A Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family (2007)
[”The Holy Family” by Michangelo]
The Christmas season is a time for families. Children come home from college or from their own homes to celebrate with mom and dad. We visit grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who we do not see for most of the year. We share stories, traditions, and dreams. Sometimes we fight with our family; hopefully we spend more time laughing and rekindling the love that binds families. There is an old saying that goes something like this; “everyone’s greatest blessing is also their greatest curse.” At least sometimes, most of us probably feel that way about our own families. Somehow our greatest joys and our greatest sufferings are often both linked up with family relationships.
Did you ever wonder why God invented family life? After all, God could have made us like ferns. Ferns are pretty much self-sufficient and self-propagating. Just give them some soil, sunshine and just the right amount of water and ferns are just fine all by themselves, making new ferns. God could have made us like ferns, but He didn’t. Why?
God created us in His own image and likeness. God is a communion of three persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — each person is distinct but they share the one Divine nature. God is a Trinity. In making us in His own image and likeness, God created us so that we can only find our fulfillment in community, in the intricate network of relationships that make us dependent on others, and others dependent on us. To be created in the image of God is to be created for family life.
However, since we are human-beings, our family life does not come ready-made. We cannot buy the perfect, pre-fabricated family somewhere. Rather family life is a calling from God, and it can seem like a task. God has created us kind of like a coloring book; the outline of how we are meant to be is provided, as are the crayons, but it is up to us to color it in, and to do our best to stay within the lines.
So how do we fulfill this central mission of our lives, the imaging of God through living a truly Christian life? We need to use three canyons that God makes available to us.
The first thing that we need to do to live a healthy Christian family life is to respect family roles. There is a natural structure of the family, just like there is a natural structure of a tree. The natural structure of a tree includes roots, trunk and leaves, whereas the natural structure of a family includes a dad, a mom, and children. They all go together and need each other in order to bear the fruit of maturity, wisdom and happiness.
In today’s first reading from the Book of Sirach we see a beautiful picture of family roles painted. Mom and Dad are in charge. Together they exercise authority over their children. This authority comes from God, and it comes with a lot of responsibility. Parents must not abuse their authority over their children, and they must not neglect the love, education in the faith, and training in virtue that they owe their children. God is counting on parents to carry out this important, primary mission in life.
In today’s second reading, St. Paul offers a formula for couples to successfully carry out this mission: spouses must keep their love strong by serving each other. The new life of their children flow from the joyful and mutual self-giving in love of their parents. A home filled with the joyful, self-forgetful love of the parents provides an atmosphere that will allow children to mature into healthy young adults.
Sirach points out that children also have a key role. They are to honor and obey their parents while they are growing up, and respect and care for them when they get old.
These are the healthy roles of family life. Parents should not behave like children, and children should not act like parents. It is like a triangle; dad is one side, mom is one side, and the children are the third side. If selfishness breaks one of those sides, the whole triangle fails.
Maintaining healthy roles of family life is not easy in this fallen world, and that where the second crayon comes in. Again we can look to St. Paul in today’s second reading for a foolproof way of rebuilding the triangle whenever it gets broken or bent out of shape. It can be summed up in two simple words: “I’m sorry.” Simple words, yes, but not always all that simple to say due to sinful pride, but if we know how to say “I’m sorry,” our family relationships can endure and grow even through very difficult circumstances.
St. Paul writes, “Put on … patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.” The only way to create an atmosphere of forgiveness is to be ready to ask for forgiveness. One of the best gifts that we can give our families is to make a commitment to always be the first to say “I’m sorry” whenever there is the slightest need. Without Christ’s example and help we could never live like that, but we do have Christ (don’t we?), so we can live like that. “I’m sorry” is the super-glue for family relationships. Like a broken bone that has been healed, a family can become stronger than ever when nourished with the calcium of forgiveness.
Despite our best efforts to build a healthy, happy Christian family we will face obstacles. The fact remains that we live in a fall world. We cannot escape from it. That is where the third crayon comes in. To build a healthy Christian family we have to expect trouble.
This past Christmas I spent with my Mother, and we watched a movie that she has been talking about called The Ultimate Gift. I really recommend it, its great for the whole family. Basically the main character has 12 tasks, which his grandfather calls “gifts,” to complete to get his inheritance from his grandfather. One of the “gifts” is the gift of troubles.
We need to keep in mind that we are pilgrims on earth; in fact we are soldiers in a real spiritual battle. We are human beings with free will and deep-seated tendencies towards selfishness and sin. And to make matters more difficult, we are surround by people with those same tendencies.
Today’s Gospel describes a family on the run, suffering, and struggling just to survive. St. Joseph is told in a dream that King Herod is looking to kill the baby Jesus, and he needs to take Mary and Jesus to a foreign country to be safe. St. Joseph knew that life would be even more difficult in Egypt because they would be outsiders, but he trusted in God. He knew that sometimes God permits hardships because God knows that hardship can bring us closer to Him. St. Matthew’s Gospel makes it clear that the flight to Egypt fulfilled a prophecy, so furthered God’s plan of salvation. Just so, when we face the hardships of family life with courage, we grow in virtue and glorify God better because we have a chance to love more heroically.
Family life truly is the school where we learn to color in the outline of the image of God in which we were created. That is why there are so many forces in modern culture that are trying so hard to extinguish family life. These forces are anti-Christian and anti-God. They resent the fact that God is God and they are not, and so they delight in disfiguring the image of God, the human family. This is the real reason behind the immoral movement towards legally recognizing homosexual unions as equivalent to marriages. It is the real reason behind the efforts to expand abortion laws throughout the world. It is the real reason that contraception and pre-marital sex is promoted as “normal” and “healthy.” It is why no-fault divorce laws have been, and continue to be expanded. And it is why legalized euthanasia is being pushed as the next “choice” we all must have, so that we can be able to dispose of the elderly and the disabled when they get inconvenient. All these trends claim to promote human freedom and dignity, but in fact, whether their promoters realize it or not, they are direct attacks against human freedom and dignity.
You can pull the wheels off a car and make the tires into a pedestal. You can rip out the engine, smash it up, and put it on top of the pedestal. You can peel of the frame, twist the pieces into fascinating, contorted shapes, and arrange them as decorations around the smashed engine and piled tires. If you do, you may have an award-winning piece of post-modern art, but that car will never again make it out of the driveway. God wants us to make it out of the driveway and to cruise all the way home to heaven. To do so, we need to follow His instructions. We must do our best to image God by faithfully living as a Christian family.
