(This is an update of a homily I gave on this feast day to a group of sisters from the USA during a pilgrimage they made to Rome.)
The good news of Christmas continues to unfold; the mystery of the incarnation continues to reveal itself. Today we are given to contemplate Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, as a member of a family – the Holy Family – together with Mary and Joseph.
And we see that Jesus as a child in the Holy Family is part of the mystery of the incarnation. When we say that the Word of God took on our human nature, this includes being a member of family, for it is part of our human nature to be members of a family, to be children of parents, parents of children, brothers and sisters. And given that the mystery of the incarnation in Jesus Christ not only reveals God but also our human nature as God sees it – and things only really exist in the way God sees them – perhaps this revelation of the Holy Family is important for us in our time, in which we see how forgetfulness of God quickly leads to much confusion – and the suffering that follows – about human nature and the nature and purpose of the family.
To start, consider what Jesus says when his disciples ask him to teach them to pray. He teaches them to pray Our Father.
That’s divine revelation. The unseen God of Israel, of whom no image or idol could be made, and of whom the only name known was the mysterious, puzzling, divine name revealed to Moses, is revealed as the Father.
One of my professors of the sacred scriptures, Fr. Stanley Marrow, SJ (may he rest in peace), was a person who didn’t fit into the usual categories very well. That said, he probably would have felt more at home on the liberal side of things. But one traditional matter on which he would not compromise in any way was God the Father, which he regarded, and rightly so I think, as a matter of revelation. Jesus had revealed to us that God is Father.
So, if at the school Mass or prayers we were supposed to pray to ‘Our Mother-Father’ or ‘God our Parent’ or some such thing, he would walk out, or, more likely, not show up in the first place. For him, the revelation of God as Father of Jesus Christ was at the heart of the good news of the gospel.
And indeed, this good news is that the mission of Jesus Christ is to share the fatherhood of God with us, to make us participants in his relationship to God the Father, to bring about our rebirth as daughters and sons in the Son of God.
In this way we see the holy family of the faithful taking shape; we are adopted into the Blessed Trinity; we have become daughters and sons in the sonship of Jesus Christ, so that on the final day of the Christmas season, a week from tomorrow, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, we too, the baptized, might hear those words of the Father addressed to us:
"You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
And as Jesus makes us sharers in his being the Son of the Father, so he also gives us a mother – two mothers in fact. From the Cross, he gives us Mary to be our mother, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit, he gives us our mother the Church. And these two motherhoods are not entirely distinct; St. Francis of Assisi calls Our Blessed Mother the Virgo ecclesia facta – the Virgin made church. And as Blessed Isaac of Stella puts it, what is said in a particular way of Mary is also understood in a general way of the Church; so just as by the Holy Spirit Mary becomes the mother of Jesus, so in the same way and by the same Spirit the Church becomes the mother of each individual Christian, conceiving us as daughters and sons of God in the divine sonship of Jesus Christ.
And even more, our virgin mother the Church and we as her individual members extend Mary’s vocation through history, for we are called to continue to do spiritually what she did historically: to receive the Word of God with faith, to nourish it let it grow within, bear it out into the world, marvel at the wonders it works, grieve as it is abused and murdered, and rejoice to see it rise again.
And so, brothers and sisters, children of God our Father in his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ and entrusted to the wise and tender care of our mother the Church, let us rejoice today in this feast of our blessed life as the Holy Family.
