Holy Family

Readings: 1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28; 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24; Luke 2:41-52

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We prayed in our opening prayer

for this feast of the Holy Family,

“that we may imitate them
in practicing the virtues of family life.”
The family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph 
are offered to us as an ideal 
that we are to strive to live up to
and a pattern for us to reproduce 
in our own families.

So, how are you doing?
How well do you think 
you measure up to this ideal?
If you don’t think you’re doing all that well,
it may be that we tend picture the Holy Family 
as toddler Jesus playing happily at the feet of Mary
with his cousin John the Baptist,
always generously sharing his toys;
or as teenage Jesus and Joseph 
working side-by-side in the carpenter’s shop,
Jesus always diligent
and Joseph quietly admiring Jesus’
preternatural skills with saw and lathe.
So when we look at our own toddler 
bopping her brother in the head with a Tonka truck
or get angry with our teenager 
when he seems so slow—not to mention sullen—
in finishing what really is a pretty simple task,
we may think that there is no way
that our own families will ever measure up 
to the shining ideal of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
 
As children we will never match 
Jesus’ amazing obedience and thoughtfulness;
as parents we will never have 
Mary and Joseph’s endless patience and wisdom.
We will never achieve the holiness
of the Holy Family.
But what if we have misunderstood 
what makes the Holy Family holy?
Part of the problem is that we confuse the ideal
that the Holy Family presents to us
with some nostalgic, and largely false, picture
of families from the past—
television images of children and parents 
happily gathered around the family dinner table,
saying please and thank you
and talking about the exploits 
and adventures of the day.
Or perhaps we think 
of the carefully curated pictures 
of familial joy and togetherness 
that people used to include 
in their Christmas cards
and now post year-round on social media.
Do we think of the holiness of the family
of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as something like that:
a holiness that knows no struggle,
knows no sorrow or pain,
no confusion or misunderstanding?
If that is our picture, 
then perhaps we need 
to look more closely at the Scriptures.
 
We need to see Mary, 
the frightened but faithful young girl,
quite unexpectedly pregnant,
who gives birth in a stable
and whose heart will be pierced
by the sword of sorrow.
We need to see Joseph,
the new father who struggles to provide
safety and stability for his family,
who must take them to a distant country
to avoid the threat of violence.
We need to see Jesus,
the baby born in a barn
who becomes the young man 
who senses a call from God 
that his parents struggle to grasp
and who follows a path
that frightens and worries them.

What makes the holy family holy?
It’s not their being some first-century version 
of the twentieth-century television family 
or the twenty-first-century Instagram family.
In our opening prayer, 
we prayed that we might imitate them
not only in the virtues of family life,
but in “the bonds of charity.”
What makes the holy family holy is their love:
the love that makes Mary say “yes” to God,
the love that makes Joseph care for a child not his own,
the love that makes the eternal Son of God 
empty himself and be born among us,
the love that makes him accept death,
even death on a cross,
the love that raises him from the grave.

This is the love that we hear behind Mary’s words:
“Son, why have you done this to us?
Your father and I have been looking for you 
with great anxiety.”
This is the love that is present in Jesus’ reply:
“Why were you looking for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
This is the love that is present even amid
confusion and misunderstanding,
fear and frustration.
This is the love that makes Jesus who he is.
For while Jesus is who he is from all eternity
because he is the Word 
who is born of the Father before all ages,
in a very real sense he also becomes who he is
by being born in time into a human family,
by advancing “in wisdom and age and favor
before God and man”
within the matrix of love
that is the holiness of the Holy Family.

But what of our families?
What of our families that struggle, not simply
to live up to a television or Instagram ideal,
but sometimes even to love at all?
What of our families, 
where love at times cannot make itself felt
or cannot forgive the harms 
that we have inflicted on one another?
Even then, we can look to the Holy Family.
The Holy family can teach us that love
is not the exclusive property 
of mythical perfect families.
 
The Holy Family can teach us 
that love can be present
even amid anxiety and confusion;
that we can keep loving people
even when we don’t understand them,
or can’t protect and provide for them 
in the way that we would wish.
But above all, 
the Holy Family can teach us
that there is a reservoir of love 
upon which we can draw
when human love runs dry,
a perfect divine love that can heal
the imperfections of our human love:
“See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
And so we are.”
This is the love that forgives love’s failures,
that sustains us when the harms we cause
obscure the love we feel.
This is the love that makes us by grace
what Christ is by nature,
children of God,
treasured by God from all eternity. 

May we know such love 
in these days of Christmas,
may we know it in our hearts,
in our families,
and in our world.
And may God have mercy on us all. 

Holy Family

Readings: 1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28; 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24; Luke 2:41-52

When my children were little
we gave them each a copy of a book called The Picture Bible.
This was more than simply an illustrated Bible;
it was what today they call a “graphic novel”—
a thick volume containing most of the Biblical stories
in classic comic book form.
It was the perfect vehicle
for conveying the stories of Scripture to children,
and to this day there are parts of the Bible
(particularly the battles in the Old Testament)
that my children know better than I do.

