Feast of the Holy Family: Cycle C 21-22
FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY OF JESUS, MARY AND JOSEPH
Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 | Colossians 3:12-21 or 3:12-17 | Luke 2:41-52
Oh God, who are pleased to give us the shining example of the Holy Family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life in the bonds of charity and so, in the joy of your house, delight one day in eternal rewards. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
The piece of music you just heard was named Humble by its composer and producer, Ryan Harner, and every time I listen to it, I want to make sure Ryan knows how much that piece of music means to me now. And I hope it’s a piece of music that helps you to let go of your logical mind and enter into this beautiful world that we call mysticism, a mystical promise that God has made to you and to me, that we have contact with him, an intimate contact.
Before I begin talking about the readings we just listened to on this Feast of the Holy Family, I want to go back to what we’ve just gone through for the last four weeks, and that is a meditation, a reflection on the mystery of the incarnation. The incarnation, something spiritual becoming material, the Spirit of God in the Old Testament that was spoken of so clearly from a position of separation. God in the Old Testament is outside of us, and he is talking to us. And he talked basically through other people, not directly. He talked through the patriarchs and the prophets and priests and scribes and kings. It’s so clear that what we read and what we ponder in the Old Testament is a system that wasn’t capable yet of being everything that God wanted it to be, in terms of his relationship with us. The Old Testament has a God that’s distant, that has a role of guiding us through regulations, rules and laws, and the motivation so clearly in the Old Testament, because we were much less evolved than we are now, was like treating a child, where you’d tell a child, who can’t fully understand the reason for your commands and your rules — they will follow it if you tell them, if they don’t follow it, there will be some negative results. So we have an Old Testament for 2,000 years where God is working on human beings through laws, through rules, through other people, and it was helpful. And the most helpful part of it was this wonderful wisdom of the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, and it’s just a wonderful description of our nature. So in the Old Testament, we recognize a relationship that God had with us that was based on something that had a lot to do with our undeveloped side of ourselves, if I can say it that way. We were more like children than adults, but 2,000 years later, God, from that beginning of calling Abraham, basically he said, “I want to change this whole thing, and you’re going to have to change two major things that you have in your imagination. You have to change the way you imagine me, God, and you have to change the way you imagine yourself.” And incarnation is the coming together of this new image of who God is into the heart, into the very existence and the being of a human being.
And what is different in the God that Jesus reveals? The God that Jesus reveals to us is the Father, yes, but he is not the Father that is at a distance, that wants to guide us through regulations and rules. He is a God who is intimate and longing for a relationship that is not that of power over someone but a role that God wants where he wants us to believe that he empowers us, empowers us with his presence. And how does he describe his presence? Well, it is described primarily as forgiveness — forgiveness. If you look at the Old Testament system, it is based on people being responsible for the mistakes they make, and they are punished, and they have to endure the punishment. The New Testament, the way that God now reveals himself, is so radically different that we very seldom make the shift, and basically it’s this: “I no longer hold anything against you. No matter what you do, it doesn’t change for one second my intention to save you, to love you, to enter into you, to be a source of life for you, to tell you that you’re loved despite your weaknesses and your faults. That’s who you have to understand me to be. Otherwise, you won’t let me inside of you.” Who wants a judge inside of us? We already have one. If you’re like me, you have this critic that’s constantly laying responsibility upon us, telling us we’re not good enough or telling us we’re so great that we’re miserable, because we can’t achieve it. The critic is always there. We don’t need another critic. We need a lover, and so the first and foremost thing we need to do is just say, “All right, God, if you are going to come into me, I will allow this, because what you’re saying to me is all I’m inviting in is love, appreciation for who I am, and forgiveness for everything I’ve done wrong.” So there’s a new image of God that has to happen before incarnation can take root in you, and then the other thing that has to change is our image of ourselves. We’re not called by God to be perfect. We’re not called by God to not sin. We’re called by God to work through our sins so that they can bring us to a place of greater understanding and wisdom, and at the heart of that is the heart of the message of Jesus in the New Testament. And that is God is forgiveness.
Somehow we think that God demands forgiveness. That’s the way I always felt it. That’s me falling back into the Old Testament of a God who demands that I do things in a certain way. I have to forgive everybody that’s ever harmed me. Now, that’s not the focus. The focus is you have to believe you’re forgiven. You have to believe you’re forgiven by God, and if you can believe you’re forgiven and you can feel the freedom of that, you are going to be more drawn to and more naturally inclined to forgive everyone who’s offended you. The most important command that God has revealed to us, as he enters into us, into our hearts, is, “Listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying to you, ‘My love for you is so intense that there’s nothing you can do that can keep you from me entering into you and empowering you to believe what I am, who I am and what I do for you.’” It’s so hard for us to believe we’re loved that way. Why? Because we don’t experience it in life. So that’s the image I want you to hold onto as far as incarnation, a God living in you, empowering you to be the one in the world that is like him, offering other people this gift, the gift of forgiveness, acceptance.
