Deacon Michael's Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family December 26, 2021

Here's my homily for the Feast of the Holy Family.

You can find the readings on which this homily is based linked HERE

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family, and because of the calendar this year we are celebrating it the day after the family was born, so to speak, at Bethlehem.

They have hardly had time to get some rest and perspective on the way the coming of a child can change everything

…life before and life after are just not the same

…either in the larger grand drama of our world punctuated by the birth at Bethlehem 

…or in the smaller sub-narrative chapters of that drama in our own lives. 

One of my favorite images of the Holy Family is a painting by the 19th Century artist Luc Olivier Merson entitle “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”,

…depicting Holy Family, resting in the desert at night, during their flight from Herod 

…their donkey grazing

…Joseph asleep near a campfire that is now just smoldering

…Mary is asleep in the arms of an Egyptian Sphinx 

…the only light being projected in this dark and cold night is emanating from the enfant in Mary’s lap.

The scene depicted is deeply peaceful, yet ambiguous.  

The deep calm of the night is serene, but the dark cold, a bit foreboding.

Joseph and Mary, our refugee heroes, rest camly…likely due to exhaustion.

The momentary calm belies the violence of the danger they are fleeing

…and uncertainty of their future as strangers in a strange land.

The seeming calm serenity of the moment, also belies the extraordinary nature of who and what gave rise to this scene at all.

The child himself, his parents playing their dutiful roles, all speak to extraordinary responses of ordinary people to trust, accept, love, protect, provide 

…doing their part in enabling the inbeaking of the Kingdom of God’s love into the cold and darkness. 

This inbreaking culminates three decades later, when

…after offering us his challenging and often radical teaching on the way to live this Kingdom of God’s love now,  

…this child’s resurrection of light and love transcends the cold darkness of sin and death 

…helping us to see and integrate the expanded horizon of our own realities, through this life

…and out into the life of the world to come.

These realities are all pregnant, as it were, in this scene of ambiguous serenity on cold desert night.

There is a similar sense of things in today’s Gospel reading about the finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple.

A precocious adolescent son takes off for a bit of adventure to an environment that deeply resonates with him.

He talks over things that interest him with informed and curious adults

…and the lad gets the satisfaction of befuddling them with his wisdom and wit. 

His parents come and annoyedly reclaim him. 

You can almost hear “the speech”

…‘Three days we’ve been looking!  What’s the matter with you son? Have you any feelings for your father and me?”

“What did we ever do to deserve this?”  

But we know the rest of the story. 

He returns with Mary and Joseph to Nazareth where, obedient to them 

…he “advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.”

But, years later, some of these astonished Temple elders or their successors will be joining the calls to “crucify him!” 

…as he went about his Father’s business, teaching on the very steps of this Temple

…the same Temple precincts which Jesus later predicts will be destroyed, as they soon were, the rubble present to this day 

…the same Temple whose sanctuary veil will be torn in two from top to bottom at the hour of his death.

Here again the drama of salvation history played out through the everyday life of this family whose reality as such we remember today.

The drama continues to this day.

Kingdoms rising and falling. Leaders coming and going. 

Cultures advancing and decaying.

But the faith remains and endures. The Kingdom of God advances bit by bit, here and there. 

And we have a part to play

…by doing our best to teach and nurture mutual love and responsibility in our own households and families as is so lovingly portrayed in today’s first ancient reading from the Wisdom of Ben Sirach

…by passing on the faith to those around us and those who will follow after us

…so that the Kingdom of God’s love may be advanced in whatever little corner of the world we find ourselves

…faithful to the commandment that Jesus left us, and John reminds us of today, to love one another as he loved us, sacrificially, all the way down. 

…trying as ordinary people to provide an extraordinary response as well

…to have some courage, to trust, accept, love, protect, provide 

…doing our part where we are to enable the inbeaking of the Kingdom of God’s love…wherever we find the cold and the darkness.