Homily for the week of December 26, 2009

Feast of Holy Family, 2009

1 Samuel 1:30-22; 24-28

1 John 3:1-2, 21-24

Luke 2:41-52

The last weekend of the calendar year is a wonderful time to celebrate the feast of the Holy Family. It’s a time to reflect on the year just ending – on our successes and failures, our times of joy and sadness – and then look ahead with hope and expectation to the possibilities of the coming year.

What’s really great about this feast day is that it’s about something to which we can readily relate. Each of us are members of a family. Families come in many different sizes: traditional family, or a blended family, or a single parent family, or like myself, a member of a parish family. But we are family. So when we celebrate the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we also celebrate our own families.

We know very little of Jesus' life between His birth and when he was about 30 years old. We also know little about his family life. Joseph, his foster father, was a carpenter, so it was customary that Jesus would follow his father’s trade as a carpenter. He spent most of His life in Nazareth, a little village of about 300 persons.

In the Jewish homes of Jesus' day, until a child was about 12, the mother was the teacher in religion as well as in learning. When a boy was 12 years old the father took over and began to teach him a trade.

The Bible story about Jesus also took place when he was 12 years old. Luke describes an incident in Jesus' life that shows that even in this most holy of families, there were moments of anguish and misunderstanding. Each year parents and their older children went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. Passover was a time when Jews remembered the time when they had been saved from death by God. After the temple and on their way home, Mary and Joseph discover that Jesus is not with the group of people going back to Nazareth. They go back to the temple to look for him. He had disobeyed them, and stayed to listen to the teachers and to ask them some questions. The teachers are surprised at his questions. His mother, like most Mothers, is concerned what he did, and like most Mother Mary says to Jesus: Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.And, maybe like a lot 12 year old children who are caught doing the wrong thing, he thinks that his mother is making too much of the situation and says: Why have you been looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?

Jesus' reply is, to them, baffling: It is interesting how Jesus definitely asserts that it is God is his father, rather than Joseph, who is his Father. This story marks the time in Jesus' life when he consciously expressed his awareness that he was different, that he stood in a unique relationship with God.

The Church has placed this Feast of the Holy Family in the Christmas Season as an encouragement for all families to be holy. What does that mean? Being HOLY does not mean that we go around all day with our hands folded and our head bowed. Being HOLY means keeping our mind on what it is that the Lord wants us to be and to do. It means having a place in our family for religion and prayer and trying to live the religion and prayer we talk about.

Being holy means keeping the presence of the God alive in our homes. Children need opportunities to pray in their own way. For most families these opportunities are before meals and at bedtime. Moms and Dads also need the opportunity to pray alone and together.

A holy family is also a family where children are honest with their parents, and parents show respect and honesty to their children. It is easy to be dishonest with one another. When that happens the holiness of the family is destroyed.

Throughout the ages, the family has been the cradle of the Christian religious spirit. The first places where the Christian communities gathered were not churches, but the homes of families who opened their doors to the Christian way of life. These domestic churches nurtured the spread of Christianity for over two hundred years. And since then the family has been the single most important teacher of Christian virtue and Christian faith.

Many families today are what are known as blended families. This can happen in two ways. A couple practicing different religions get married. This is not usually a problem until they have children. Unless the parents were active religious persons while dating, and talked about this seriously, I find that often children may receive little religious formation other than Baptism. But many times these two religious traditions can be a blessing.

Another type of blended family is when a man and a woman who were previously married and both have children, get married a second time. This can be especially challenging when they children who are teenagers if their mother and father did not prepare them for this. A new person enters their life. At times the attachment to the Mom and Dad that is no longer there is closer than the relationship with the step-Mom or step-Dad that has moved in. Unfortunately, the two adults do not see this, or if they do, they do not understand it. It is also normal for a Mom or Dad to "stick up" for their biological children. A fragile relationship between husband and wife can develop, especially when there is a fear on the part of the step-Mom or step-Dad that one of the kids might report child abuse as a means of getting out their anger against the man or woman who is not part of what they think is their home. Fear often leads to marital violence, or ends up in separation, not from each other, but from the situation.

However, there is no problem when a father and mother both have a strong religious faith that has always been part of their life. The family is the first community we experience where we begin to develop relationships. We all learn the meaning of forgiveness from our experience of being forgiven within the family. We all learn the meaning of thankfulness as we experience thankfulness within the family. These are done in the ordinary moments of daily family life: at mealtimes, household chores, washing dishes, cleaning rooms, workdays, vacations, expressions of love and intimacy, caring for a sick child or elderly parent, or the death of a child. and even at times of conflicts over things like how to celebrate holidays, discipline children or spend money. All of these are threads from which families can weave a pattern of holiness. It is within family that we are either called to God or driven away from God.

This does not mean, however, that family life is always easy. The family photos you receive with Christmas cards show the perfect family. They don't show debts, infidelity, divorce, people who have left their faith, people who are addicted, kids on academic probation,kids with behavior problems. Yet these are the situations of family life. But in the Bible God never really gave us the picture of the ideal family. In the bible Cain kills Able, David lusts after Bathsheba. Consider even the Holy Family of Nazareth. Joseph considers divorcing Mary when he learns she is pregnant. But in all of these God's love which overcomes all division. On this feast of the Holy Family, take a inventory of your family. Be generous with thanks and praise for what you do well, ask forgiveness for times you have hurt, and praise God for having given you the gift of marriage and family.