God is at the centre of family life

Solemnity of the Holy Family 

Two days ago, we celebrated the Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas), Jesus Christ, the word made flesh and dwell among us. Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Holy Family. The proximity of these two feasts is intended to remind us that Christmas and the family are intimately linked. It’s easy to think the Incarnation means God took on a human body; that he appeared in human flesh. But there is much more to it than that. In Jesus, God unites himself to an entire human nature.  He fully enters into human experience, with all its peaks and valleys. And a part of that human experience, with more than its share of peaks and valleys, is family. Christ came as a member of a human family to enable us to be part of God’s family.

Now when we hear the title of this celebration, the Solemnity of the Holy Family, we are inclined to just dismiss the possibility that our families can be like the Holy Family.  The personages of Jesus, Mary and Joseph can at first seem to be too unreachable an ideal for our own family. Every family is far from the ideal because every family is made of unique individuals with their positive qualities and their negative quirks. Perhaps, especially at this time of the year, we are most intensely aware of the limitations of our family - of the various families we are a part of. Family reunions can often be marred by quarrels and misunderstanding. Selfishness, stubbornness, independence can appear to be so great that we can question the integrity of our family as a family, let alone see any real holiness there. In all families, we will witness the same interplay of light and shadow.

In our painful introspection, we forget that the name of our feast is not the Feast of the ‘Ideal Family’ or the ‘Perfect Family’ but of the ‘Holy Family’. The Holy Family was not spared the intermingling of light and shadow. The Holy Family was holy because their lives were centred on God, and not because they were preserve from misfortune and trouble. By today standards, the Holy Family would have been categorised as dysfunctional, far from the ideal. Joseph was married to Mary but is not the biological father of her son. In fact, Mary and Joseph, though publicly married, were actually living sexually continent lives. Right from the beginning, the family was condemned to wander as homeless refugees, fleeing the clutches of a power mad and blood thirsty despot. Poverty would trail them throughout their lives. According to Tradition, which is implied in Sacred Scriptures, Mary seemed to have been widowed at a young age, thus leaving her in the role of a single parent with Jesus orphaned. There is enough juicy stuff here to produce a dark satire of a movie on the Perfect Family!

The Holy Family is proof that God's greatest work on our behalf and for our salvation begins in tragedy, in misfortune, in hardship, in poverty, in silence, and always invisibly. The work of God is never done in a vacuum of imperfection. God is indeed subversive – He uses our darkest experiences and imperfections as the raw material for perfection. Within the Holy Family, we see the ‘perfect’ model for families struggling with their imperfections – the broken families, the single-parent families, the families that are struggling to keep their relationship together. Jesus truly understands what you are all going through and the struggles that you are experiencing - broken relationships, betrayals, and hurts are inevitable. But the Holy Family also gives us a picture of hope. If God is at the center of family life then no matter how big the problem may be, no matter how serious the hurts may have become, no matter how wide the chasm that has grown between individuals, the presence of God assures us that our lives are not ultimately defined by sin but by the love which God has poured and continues to pour as a balm into our lives. Holiness, therefore, is the remedy which heals, strengthens, bonds, and brings about a great measure of the peace for which our hearts so ardently long; for in holiness we embrace Christ, the new beginning of the new creation. In Christ, we get to start all over again.