But in some ways the Bible does not really make
a very good children’s book.
Take the compact little story of the birth of Samuel
that is our first reading today.
Hannah prays to God for a child and,
in gratitude for the birth of her son, promises
“Once the child is weaned,
I will take him to appear before the Lord
and to remain there forever;
I will offer him as a perpetual nazirite.”
Hannah makes for her son a vow that,
according to the book of Numbers,
you really should only make for yourself,
a voluntary consecration to God
that involves never cutting your hair
or drinking wine,
things that mark you out
as “set apart” from ordinary life.
Moreover, as part of her vow
she takes Samuel to the Temple
and leaves him there
to be raised by the priest Eli.
Why, we might ask,
after all she has been through to have a child
would Hannah commit him
to the difficult life of a nazirite
and then abandon him into someone else’s hands?

Moreover, whatever puzzlement this story
might cause in us adults,
imagine the effects
that it might have on a child:
your parents make promises for you behind your back
and then abandon you
with some old man who lives in a temple.
It is almost as if the story
is designed to hit the sweet spot
between children’s frustration
at their lack of autonomy
and their fear of parental abandonment.
It is more like the terrifying tales of the Brothers Grimm
than what one would hope to find in the Bible,
though given stories like Abraham’s near-killing of Isaac
and Jeptha’s foolish vow that
leads him to sacrifice his daughter,
it is actually pretty mild
(In The Picture Bible,
you may be reassured to know,
Hannah’s vow is depicted more as a simple desire
that her son be a good person
and Samuel’s leaving at the Temple
is more like him going off to boarding school,
a kind of Hogwarts for prophets).

But if it is not really a story for children,
perhaps it is a story for parents,
for the story of Hannah and Samuel captures something
that is deeply true
about the relationship of parents and children.

All parents have hopes and dreams for their children,
ideas of what sort of person we want them to be,
what values we want them to embody.
For Christians
who bring their children
to the waters of Baptism,
we promise “to bring them up
to keep God’s commandment
as Christ taught us,
by loving God and our neighbor”;
we renounce Satan
and profess our faith
in Father, Son, and Holy Sprit
and state our desire
to have our children baptized
into the faith we have professed.
We do this not because we want
to violate their autonomy
or restrict their freedom,
but because we believe
that the Gospel of Jesus Christ
will give them the freedom they need
to be truly happy.
Like Hannah, we dedicate our children
to a life of love of God and neighbor,
a life that might be difficult
in a world that often rejects God’s love,
but one that promises them a joy
that ultimately surpasses
any pain they might suffer.

We parents must also realize, however,
that our children do not remain
forever in our households.
From the outset and gradually over the course of years,
they are and become, as we say, their own people.
Or, for us Christians, we might better say
that Baptism is not simply about
our hopes and dreams,
but about placing them in God’s hands,
so that they can receive
what God desires for them.
As they, like Jesus in today’s Gospel,
“advance in wisdom and age and favor
before God and human beings,”
they might do things and make choices
that cause us,
like Mary and Joseph in today’s Gospel,
great anxiety.
We desire happiness for our children,
and we seek to teach them the ways
that we believe will lead them to that happiness.
But all along they are also teaching us,
teaching us that God’s ways are many and varied,
teaching us that the one thing we can know
is that the path along which
they will make their journey to God
will surely not be our own path.
Even when we are convinced
that they are mistaken in their choices,
once we have said our piece and done our best,
we can in the end only entrust them to God’s care,
in the faith that the God
to whom we gave them in Baptism
will never abandon them,
never let them fall from his loving grasp.

Like Hannah,
we ultimately must leave our children
in God’s hands,
trusting that they have in Baptism
become children of a God
who loves them even more than we do,
and will lead them to eternal happiness.
Like Hannah,
we hope for our children
a destiny so great
that no effort of ours,
but only the merciful love of God,
can bring it to completion.

Holy Family

Readings: 1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28; 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24; Luke 2:41-52

As many of you undoubtedly know,

Christians in the first five or six centuries

produced a number of gospels

in addition to the four that are in the New Testament.

These gospels, which are almost surely not as old as the canonical Gospels

that the Church accepts as Holy Scripture,

seem to have been composed in many cases

to fill in gaps that were perceived in the Scriptural Gospels,

particularly concerning the birth and childhood of Jesus, or his resurrection.

One of these gospels is known as The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

and is composed of materials written between the second and sixth centuries.

It tells stories of Jesus as a young boy – and an unusual young boy he is, too.

It opens with a story of five-year-old Jesus

playing by a brook on the Sabbath day:

he first gathers the water into pools, simply by commanding it,

and then begins to forms figures of birds out of the clay.

The neighbors, of course, complain to Joseph

that Jesus is engaged in work on the Sabbath.

