Sunday 29/12/2024
We have just celebrated the feast of Christmas so it is only right that we focus not just on Jesus but the whole family. We grow up in a family, we live our lives in a family, we proudly call the Church a family. Over Christmas we connect with the members of our family and try to celebrate it together. We also feel the absence of family members more intensely at this time of the year. It can be a very difficult time for those recently bereaved.
For most of us family remains very important although it can differ for each of us. As well as being places of warmth, love and support, our families can also be places of conflict, suffering and anguish. Yet, even these negative experiences of family do not break completely the bond that we feel with family members.
Pope Francis said recently that all of humanity passes through the family. To that extent, the health of humanity is greatly dependant on the health of the family. At its best, the family is a communion of love, created by the loving commitment of a husband and wife to each other throughout their lives.
Today’s feast of the Holy Family reminds us that Jesus was born into a family. The Word became flesh as a member of a family; a family that included not just parents, but grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Jesus grew to maturity in his family and was filled with wisdom and God’s favour was with him.
The family provides an environment in which we can grow to maturity, not just physically, but emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, relationally. It is a place that offers us the wisdom to negotiate the challenges of life’s journey. This wisdom is fundamental in helping us discern what is good, right, noble, true and loving, and then to act accordingly. Within his family in Nazareth, Jesus grew to maturity and was filled with wisdom. It was in his family that God’s favour rested on him.
At its best, our family is a place where we also experience something of God’s loving favour. We speak of marriage as a sacrament. The love of husband and wife makes present the love of Christ for his church and the love of God for all humanity. The experience of family is our best opportunity to be graced by God’s loving favour for us in Christ. It is there that we can experience in concrete ways something of the Lord’s faithful love, his willingness to forgive us when we fail and to support us when we are at our most vulnerable.
We know little about the thirty years Jesus spent with his family in Nazareth. Yet, without that experience of family, Jesus would not have become the adult who graces the pages of the gospels - that fully mature human being, filled with wisdom, on whom God’s favour rested and who revealed God’s favour to everyone, especially those made to feel outside God’s favour.
Let us not underestimate the influence that Joseph and Mary had on Jesus. They brought him to the point where one day he could separate himself from his blood family and begin to form a family of his own, not a blood family but a family of friends and disciples, a family of believers who did the will of his Father in heaven. This family came to be called the Church, the family into which we have all been baptized.
As St John said: Whoever keeps God’s commandments abides in God and God in him/her.
by Fr. Thomas O'BRIEN a.a
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