THE HOLY FAMILY

ATHE CHILD GREW ...@

Homily for Dec. 31st, 2017: Feast of the Holy Family. Luke 2:22-40.

AIM:  To show that Jesus, like us, learned to love in childhood by being loved; and

to encourage the hearers to share their love with others.

 

What do we know of Jesus= childhood and youth? Virtually nothing.  Matthew records the flight of the holy family into Egypt. Luke gives us the story of the infant Jesus= presentation in the Jerusalem Temple, which we have just heard in the gospel. And he tells us that at age twelve Jesus stayed behind in the Temple after Mary and Joseph had started home, thinking their son was in the group with them. Otherwise the record is blank. No wonder that the first three decades of Jesus= life are called Athe hidden years.@

The obscurity surrounding Jesus= infancy and youth makes the concluding words of today=s gospel especially precious: AThe child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.@  Jesus= slow growth from infancy to manhood shows how completely he who was God=s Son entered into our human condition.

God could have sent his Son into the world fully mature, in a way so dramatic as to compel everyone=s attention. Instead Jesus made his entrance, like every one of us: quietly, inconspicuously. Like us, Jesus passed through the weakness and vulnerability of infancy; through childhood, adolescence, and early manhood. At each stage Jesus possessed the perfection proper to that age. He was the perfect baby, the perfect boy, the perfect adolescent, the perfect young man.  There was, however, real growth: physical, mental, and also spiritual.

That growth took place in the context of a family: a family like any other, yet also unlike any other. Luke introduces them at the beginning of today=s gospel, yet they speak no word throughout. Their silence is another aspect of those Ahidden years.@  

Were those years really so hidden, however?  Even if we have no record of them, it is not difficult to reconstruct from our knowledge of Jesus= public ministry something of what they must have been like. The early nineteenth century German novelist Jean Paul Richter writes: AWhat a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.@ Many of Jesus= familiar sayings surely reflect the atmosphere of simple trust in God, and undivided loyalty to him, which surrounded Jesus from his birth. It is fanciful to imagine Jesus first hearing in the carpenter=s shop at Nazareth such sayings as these?

ADo not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own.@ (Mt 6:34)

AThe one who endures to the end will be saved.@ (Mt 24:13;10:22, Mk 13:13)

AThe first shall be last, and the last shall be first.@ (Mt 19:30, 20:16, Mk 10:31, Lk 13:30)

Is it conceivable that any shoddy work came out of that carpenter=s shop? That its customers were kept waiting for things beyond the time they were promised?

The late Father Theodore Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame University and one of our country=s great priests, has said: AThe most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.@ Where did Jesus got his unsurpassed capacity to love even outcasts, lepers, beggars, and hardened criminals, if not from Joseph and Mary?  

A film I saw years ago on natural childbirth showed more clearly than many words the effect of a mother=s love even in the first moments after birth. As the baby is placed for the first time in the mother=s arms, she cries out spontaneously: AO you beautiful baby!  I love you already.@ That is how each one of us learned to love: not from formal instruction or from books, but simply by being loved. 

Parents don=t wait to love their children until the little ones have done something to deserve parental love. Indeed, before birth, and for months thereafter children are so burdensome, to their mothers especially, that there is every reason why they should not be loved. Parents love their children nonetheless. And if they are good parents, they don=t stop loving when their children disappoint them, changing from the little angels they admired in the crib into grown up sinners like Mom and Dad. It is this experience of unmerited and unconditional love that makes it possible for us, as we grow up, to love others in return. Jesus too learned to love in that way. He learned about God=s love from experiencing the human love of Mary and Joseph.     

Do you see now why the Church gives us, on this first Sunday after Christmas, a feast in honor of the Holy Family? By recalling the atmosphere of love that surrounded Jesus from birth, and molded him in that long process of human growth referred to in the closing words of today=s gospel, we are reminded that this is the way each of us grew to maturity. This is how we learned to love, if we have learned at all. This is how we learned how much, and how unconditionally, God loves us.

Here is what one of the modern world=s great lovers, Mother Teresa, said about loving and being loved: AThe greatest suffering today is being lonely, being unwanted, being unloved; just having no one, having forgotten what it is like to have the human touch, human love; what it is to be wanted, what it is to be loved; what it is to have your own people. The greatest diseases are not leprosy, tuberculosis, or cancer. A much greater disease is to be unwanted, to be unloved.@

On this Feast of the Holy Family, God is asking each one of us, whom he has already made members of his family in baptism, and whom he loves totally and unconditionally, to be his agents in loving the unloved, the unwanted, the unlovable. Here at his holy table Jesus Christ, God=s Son, fills us brim full with his love C so that we can go forth from here to share that love with other people: His brothers and sisters, and ours too.