The Holy Family, 2006

The feast of the Holy Family falls during the Christmas season, when most families are gathering together to celebrate during the Christmas holidays. It's a very natural feast, one that we should easily identify with. The following homily is a short one, one that is intended just to spark us to reflect upon our families,and how we share our faith within the family.


Good morning. It's really good to be with you again this morning. I know we have some guests here today, still in town for the Christmas season -- it's a pleasure to have you with us. The Christmas season is one that all of us can and do use to mark the seasons of our lives. We all have our childhood memories of this time; most of us here have memories of Christmas seasons with our own children; and some of us have memories of celebrating the Christmas season with our adult children and our grandchildren. (I've finally begun that last stage.) I remember several years when our children were very young, when we would always travel to Spokane for Christmas, because that's where Joan's parents live; and I have lots of fond memories of that time.

But I did not quite have such fond memories of the Feast of the Holy Family, when we always sat in a pew at Our Lady of Fatima church in Spokan, and listened to homilies about the Holy Family, and the different ways that we were called to be like the Holy Family. I usually felt that the picture painted about the Holy Family was just not believable. And we were also usually treated to that New Testament reading from Paul's letter to the Colossians that tells us that "wives should be subject to their husbands." That always set everybody on edge. In fact, you might have noticed that this same reading from Colossians is still an option for this Sunday, although we rarely use it here at St. Bridget.

Now, the reasons I bring that up is because I find that I do take a lot of comfort in today's gospel reading. In fact, the more I pondered this gospel, the more I liked it. First of all, this reading is the only passage in all of the four gospels that mentions anything at all about the "hidden" time of Jesus' life -- that period between the time Jesus was an infant and the time that he began his adult ministry...the only passage! And the picture given in this gospel is a little snapshot that feels refreshingly normal to me.

What do I mean by "normal"? Well, here we see a mother who was pretty worried about her lost 12-year-old son, naturally enough, and apparently also upset with him: "Why have you done this to us? Your father and I were looking everywhere for you, with great worry." And how does Jesus answer her? Well, it wasn't "Mom, Dad, boy am I glad to see you," or even, "I'm so sorry you were so worried. I just got separated from you, and figured that the Temple was the safest place to wait for you to find me." Instead, Jesus makes that odd remark, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know I must be in my Father's house?" And then the gospel adds, "They did not understand what Jesus said to them." And as a parent, I wouldn't have understood it either. Pardon me for saying it, but that sounds pretty much like a typical miscommunication between a 12-year-old boy and his parents!

Obviously, this is Holy Family Sunday, not Perfect Family Sunday. And I'm sure that Mary and Joseph had a few more things to talk about with Jesus on the way home to Nazareth. But before we leave the text, there are two final sentences in the passage. "Jesus went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them." That means that despite how this passage might sound about Jesus' placing a higher priority on "his Father's house" or "his Father's work" than on the concerns of his parents, he nonetheless went home with them and was obedient to them.

I think that means pretty much exactly what it says. That means, I think, that he listened to both of his parents, that he learned from them, and that he followed their direction and counsel. I think that means also that Mary and Joseph (along with the Holy Spirit) were a primary source for his formation as an adult, even his spiritual formation. Mary and Joseph must have shared their faith with Jesus as he was growing up, and we know that they both did have active spiritual lives to share, even though we don't know that much about them. We only get tantalizing little glimpses of their lives. For instance, the scriptures portray Joseph as one who was very conscientious about following the Law. Matthew portrays him also as very attuned to the voice of the Holy Spirit, who spoke to Joseph not once or twice, but at least four times in his dreams, at critical moments in their lives. And Mary is very open and trusting of the Spirit; she makes her life available to God. She also apparently has a very contemplative side: our gospel today reminds us of how she pondered all of these events within her heart. Obviously, they both found ways of sharing their faith with the youthful Jesus, for our final sentence adds, as a result of his faithful listening to both of these influences, that "Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man."

I'd like to invite you, before this season is over, before the tree is taken down and all the ornaments put away, to take a few moments in contemplation of the Holy Family. How might Mary and Joseph have shared their faith with Jesus? And how did he listen, absorb, and grow from what he saw and heard from them?

They lived in another land, in another age, but in a lot of ways, they weren't so far different from our families. We all face our day-to-day concerns, large or small; but whatever they are, we all do have opportunities to share the ways that the Holy Spirit speaks to us: father or mother to son or daughter, one spouse to another, grandparents to grandchildren, or even children to their elders.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all of our families were "holy families"? All!

-- Denny Duffell