Homily for the Solemnity of the Holy Family

December 29, 2024
Saint Mark Catholic Church
Argyle, Texas

1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28
Psalm 84:2-3, 5-6, 9-10
Colossians 3:12-21
Luke 2:41-52

The Church offers us in today’s liturgy of the Solemnity of the Holy Family the Gospel story that recounts the event that we reflect upon when praying the fifth joyful mystery of the Rosary: Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple. The 12-year-old Jesus who stays behind in the Temple in Jerusalem unbeknown to Joseph and Mary who, surprised and anxious, discover Him three days later conversing with the teachers in the Temple. Jesus answers His mother who asks for an explanation that He must “be in his Father’s house,” that is God’s house. The Gospel relates that Mary and Joseph do not understand the meaning of Jesus’ response and then adds that Jesus returned with them in obedience and “advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God.”

We should make clear that this story is neither an anecdote of Jesus’ adolescent disobedience to Mary and Joseph nor an example of the ignorance of Mary and Joseph of the unique significance of Jesus in God’s plan of salvation for Israel and the world. The lack of understanding on the part of Mary and Joseph recorded in today’s Gospel is not confusion as much as it is amazement that God’s ways of salvation made ever more present in the growth and development of Jesus. Mary’s question of her Son is not unlike the question she asks of the Archangel at her annunciation to be His Mother. “How can this be,” a question of awe and amazement and not one of skepticism and suspicion. We may therefore say that Jesus’ decision to stay on at the Temple was above all the result of His close relationship with the Father, but it was also a result of the example and religious formation He had received from Mary and Joseph.

The Rite of Baptism instructs us that fathers and mothers in their distinct roles have the obligation to be the first and best of teachers of their children in the faith by teaching us to follow the Commandments by loving God and our neighbor as Christ taught us. In this we can discern the authentic meaning of the vocation of marriage and family life received by husbands and wives to be fathers and mothers. Fathers and mothers are aware that their children are blessings and projects of God. Therefore, parents cannot consider that they possess their children as products or clones of themselves nor do they relate with them as peers; rather, in accepting and serving God’s plan through the education and formation of their children, fathers and mothers are called to educate them in the greatest freedom, which is precisely that of saying “yes” in accepting their vocations from God to do His will in loving obedience.

We should not be naïve about families … families can be the occasion of great joy, but they also can be the catalyst for suffering. The deepest loves and the deepest hurts are those associated with family. We are made by God to be part of a family, like it or not. There is no such thing as a self-made or autonomous person; we become who we are only as part of a family. Therefore, the Church teaches that it is the family and not the individual that is the fundamental unit of society.

The current strife within society caused by the confused ideologies about sexuality and gender stems from the breakdown in our understanding of marriage as a committed relationship between one man and one woman with their distinct and necessary roles as fathers and mothers in helping children to develop to maturity. It is this fear of generosity and distrust of commitment that accelerates a culture of death.

As Saint John Paul II preached on October 7, 1979, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., “Courage is needed to resist pressures and false slogans, to proclaim the supreme dignity of all life, and to demand that society itself give it its protection. A distinguished American, Thomas Jefferson, once stated: ‘The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the just and only legitimate object of good government’” (March 31, 1809).

What we receive from God through our families … what makes them holy … is what Saint Paul reminds us about in the reading to the Colossians today, “Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, 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.”

Families are the place where we are challenged and learn to pay attention to others beside ourselves, to be patient with others, to ask forgiveness when we hurt others and to forgive when we are hurt. The different relationships in a family form us to be people of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. In families, husbands and wives learn to be respectful of each other in their distinct roles, children discover that they need the strength and wisdom of their fathers and their mothers, and fathers and mothers learn how God’s blessings include their children.

We are keepers of one another beginning but not ending with our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and sons and daughters. The Holy Family teaches us how to be sharers of one another’s burdens…those very burdens which God makes vehicles of grace as we come to know more deeply in whose image and likeness we are made — God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a triune community of persons in love, the prime example of our call to live as the Church, God’s family.