Now, it’s so interesting that, as we spend four weeks on that theme — and if you can feel what I’m trying to say about the revelation about what God is asking us to take in, because it’s so radically new everyone struggles with it — but then we shift right over to another — the next feast is the Holy Family, and the Holy Family of Jesus is all about relationships. So the relationship you have, this incarnation experience of God living inside of you, is for you, but it’s going to be lived out in community, in the family or origin or the family you end up engaging in, the family of choice, your relatives, the people whose family you marry into, the neighbors you have, the friends. That’s the family that you’re in, and what’s interesting about this family, we use it — we go back in the very beginning in this set of readings to Sirach, an Old Testament image, and you’re going to hear a lot of the Old Testament God in the images of family. God the Father was the one who had authority over people. He encouraged people to do what they were told to do, and if they didn’t, he would punish them. I call that power over someone. That’s different than the God of the New Testament, who is the God who’s always been there fully revealed, and he is saying, “No, I want to be the God/Father. I want to be a Father who empowers my children to be who they are. I don’t want to be the one over them. I want to be the one living inside of them.” How do you live inside of someone? It’s called intimacy. You become one with them in some mysterious, mystical way, and when you go into somebody, just as yourself, you’re liable to be the one who overpowers them and tells them what they have to do, who they have to become. If you go into them with God in you, the God who’s fully revealed, you’ll find yourselves in the lives of the people in your family being there, hoping and longing for them to face all their enemies, all their fears and to become who they are supposed to be.
Listen to this first reading from Sirach. It’s all about a little bit — it’s about a hierarchy in the family, which is true in many ways. Children — parents take care of children when they’re young, and then the children turn around and take care of the parents. And that’s all a beautiful image, but we know in life that families are not always the healthiest place to be. And families are places where people work out their stuff. You come into the world with your own stuff to work through. I think it’s our ancestors we inherit, and then you’re in a family, and the family of origin is not necessarily the most ideal environment to learn how to love. It’s often filled with people who are damaged before they started the family, and there’s struggle in that. And there’s something very, very important to understand, that this is the context in which you learn how to live the incarnate life that God calls you to. It’s not about you becoming the best that you can be by allowing God to enter into you and change you. It’s about you becoming a minister, a servant of other people. You’re going to receive what you receive, but it’s always not just for you. It is for you. It’s also for the people around you.
So we listen to a New Testament image, because it’s St. Paul. So from the image of the Old Testament, power over people, we shift, and we hear this wonderful description of what it is that the incarnation awakens in a human being. And it’s a kind of relational gift: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. Put up with each other. Forgive each other. If someone has something against you, you have to forgive them. If a parent overpowers you, if a sibling overpowers you, that’s older, if you have any of that system that is people abusing you, you have to understand that the only way to be free of the negative impact of that kind of negativity is not to take it personally and to be able to forgive the person who is struggling, struggling with this, as we all are, this invitation to be life-givers to one another, be life-givers. Okay?
So now let’s go to the gospel, because what we see in this is the story of real family life. You would think that, if our family of origin is supposed to be perfect, well, then you would certainly think then — let’s look at what is considered a perfect family in the Holy Family image, and it’s anything but perfect. The image the gospel gives us of the rare glimpse into the family life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is that there’s tension. There’s disagreement. There’s pain. There’s inflicting negativity. It’s a classic story of what happens in one’s teenage years when one begins to realize that I have a destiny that comes to me, not because my parents tell me this is who they want me to be, but it’s because God created me. My Father, my true Father, ultimate Father is — he’s saying — he’s calling me into his world, into the world that I’m called to be in this life. Nothing is more exciting to me than to imagine grace is poured into us. God is poured into us, not just to turn us into sweet, nice people but the person we’re intended to be, the only person that gives us satisfaction when we’re living out of that very person we’re called to be. It’s called authenticity.
So we see that, in this story, Jesus is 12 years old. He’s feeling a calling of his own destiny, who he’s supposed to be. It’s not what his parents expected exactly and — or maybe they did, but they had no real sense of what it was like, but they didn’t know their son had the talent that he had. They didn’t realize he was as, maybe, gifted as he was, but in any case, he’s left them. And they’re searching everywhere, and I love the line of Mary. “How could you do this to us?” She’s hurt by this perfect God/man Jesus, and he looks at her without apologizing. He said, “Look, don’t you realize I am here to grow into who I’m called to be? And I have to be about my Father’s business, my destiny.” It’s so interesting that that’s the image we have of Holy Family, the tension between the parent role of guiding and creating an environment in which their children flourish and the children’s needs and wants because of their destiny. That’s the tension. It’s the tension in everything, it seems to me.
Relationships are there to support, and the most dangerous thing that happens is love gets confused with control. And many times parents, or anyone in authority, worries about those under their charge, and they want them to be who they are called to be. And instead of trusting and putting them in touch with the source that will make them into that, they themselves try to make them into it by telling them they must do this, or they’ll be punished, or they’ll be rejected, judged. Nothing is worse than living in a community of judgment. Nothing is more life-giving than living in a community of forgiveness and patience and kindness and all those beautiful things that Paul talked about. That’s our destiny. It happens now and then in family life. It’s true in my family, and when it’s not what it’s supposed to be, is there blame and criticism? No, it’s knowing that this whole system is designed slowly to bring us into a place of peace, and through tension with forgiveness is the way peace is going to be rooted inside of you.
Father, your promise is beyond our imagining. You want to live inside of us. You want to be a part of us. You want to be in our dreams, in our imagination. You want to be so intimately engaged in us that we don’t even see you as someone else, but it’s a part of ourselves that we listen to. And it frightens us at times, because it challenges us so directly and perfectly. Help us to believe in this relationship that you have given us, and help us to know how valuable it is in every other relationship we have. We long for peace. We long for intimacy. We long for oneness, and when we’re deeply damaged, those things are frightening to us. So heal us. Open us. Free us. Teach us, and let’s experience the life, the family, the communal life that is our destiny. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.