December 30, 2024
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the Feast of the Holy Family (Year C) on December 29, 2024, at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Chicago, IL. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14; Psalm 128; Colossians 3:12-17; and Luke 2:41-52.
I think that the Church is brilliant to designate the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s as the Feast of the Holy Family. This may be one of the few Sundays of the year where everyone in an extended family – or everyone within a group of people who are like family – can come to Mass together. Even if many of us don’t have the whole gang with us today, we may still be seated next to someone who will be tempted to jab us in the side as we hear our readings from Sirach and Colossians. Let’s be grateful that we’ve built up some padding on our ribs by feasting over the past few days!
So, friends: let us resist the temptation to think that the rest of our group needs to listen more than we do! Even if we don’t fill the precise roles as described by Sirach, let’s each listen for how the Word is trying to speak to us, not to the people sitting on either side of us.
Jesus Christ came to teach us to relate to God as children relating to a caring parent. Let us take a moment to celebrate the care that God has shown us at every moment of our lives.
More than 30 years ago, two high school friends and I decided to go see the movie Philadelphia on the spur of the moment. There’s an emotionally powerful scene, about halfway through the movie, when Tom Hanks’ character plays a recording of Maria Callas singing the aria “La Mamma Morta” for Denzel Washington’s character. Hanks’ character explains why he loves the song so much. Slowly dying of AIDS, he walks, trancelike, around the living room, trailing his IV bag on a pole. He points out the emotional nuances of the composition: “Oh, that solo cello,” he softly exclaims. He translates the next line as Callas sings it: “It was during this sorrow that love came to me.”
And at that moment, I whispered to my friends, “I just remembered that I was supposed to pick up my sister at church half an hour ago.”
Sadly, I’ve never seen the movie all the way through.
Once, when I was on my annual retreat, my spiritual director asked me to pray with today’s gospel passage. I struggled. Jesus was God, Mary was sinless, and Joseph was a saint. Yet this gospel story tells when something seems to have gone terribly wrong. When Mary and Joseph find Jesus, Mary asks, “Why have you done this to us?” Jesus replies, “Why were you looking for me?” Joseph, as is always the case in the Bible, says nothing. I’m sure that everyone had a lot more to say on the long journey home, but the Bible doesn’t record that conversation for us.
Our gospel is about the family we usually call “The Holy Family.” If Mary and Jesus are sinless, what in the world are we supposed to make of the bits of dialogue that the Bible shares with us? On that retreat, the Holy Spirit revealed that maybe I was too rigid in characterizing everything as right or wrong. If Mary and Joseph, charged with the care of the Son of God, could accidentally lose track of him for three days, and if the 12-year-old Jesus, who is the ultimate embodiment of love, didn’t bother to tell his parents that he was planning to stay behind in the big city alone, perhaps some things that go wrong in our families and in our “like-a-family” groups are simply accidents.
Life is complicated, and sometimes, things go wrong and people get hurt even when nobody means to do anything wrong or hurtful. This is NOT by any means an excuse for when truly abusive behavior happens in our families, in our Church, or in any other institution. Old St. Mary’s stands ready to help abuse victims find the unconditional love and care that they deserve.
When Christian parents have their children baptized, they’re promising to try to emulate Mary, Joseph, and Jesus… at least in some ways. But this gospel passage reminds us that even for this most saintly, holy family, traveling to and from worship services was an occasion for conflict.
God does not expect anyone to be perfect. But because we are knit into the Body of Christ at our baptism in an irrevocable way, the Church expects all of us to live out the advice of Sirach and Colossians. Especially, when things go wrong – as they’re bound to go wrong from time to time – we need to live out that first sentence of our Colossians passage today: “Put on, as God’s chosen ones… heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.” (You know, some couples choose to have that passage proclaimed at their weddings!)
Families – and long-standing groups of friends – are complicated. But most other aspects of life are complicated, too. Hopefully, when we encounter life’s complexities within a tight-knit group of people who try to add compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, and forgiveness to one another, we will be better prepared to handle future complexities that come our way.
One of the most important documents issued by the Catholic Church in the last 500 years, the 1965 Dogmatic Constitution of the Church in the World, challenges us to view the family as the smallest unit of the Church. The various members of the family hopefully inspire one another to live lives of greater holiness, of greater discipleship.
On this Feast of the Holy Family, let’s keep in mind some advice we usually offer on Marian feasts: we honor Mary – and in this case, Joseph and Jesus, too – for what they have in common with us. So, rather than focusing on Jesus’ divinity, Mary’s sinlessness, and Joseph’s unique role in salvation history, let’s pay attention to the call we share with them, to treat one another with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, and forgiveness.
Old St. Mary’s is a larger unit of the Church, a family of families that the Holy Spirit first convened in 1833 and that Holy Spirit has expanded and guided at every moment of the subsequent 191 years. Whenever we gather in-person or online for Mass here, we pledge our love for one another, and we pledge to help each other grow in Christian discipleship. As someone who first met the Paulist Fathers more than 27 years ago, through that very sister I forgot to pick up at our home parish 3 years before that, and as someone who has experienced a beautiful, transformative year in 2024, I thank all of you who have shown me such love in my first 6 months living in Chicago. I am a better disciple, and a better member of this one body of Christ, because of all of you!