Feast of the Holy Family 2022
If there is anything we can be certain of when we consider the past fifty or sixty years, it is that there has been a massive cultural, media and even governmental assault on the natural family. I say “natural” family because one of the prongs of this assault has been an expansion of the use of family to include all kinds of unnatural pairings and additions to what we know as family. Mother, father and children. Even social sciences like psychology and sociology have studied the expansion and found that anything less than man and woman committed to each other in an exclusive and lifelong relationship and children–natural or adopted--is less than optimal for the development of the children. Jesus ben Sira, in his deuterocanonical text, clearly outlined the duties of husband, wife and children, and their powers with respect to each other.
But St. Paul, writing to the church at Colossae, spoke to all of them in the light of the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus. We are, individually and as a family, “God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved.” What does that mean? Forbearing with each other. What that means in plain language–to be the family of God, living in love, don’t we have to put up with a lot of non-optimal behavior? A poor choice of words, an encroachment on my personal space, a long time between phone calls from an offspring–all of these are challenges to our forbearance. Most of the time we have to forgive without even the pleasure of saying to the offender, “I forgive you.” Paul tells us that we have to wrap all that up in love. He uses the word syndesmos, which has the connotation of a shackle. That goes right along with our notion that being bound together with each other is not always very pleasant. In other words, with all members of Christ’s body, we practice love, agapen. We are not bound to like each other; we are bound to will and do the good for each other. If we are so disposed, then the peace of Christ will supernaturally reside in our hearts. It’s as if we had one heart collectively, and that is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, so full of love for us it overflows and enables us to be full of love for each other.
Just a quick note about Paul’s use of the word hypotasso (be subject) with respect to a wife’s relationship with her husband. We live in a society in which everyone feels a right to be treated as an autonomous individual. The culture would like that, would prefer us to make decisions one by one. Why? It’s easier to sell stuff that way, when nobody has to confer with another person or group before buying a product or a service or a philosophy of life. Christian societies, beginning with the family, must be structured differently. Before decisions that affect the family–and don’t nearly all of them do that?–come before at least the council of dad and mom. Each listens to the other, but since the safety of the family unit is primarily the responsibility of the father, he deserves the deciding word. But note also that Paul immediately conditions his words to the father, telling him that his primary responsibility is to love his wife, never being harsh, and to show encouragement to their children. That is the description of a community of love, not authoritarian patriarchy.
In our Gospel we see how the Holy Family applied these principles. They have fled to Egypt to take the Messiah out of the bloody hands of King Herod. While there, they hear that he has died. The Romans are ultimately in control in these last year’s of Augustus Caesar. They rule the world through petty local dictators, most recently Archelaus in Judea, almost as cruel as his father, Herod. So Joseph takes Mary and Jesus back to Mary’s home town of Nazareth, and they there raise the Son of God as the son of man, compassionate, kind, lowly, meek and patient. They give us the model of what our families should become.
