facets, especially, the difficulties, struggles, and tensions of human life and relationships.
Holy people don’t run away from these everyday realities. Rather, they engage them as God wants them to. God always meets their faithfulness with his loving fidelity – his holy presence and his saving labour.
Today’s gospel passage proclaims this truth. Joseph protects and provides for his family because God wants to safeguard them from danger and to bring them home safe. Whether going or coming Joseph is attentive to his family’s needs. He can do this because he is first and foremost attentive to God’s presence and guidance in his life and family. I believe Joseph shared this wisdom with Mary and taught it to Jesus.
Scripture teaches us that Jesus, Mary and Joseph discerned God’s will, risked change for each other’s growth and good and united themselves as family faithful to God and each other.
Today, we are being invited to be this same kind of family – holy. How can we be, you ask, when my family is struggling?
Perhaps, by first recognizing God's good labour in our families. It is much easier to identify and celebrate God’s goodness. When everything is well and we feel blessed, it is easy to give thanks. We readily count God's blessings in our successes, in the positive impact we made, in how far we have progressed, in how much we have done. And we delight in them.
But can we see God's goodness in our family’s weaknesses and limitations, our mistakes and faults, even our sinfulness, and to still give thanks? It is challenging.
We can by reminding ourselves constantly of how much God is with us in our weaknesses and limitations, our mistakes and our errors. And not just present, but God labouring to comfort and forgive us, to set us right and accompany us to become better, and so saves us.
A report card summarises progress. What would a report card on our family life for 2019 show?
How shall we write it? By reflecting honestly on whether we were weak enough for God to work in our lives this year. For in our weakness, God's grace abounds. It certainly did in the life of the Holy Family.
Here are three questions for our review
First, were we weak enough to recognize our need for God? If we did, were we surprised that God faithfully and repeatedly came to us and laboured for our wellbeing and happiness? If we answer ‘yes’, then you and I would have learned that our weakness is graced. Our weakness is the very space God fills us with His Spirit. This Spirit that frees us from burdens to live a flourishing and fruitful life.
This is how the Holy Family lived trusting God. Can we trust that our families are the very spaces where God is working for us in the best and worst of times?
Second, were we broken enough to be Christ-like? Our families teach us how to grow up and become persons and Christians. But they also break us to form us anew into the persons God wants us to become -- always better than we are.
Families are the right places for this transformation. Here our small-mindedness and arrogance, our selfishness and individualism, our hard-heartedness and fixed mindsets are broken. Broken again and again so that we can become a family who accompanies and cares, loves and forgives each other. Ultimately what we are broken for is to become what we are in Communion: the Body of Christ. This is Jesus for you and me. And in us and through us, Jesus makes his saving presence real for all.
This is how the Holy Family lived for one another and God. Does their self-sacrificing love invite us to practice sacrificial love for family and community?
Third, were we brave enough to be totally dependent on God who wants to serve and lift us up? The Holy Family depended totally on God’s providence and guidance in everything. God never failed. Their radical dependence on God assures and delights them.
Can we make the Holy Family’s way of relying completely on God to be our family way too?
If we are following the example of the Holy Family, give thanks. If we desire to follow them, give thanks too. And if we have many other blessings for this year, give thanks also.
As we do this, I pray we may be more like the Holy Family this year: giving thanks for God’s love shining through when those moments when they were weak, broken and brave only to discover the profound truth about being human.
You and I already know it. We have experienced it repeatedly this past year.
Let me explain. Today, St Paul says, “Over all these, to keep them together and complete them, put on love.” But we know from our experience how often it is really God who first and always cloaks us in his love.
This deeper truth rightly focuses our thanksgiving for this year. Not for the many things or blessings received but for the one who gives -- who gives nothing less than himself.
How can we then not delight in this giver, God with us?
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: adamkatzsinding.com
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