HOLY FAMILY

HOLY FAMILY

Cycle “C”: Luke 2, 41

…”The parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem for the feast, taking the Child Jesus with them. And the Child was missing.”

Losing a child in a crowd is a parental nightmare. A combination of panic, guilt and desperation makes it a horrifying experience. Mary and Joseph, like all parents, would have struggled hard to keep their imagination in check throughout their frantic search for Jesus. Could he have been abducted by dacoits to be brought up like one of them; or murdered, with his mangled body lying in a thicket or open field? For the moment, those dark fantasies had to be suppressed and all energies galvanised for the search. Abduction and death among dacoits, his mangled body picked up by his mother was still 21 years off  -  the first Good Friday. For the time being, Mary’s search goes on and bore fruit.

Understandably, Mary expresses relief, disappointment and love. When she finally finds her Son in the Temple in the middle of a busy session with the wonderstruck elders, she asks, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Just look, how your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” Jesus answered with a counter question, “Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know I had to be about my Father’s business?” The Child Jesus was discovering and working out his identity. Yet we do not read that they were angry. In fact, Mary knew her son had a special destiny, and “she kept all these things in her heart”. We also read  “he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them”. It was part of the Saviour’s humility that he chose to submit himself to the care of human parents; though he already knew he had his Father’s work to do, he also knew that it was in the environment of the family that he could best prepare for his mission.

This incident allows us to understand that the Holy Family had to face pressures similar to what families face today. From the moment Mary said “yes” to God, her life was plunged into the kind of trauma that the most marginalized people experience  -  homelessness, persecution, refugee status, and finally, watching her Son being tortured to death. Mary belongs among those who have nothing to give this Christmas but themselves.

The true gift holds nothing back. Since Mary gave herself, the Son of God became truly man and a member of a family. And because she gave of her best, she could keep the Holy Family together. Are parents and children today giving of their best? The pressures are pretty similar since the time of the Holy Family of Nazareth.

I was watching a programme on TV one evening in New Jersey. At precisely 9.30 p.m. there was a break, and it wasn’t a commercial. Instead, a message was flashed on the screen: “It’s 9.30 p.m. now. Where are your children?”

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 competitive 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 development.

 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 confines. God chose to mould and form his Son within the environment and culture of a family. 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:  by Eric Milner-White (1884-1964) [A Dean of King’s College, he expanded and adapted the Festival of Nine Lessons for Christmas. Eric Milner-White went on to become Dean of York, and wrote many beautiful prayers. Here is one of them for the Family]

Almighty Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ hast poured upon us thy best gift of love, to be the bond of perfectness in the families of men, and the means to bring man and wife and child to thine everlasting mansions; bless, we beseech thee, the homes of our land, that in them love and happiness abide, by faith in thee; through the same Jesus Christ Our Lord.

Lord Jesus, in the Holy Family you have given us a model of sanctity to imitate. We pray that you would strengthen the love in our own families, and that all families might come to know the unity and grace that you only can give.