The Holy Family and Yours
The Feast of the Holy Family
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy can open his novel, Anna Karenina, with such a pithy, memorable quip, because while not every family would be quick to call themselves unhappy, every family has those experiences that can lead to unhappiness, and those experiences seem to be uniquely their own. I do not believe Tolstoy meant to say that some families are perfect and happy while the rest are flawed and miserable; rather, the irony here at play is that no family is perfect, and every imperfect family looks upon most other families as being, maybe not perfect, but at least less imperfect and, thus, less unhappy than themselves.
If families were inherently perfect, Tolstoy and a good many other authors would not have nearly as much to write about. If they wrote about pure relationships without any tension or drama, we would not buy their books because we would not want to read them. It would be like reading science-fiction about some utterly incomprehensible other-worldly existence that bears no relation to our own. But as it happens, their works are successful because they are real, the characters they create our ourselves, the families whose stories they tell are our own but with other names. I say all this coming from a loving family of my own and as a witness every day to the kindness and affection shown by so many families around me. But in our heart of hearts, we all know that no family is perfect, even the ones to which we belong and create. Unhappiness reaches all of us in one way or another. Perhaps at this time of the year, when family engagements are a responsibility that must be borne, we are all the more aware of Tolstoy’s insight.
For all this, it strikes me as remarkably fitting that God should choose to redeem the world by entering the world in the context of a human family. The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is, of course, the sole exception to everything I have just said. However, that they are the outlier may come as a surprise when we read so many wonderful things in the Bible pertaining to married and family life.
We have two such examples before us this morning. The author of Sirach writes of how “God sets a father in honor over his children; a mother’s authority he confirms over her sons,” how a son should honor and revere his father and, in doing so, comfort his mother. Saint Paul says to the Colossians that Christian living which we presume extends to the family should be marked by “heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another.” In this, and in other places, the Bible seems to paint a picture of family life that is perfect, or at least should be perfect by those people formed by its teaching. Yet when we look to the families we find in the Bible, we find much to contrary. In its opening pages, we find the selfishness of the first husband and wife, Adam and Eve, choosing against the law of God and becoming the cause of all unhappiness and familial strife to follow. Soon after we find the fratricide of Cain and Abel, and not much later we see God destroying all the families of the world by a flood except the family of Noah, who was righteous before God. Yet after the flood even Noah becomes an embarrassment before his sons. I could go on, but it is a simple fact that a family is not to be found in the Bible, save the Holy Family, who is holy, blameless, and without any reason whatsoever for unhappiness. It is no less a fact that we will not find any family who can rival the Holy Family in the twenty-one centuries of Christian living among those countless families who have strived to live up to their example.
Yet this is the point — a point that is far too easy to miss in our world today that constantly seeks after an elusive ideal of perfection. Christianity is not about setting an impossible standard and then coming down hard on ourselves for failing, time and again, to reach it. On the contrary, Christianity is about cooperating with God’s grace to work in and through our imperfections so that, in the course of time, he will perfect the work of his creation through us. It was entirely within God’s power to enter his creation in any way he should have liked. He could have been born as an angel and lived among those spiritual creatures who always and everywhere do as they ought, praising and serving God in all things. But, instead, he chose to become human and to enter the world by means of a human family to reveal to us that it is not outside his power to sanctify our families by bringing his mercy into them. He came into the world through a family to save the world as the one, human family and to bring it to delight perfectly in heaven in one, united prayer of perfect praise of God forever. For him to accomplish his plan in us, we must first acknowledge our sins, admit that we and our families are not perfect, and that happiness is something we have not attained and will not attain outside of him. It is then that the work of salvation can reach us and lead us to the joy of his kingdom.
In close, there is one virtue we find in today’s readings that would benefit us all to cultivate in the new year ahead. It is found in that last part of the reading from Colossians that we might be tempted to gloss over or write off as outdated: “Wives, be subordinate to your husbands…”, “Husbands, love your wives…” “Children, obey your parents in everything…” “Fathers, do not provoke your children…” I won’t try to pull the wool over your eyes and convince you that this and similar passages of Scripture are not without their complications in interpreting them correctly. But I do believe there is a simple way to understand these instructions of Saint Paul without controversy. Hear in each of them an invitation to self-surrender and self-gift to the other. What we find in wives being subordinate to the husbands who love them to return, children who obey parents who do not provoke them, is not a hierarchy of control and submission but, much to the contrary, a nexus of relationships of sacrificial love. If our families — if we ourselves even as individuals — are ever to become what God in his loving providence has created us to be, we must strive to practice this virtue in our daily living. We can call this virtue, simply, love. Love is the virtue of God himself, as God emptied himself to become human, to step down from the perfection of eternity to enter the imperfection of time, to come from his fullness to enter our poverty, and to give us who were dead through sin the promise of eternal life. All this, God does in love; and he calls us each day and in every circumstance to “put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.” It is love that unites the Holy Family and makes them holy; and it is the love of God that elevates our human capacities to love that will make us and our families holy as well.
Homily preached December 30/31, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and St. Thomas Aquinas Parish