Luke 2:22 - 40
When I was growing up I never thought of my family as holy, but it wasn’t unholy, either. It was probably normal for the years in the middle of the last century. My parents, like many couples in those days, married in the shadow of World War II, as my dad prepared to enlist in the armed services. He chose to enlist because he wanted some choice in where he was sent. This ploy worked because he spent the war training to be an army aviator, and just about when he completed his training the war ended.
My dad was baptized Catholic. His mother was Catholic but a fairly liberal one for the time; his dad did not practice any faith. But unlike many of his peers, he remained faithful all his life. My mom had been raised in a German Catholic family where religion was taken very seriously indeed. I think the common bond of religion played a role in their deciding to get married. I know it was probably one thing that held them together during many very rough patches.
Families don’t happen until a child comes along. I was that child, and after my birth, my mother grudgingly accepted my paternal grandparents, whom she would probably have nothing to do with otherwise, as mother and father-in-law. I think my mother’s dad always looked down at my dad, because he wasn’t German and wasn’t a farmer. Her mom and my dad got along well. And our little family became a part of two other families, sharing, in greater or less degree, vacations, celebrations, milestones of life, and helping each other out because, well, we were all family.
Many years have gone by, and the family that I was a part of is gradually dying off. But new families have been formed. When I meet up with one of my cousins, we usually take up our conversation from where it left off the last time, even if many years ago; but my second cousins are just names on a family tree.
So why the holy family? Sometimes we think of the holiness of Jesus’ family as being all about Mary’s sinless perfection with Joseph a half-step behind. The family is holy because the members were holy. But Jesus’ holy family is not just Jesus, Mary and Joseph. His holy family extends to his grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, just like my family did. And at least some of these were not particularly holy. If you read the genealogies of Matthew, who names the ancestors of Joseph, or Luke, who names those of Mary, You meet a lot of average people, a few heroes and saints, and a few rogues as well. And in a sense they are part of the holy family because Jesus is the Holy One. You know, if I got a call from the son or daughter of one of my cousins, someone I know only because I’ve heard the name, and they needed something, I’d be more likely to ask a few questions and maybe help out if I could, than if that person were a perfect stranger. Something about being part of a family, however tenuous the link is, lowers the natural barriers between strangers. And I wonder if Jesus has a soft spot in his heart for his ancestor David who was responsible for the deaths of thousands, who committed adultery and then saw to it that the woman’s husband was killed in battle. Or Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law, or Rahab, who made her living as a prostitute; or Solomon, who after a great start, ended up building shrines to the gods of his many wives. I like to think our Savior does.
But Jesus came into this world to form a new family, a holy family. And he even defined that family when he said, “Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”
My mother used to say in reference to the Holy Family, “It was easy for them to be holy; they only had one child and he was God.” But I think my mom and dad created a holy family, because despite all their difficulties, despite the times when they wouldn’t talk to each other for sometimes weeks on end, despite the emergencies, the illnesses, the many disappointments they caused each other during their marriage, they always clung to Jesus and through him to each other. And they passed the love of Christ and the desire to be part of his family along to their children, as we try to do to ours as much as we can.
On the feast of the Holy Family it’s nice to look back at a little nuclear family in Palestine 2000 years ago and imagine them like so many pictures paint them, like so many Christmas hymns bring to mind. But on the feast of the Holy Family let us remember that as often as we set out to do the will of the Father, we become part of that family of Jesus.