When Joseph goes and reprimands him, Jesus claps his hands

and the birds come to life and fly away,

silencing, at least temporarily, his critics.

This is a charming story

that seems to be trying to depict God incarnate as a child:

the same God who in the book of Genesis commands the waters

and forms Adam from the clay of the earth

and makes him a living being.

Other stories in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

sound a more ominous note,

such as the one in which Jesus strikes dead

a boy who inadvertently runs into him.

When the boy’s parents go to Joseph to complain,

Jesus strikes them blind.

Joseph boxes Jesus’ ear, but this does not seem to have much effect:

in the stories that follow Jesus seems as likely to curse and kill the neighbors

as he is to bless and heal them.

Again, what we seem to have here

is an attempt to imagine what God incarnate is like as a child,

only in this case we see the power of God

combined with the impulsiveness and petulance

that sometimes characterizes young children.

Jesus comes across in these stories as some sort of evil child-genius

who terrorizes the town of Nazareth.

While we might appreciate the impulse

that motivated those who composed these tales –

the desire to imagine God incarnate as a child –

in the end what is conveyed

is less the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ,

and something more like one of those movies

in which the demon-possessed child kills off the characters on-by-one.

The events in these stories are, as my son Denis would say,

are not so much miracles as they are “weirdicals.”

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas concludes

with a version of the story from Luke’s Gospel

that is our Gospel reading for today,

which is the only story from the New Testament

that tells us anything about Jesus between his infancy and his baptism.

After the sometimes bizarre tales

that precede it in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas,

it is something of a relief to arrive at this familiar story

that doesn’t involve anything particularly extraordinary.

Indeed, compared to what has come before,

one is struck by just how ordinary the boy Jesus depicted by Luke is.

True, he seems to astonish people with the answers he gives

to the questions of the teachers in the Temple,

but no one gets struck dead or blind;

Jesus doesn’t levitate or speak with a booming heavenly voice;

he seems nothing more than a spiritually precocious child.

He is not, as he comes across in the later imaginings

of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas,

a powerful and capricious deity in human disguise,

like an avatar of Zeus or Apollo.

Rather, he is a fully human being,

who listens and asks questions of his teachers,

who slips away from his parents and causes them great anxiety,

who returns home with them and is obedient to them,

who advances in wisdom and age and favor,

in the same way that any of us grows and develops within a human family.

And yet, within this ordinariness

there is something extraordinary,

something miraculous.

The boy Jesus says to his anxious family,

“Why were you looking for me?

Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Even at this young age, Jesus knows

that when he is in the Temple he is in his Father’s house;

even at this young age Jesus knows

that he is the Son of the God whom he calls “Abba,” Father.

We might try to imagine what this consciousness was like,

whether the twelve-year-old Jesus could have formulated words

such as “begotten, not created” or “one in being with the Father.”

But in the end our imaginations fail,

as they always fail when it comes to knowing God.

Suffice it to say that Jesus knows himself to be God’s Son

in something like the way we might, from our very infancy,

know ourselves to be loved by our parents.

While the newborn infant “knows” very little –

if we are using the term “know” in the sense

that I know next Tuesday is the 29th

or that Caracas is the capital of Venezuela –

there is a sense in which the infant that is held in its mother’s arms

knows her love more deeply and surely

than any other knowledge it will ever have.

The infant knows this love

as the power that has given and sustains its life.

It cannot know itself without knowing this love,

for this love is the soil in which it is rooted.

Just so, Jesus cannot know himself

without knowing the love of his Father,

which is the eternal source of his identity:

we might say that from the outset

he knows himself to be rooted from all eternity

in the soil of divine love.

But there is a difference between this divine love and our human love.

While we human parents try to love our children to the best of our ability,

we are also keenly aware of the failures of our love:

the limits of our patience and generosity,

the shortness of our tempers,

the poverty of our wisdom.

Jesus, however, knows himself to be rooted in a love that is perfect,

a generosity without limits,

a power that will enable him to face opposition and misunderstanding

and even the failure of the cross,

a love that will carry him through death

into the risen life of the Kingdom of God.

This is the true miracle of the boy Jesus:

not the power to make clay birds fly or strike opponents down,

but the miracle of a human life rooted perfectly

in the eternal love of God,

the miracle of one like us,

who unshakably knows himself to be God’s beloved child.

But the miracle does not stop there.

As our second reading, from the First Letter of John, tells us:

"Beloved:

See what love the Father has bestowed on us:

that we may be called the children of God.

And so we are.”

The miracle is that God’s Son has become what we are

so that we might become what he is.

The divine love in which his life is rooted from all eternity

has now, in time, been bestowed upon us.

In the face of misunderstanding and opposition and even death

we can know that we are held in God’s love,

a love that will carry us through

to the risen life of God’s Kingdom.

Tricks with clay birds pale in comparison

to the true miracle of this Christmas season –

that we become by grace what Jesus Christ is by nature:

beloved children of God.