December 27, 2021
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the Feast of the Holy Family (Year C) on December 26, 2021, at the St. Thomas More Newman Center at the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. 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.
In normal years, the Church is brilliant to designate the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s as the Feast of the Holy Family. When there isn’t a pandemic going on, 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. Be grateful that you’ve built up padding on your 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 27 years ago, two high school friends and I decided to go see a popular movie on the spur of the moment. It was riveting. About halfway through the movie, in the middle of an emotionally powerful scene, I leaned over and 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 that 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. And 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 everyone said more on the long journey home, but the Bible doesn’t record the rest of the conversation.
But our gospel is about 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. The Newman Center stands ready to help abuse victims find groups of people who can give them 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 worship services was an occasion for problems.
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, 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.
The St. Thomas More Newman Center is a larger unit of the Church, a family of families that the Holy Spirit guides us in creating. Whenever we gather in-person or online for Mass here, we pledge our love for one another, and we help each other grow in Christian discipleship. As someone who first met the Paulist Fathers in this very room more than 24 years ago, who was brought here by that very sister I forgot to pick up at our home parish 3 years before that, and who had a beautiful, transformative pastoral year within this community 12 years later, I thank all of you who have showed your love for me over and over again. I, for one, am a better disciple, a better member of this one body of Christ, because of all of you!