Deacon Mike Meyer / Sunday, December 26, 2021 / Categories: Blog, Homilies A Holy Family Homily for the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph My favorite Christmas decoration by far is the Nativity scene. Saint Francis of Assisi supposedly created the first Nativity scene after his visit to the Holy Land in 1223 to foster Christian worship. Apparently, his was a live Nativity with real people and animals, so that’s what I’ll be pushing for here at Saint Catherine’s next year. We already have the flies; we might as well add the animals. Saint Francis’s Nativity was so popular that it quickly spread throughout the world. Today, you can find Nativity scenes in pretty much every shape and size. You can find fancy Nativities made by Hummel and Lladro, simple Nativities, like the little seven-piece handmade set I bought in Mexico, some with hundreds of pieces, and there’s even a Fischer Price Little People Nativity. For as much as I love the Nativity, I do find it a little misleading. Take our Nativity here for example. Mary just gave birth, but she looks like she just returned from a spa day. Everyone looks serene, well rested, and they’re all dressed immaculately in Renaissance European clothing. The newborn baby Jesus looks more like a two-year-old than an infant, there are animals all over the place and not an ounce of manure anywhere, and the two bagpipers standing in the back more than suggest that while the night may have been Holy, it most certainly wasn’t Silent. Nativity scenes tend to depict the Holy Family like Mary Poppins—practically perfect in every way. Holy? Definitely. Perfect? Well, our Gospel suggests that it wasn’t, and that’s great news for all of us. In our Gospel passage, Mary and Joseph find Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem after three days of searching for him. Wait what? Let’s back up a little. After spending the Passover in Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph traveled a full day back toward home before they noticed that Jesus was lost. How does that happen? Did Joseph say, “Mary, we ran out of wine. Where’s Jesus?” “I thought he was with you, Joseph!” Who wouldn’t notice that a twelve-year old boy was missing? Now, pretty much every Bible commentary I read tried to paint this scene like it’s not unusual—they were in a large crowd of family and friends, so they assumed that he was safe among them; the women left ahead of the men, so each thought Jesus was with the other. I’m sorry. Mary and Joseph messed up, and they were lucky Jerusalem didn’t have a Department of Youth and Family Services. So they travel a day back to Jerusalem and after spending another day looking for Jesus, they finally find him in the Temple. Totally stressed out, Mary reproached her son saying, “Why have you done this to us?” Now that part sounds pretty normal, but for some of us, the word “reproached” might not completely capture the full character of our response. “Chewed out,” “reamed out,” that sounds more like it. Then we have Jesus’ reply: “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know I must be in my Father’s house?” The Bible commentaries, again, try to cast these words in the most perfect light, saying that Jesus is expressing his divinity for the first time. We can just hear the angels singing . . ., but every one of us who’s lived with tweens sees it as Jesus playing the God card. We know exactly how those words sounded because we’ve heard that tone countless times. To be clear, I’m certainly not saying that Jesus sinned or intended to disrespect his parents, but he sure seemed to be acting just like an emerging adolescent. Last, but not least, we have Mary’s response: “His mother kept all these things in her heart.” Isn’t that nice? Yeah, right? The only reason a good mother would hold such a thing in her heart would be to save it so she could bring it up sometime down the road when it would have a greater impact. “Remember that time when we had to search for you for three days?” Or better yet, “When I gave birth to you, you were the size of a two-year-old!” Now, my point isn’t to mock, belittle, or disrespect the Holy Family at all. I love the Holy Family, and one of the reasons I love them is because they’re real people, just like us. My point, then, is to portray them as the human beings that they are. The Holy family certainly was Holy, but it wasn’t perfect. Jesus is perfect, but his family wasn’t. Again, they were real people just like us, and God chose them as the earthly parents of his Son anyway. Holiness and perfection aren’t exactly the same thing. Only God is perfect, and only God is perfectly holy; we mere mortals are not. We are all called to holiness, though. As the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church tells us, “all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life. . . . [We] must follow in His footsteps and conform [ourselves] to His image seeking the will of the Father in all things.” Holiness is a journey toward restoring our lives to God’s image and will. Yes, perfection is our goal, but we get credit for trying, too. We can be holy long before we’ll ever reach perfection. So, we need to give ourselves a break. We tend to idolize holiness and the people we think are holy, to the point that holiness seems unattainable. But God never asks us to do the impossible and always offers us his help. He offers us help in Scripture. Our first and second readings give us laundry lists of simple ways to be holy, especially in our family lives: honor our parents, take care of them when they get old, be considerate and kind, show compassion and patience. Forgive. Love. These aren’t impossible tasks—we learned all of them by the time we were in kindergarten. God also offers us the best help possible in the perfect example of Jesus Christ, who graced a very human, imperfect family with his presence and made them Holy. He’ll do the same for us, too, if we let him. If we want to be holy, if we want to be a holy family, we need to follow Jesus, doing whatever we can in his name to make our whole family’s life better. Sure, we’ll have moments when we don’t live up to our call to holiness. Sure, we all have that aunt or uncle who scratches our last nerve, the in-law who insists on adding a little more oregano to the sauce we made, and the sibling who just can’t get over the fact that we were born. The truth is, family life can be messy, but messy situations provide the most fertile ground for holiness. We’re not perfect, but we’re called to holiness anyway. And with Jesus’ help, we can attain it, too, just like Mary and Joseph did. The Holy Family wasn’t perfect. Their life wasn’t the idyllic scene that medieval art and Renaissance paintings made it out to be. As Father Chester said in his Christmas homily, Jesus was born in a cave filled with animals. It was messy, to say the least, but that’s exactly the kind of life and exactly the kind of family that God chose for his only begotten Son. I said earlier that that’s great news for us. Why? Because it means that even with our imperfections, our family can be a Holy Family, too. Readings: Sirach 3: 2-6, 12-14; Psalm 128; Colossians 3: 12-17; Luke 2: 41-52 The Most Important Candle A Holy Family Print 451 Please login or register to post comments.