Homily for Feast of the Holy Family 2009

For someone looking for an intense religious or spiritual experience, Christianity is a bit of a contradiction. What are we presented with? At Christmas: a childbirth by a teenage woman who was pregnant before marriage. A birth that takes place in poverty surrounded by the lowest classes of people, like shepherds. Even the angels who announce the news do not keep the shepherds in a state of ecstasy as they encounter the glory of the Lord. Instead, they direct them to the poor stable in Bethlehem. At Easter, we celebrate a death of the most gruesome kind. That is the difficulty of the Incarnation. God and human flesh are united in a grand paradox.

And we Catholics take this humanness, this human flesh, seriously. Births and deaths are celebrated at length in our rites. Marriage itself is taken up into the midst of the Eucharist which celebrates the very body and blood of which we are all made broken and spilt in Jesus. Other Christian traditions tend to shy away from all this close contact with the human, preferring instead to connect with God in a direct way. Much of our own Catholic theological and spiritual history has been characterised by efforts not to let the apparent division between the material and the spiritual take hold on our thinking as though the material is bad and only the spiritual is good. Catholicism has sometimes even been criticised as being too primitive with all its emphasis on the visible, the material, the sacramental.

The Holy Family of Nazareth, in spite of the idealised images of it created by artists over the centuries, was very much grounded in the ordinariness of family life. The story of the Gospel today affirms this. At the same time Luke is presenting Jesus as much more than he appears, to the bewilderment of his parents. The one who seems to be a child of a poor couple in Nazareth has a mission from the Father to call them and us to be children of that same God.

This Feast calls us to meditate on our family life in light of the choice by God to enter our lives through the ordinariness of family life. In our prayer we may find that point of union between what you do everyday and the very reign of God Jesus brings. God's reign is established in you and your family even through the very tensions and problems that take up so much emotional, physical and spiritual energy as well as in the good times. It happened for Mary and Joseph. It can happen for us.

Fr Graham