THAT FAMILY FROM NO-GOOD NAZARETH

 That Family from no-good Nazareth 

Luke 2, 41…”The parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem for the feast, taking the Child Jesus with them. And the Child was missing.”

This incident allows us to understand that the Holy Family had to face pressures similar

to what families face today. 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.

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.

Yet God comes within the chaos, within the discord, the failures, and he sits with us in all the lumpy, wrinkly, pimply, sweaty bodies that we feast and fight with.

To strive for a better world, for a better family where every child finds welcome and shelter  -  that is our gift to the world. Christian families should and can become shining beacons of real humanity, places where children are taught faith and values and receive real warmth and support. In a fast-food society dominated by the social control of TV, mobile phones and the internet (call it Facebook or Twitter), it is becoming increasingly difficult to bring parents and children together in a community of shared values and, to be practical, common meals. Through grace at table, other family prayers and prayers by the beside parents effectively pass on faith and values to their children. Little boys and girls are deeply touched when they notice how their parents have a relationship with Jesus, talk with him and do not merely go through a formal ritual. Children not only naturally believe what their parents and teachers tell them; they are born believers, and need little to grow into a life of faith if there is no gap between what they are told and what is lived. Children, until adults corrupt them, sense that men and women cannot be defined by what they have. Like everyone else, children and the young need to be and to grow as human beings.

 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 understandable 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.

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.

The obvious truth is that parents cannot but influence their children. It is preposterous and contrary to common sense to affirm that they cannot. It is from one’s parents that one learns the difference between right and wrong, why we should treat other people with respect and what life is or is not all about. I (Clifford Longley) acquired my taste for music from my father, my interest in social justice, my sense of duty, and my views on religion. It was only when I tested them in my heart and against experience, after leaving home, that I decided  “to choose for myself” and became a Catholic. I think that my father felt that he had failed, although I kept hold of the rest of the package as best I could.

But the idea that one could raise a child to be genuinely neutral on the question of religion, simply waiting to make up their own mind once they grow up, is palpably absurd. There is no such thing as value-free parenting.

Faith, as Pope Benedict has said, has to allow itself to be continuously interrogated by reason. Atheists’ minds are closed. It is as if they cannot bear the thought of their reason being interrogated by faith. As mine was, and faith broke through. Is this the possibility that really scares them?