FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY   Year "B"

(Luke 2, 22 - 40)

The Feast of the Holy Family is not as old as one might think. Its origins are found only in the 17th. Century. In the first 16 centuries of our Church, solemn veneration of Mary, Jo-seph and Jesus was a non-event. There was little need to put up the Holy Family as a model, since family life was largely in a healthy condition. But then came the Industrial Age and the rise of the cities, fast lanes, mass media, and entertainment outside the home. Serious problems began to appear on the family horizon. The Church’s stategy was to look for a counter force. She hit upon devotion to the Holy Family. Pope Benedict XV instituted the feast of the Holy Family as recently as 1920. So it was in that year that the threesome of Nazareth officially became the First Family of Christendom east and west.
It is a given fact today that family life is a most difficult project. Apart from economics and housing, one thinks immediately of divorce and broken homes, the scourge of alcohol and narcotics, the breakdown of discipline, and the rest of the unhappy lot. We should pay serious attention to St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians in West Asia. Apparently word had reached Paul that many families in Colossae found themselves between the rock and the hard place.  And so he underlines the qualities  that should be found in the Catholic home. Sit back and allow his magnificent words to sink into your spirit:  “Bear with one an-other...forgive whatever grievances you have against each other....Over all this put on love....Christ’s peace must reign in your hearts....Dedicate yourselves to thankfulness.”
These are not abstractions.  The readings of today’s feast remain reassuringly down to earth: the mutual respect that members of a family owe to each other, issuing in empathy, compassion, considerateness, kindness, patience, gentleness, forbearance and forgiveness. What a home it would be were one to find there all the qualities just mentioned. People would fight to come in and just hope that something of it would rub off on them and their families. Why not allow it to be your home ?
In the family we discover that we are not lone individuals but parts of one body, called to allow the “peace of Christ” to reign. Here as we hand out advice to one another we learn to do it in all wisdom, with tact and love. Here, instead of grumbling discontent, we are to be grateful, always awake to how much we receive from one another  -  a pattern of rights and responsibilities. The family has this great potential. But we know that things are not always like that. Family life can be stifling and even tyrannical. Individuals can be thrust into rigid moulds, held back from their particular flourishing. The family can be possessive, holding us back from growth and maturity.
So our Gospel leads us to the Holy Family. In the temple at Jerusalem Mary and Joseph renounce all such possessiveness as they present their Son to God. Jesus is not the family possession; he is God’s possession, to be and to become all that God would have him be and become. Now they return to Nazareth. Jesus enters what we describe as “the hidden years.” But St. Luke makes a very insightful statement that Jesus grew to maturity and was filled with wisdom. As “true man” Jesus shares in the human process of “growing up” to maturity. He is not pre-programmed as the Son of God, nor a puppet dangling on the strings of the divine puppeteer. But like anyone of us he had to grow up into maturity and to seek wisdom. For this his mother and foster-father could not hold him back in their warm embrace, but had to give him the freedom to be himself and to become all that he was meant to be, even to break away from the family in order to be busy with his heavenly Father’s affairs.
For the family really to be a school of life, this hard lesson has to be taken aboard. It is un-derstandable that Christian parents are afraid of the perils and temptations that surround their young. And in all honesty these perils are real enough. But holding their children back from the rough and tumble of life will reduce them to some infantile state, unable to face the competitive world. So there has to be a healthy tension of framework and flexibility. As we look to the Holy Family we have to learn from Mary and Joseph that love means so firm a trust in God and one another as to maintain the balance between discipline and freedom.
The Holy Family of Nazareth was not a piece of poetry or a lovely painting. The first Christmas stable was crawling with dangerous vermin and choking with the reek of animal dung. No hot running water. Imagine the cold drafts cutting into the baby Jesus. Soon after his birth, the family was under sentence of death and had to flee as refugees. We’ve seen them on TV. How would you feel if your son was always wanted by the police, at all times under sentence of death ?  Many parents complain that their kids think they know everything. Can you speculate how difficult it must have been to raise a son who actually did know everything, the young lad Jesus who answered back: “Why were you looking for me ?  Didn’t you know I had to be, etc..etc..”  What an answer ! And he did not even address Mary as “Mother”.
And yet, we are told, “He went down to Nazareth with them and was subject to them.”   How do sons and daughters take that line now-a-days ?
From my own experience as a son and student, as engineering apprentice, as a seminarian and finally as priest and professor of philosophy and theology, I realise that punctuality is an important factor of family discipline. Where are the children after 9.30 p.m.?
Where are they at other times ? Times for meals, for prayers and evening study ? Can the whole family sit together for the principal meals, and pray together for its own stability and happiness ? Or is the home a cheap hotel where people come and go as they like without permission or information ? Have discipline and obedience become unmentionable words ?  Shall we insist that our children be educated into integral and competent human beings or turn out to be half-baked specimens of humanity, unable to face a compettive world ?  Shall our children learn from us our prayers and refined vocabulary, or monosyllabic expletives and words of destructive criticism ?
People, especially children, do not become good by being told to; they must be charmed into goodness, which, like love is not taught but caught. The environment in which we have been raised and in which we raise our children is essential to our formation and de-velopment. A family is a very human environment; in fact, the first a child is introduced to: the joy, the pain, the drama and the ordinary events of our lives are lived within its con-fines. God chose to mould and form his Son within the environment and culture of a fam-ily. He hasn’t broken the mould since, and thrown it away, because in his mind the family continues to be the place of holiness, love and emotional sustenance.  The Holy Family of Nazareth tells us that in God the family is not extinct.
Let me end with the story of a sailor named George. Most of his adult life he’d been on the high seas. He had never married, and now he was old and retired, living with his nephew Bill. Bill was married and had a few children. He had never travelled. All the travelling he could do was to listen to the travelogues of his sailor uncle George. Uncle George noticed there were times that Bill was fed up of family life  -  arguments with his wife, paying bills, children’s illnesses, etc..He often told his uncle, “I wish I was free to roam the world as you did.”  One evening, after supper, the old sailor told the family about a certain map of buried treasure in his possession and that he would leave it to them at his death. Some years later sailor George died. Nephew Bill located the map. It was in an envelope addressed, in fact, to Bill himself. His hands shook in anticipation as he opened the envelope. It took him just a few moments to read the map. The direction led to the very house in which he stood. George the sailor was telling him from the grave: “Your own home and your family are your treasure. Don’t blow it. Enjoy it while you have to.”

PRAYER:  Thomas Ken (1637 - 1711) [74 years]
O God, make the door of this house wide enough to receive all who need human love and friendship, but narrow enough to shut out all envy, pride, and malice.
Make its threshold smooth enough to be no stumbling-block to children, nor to straying feet, but strong enough to turn away the power of evil.
God, make the door of this house a gateway to your eternal kingdom.
Grant this through Christ our Lord.