Wholly Family

Scripture Reflection for the FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY (Sunday, December 29, 2013)

Scripture Readings:
Sirach 3:2-6; 12-14
Psalm 128
Colossians 3:12-21
Matthew 2:13-15; 19-23

Sometimes I think that the “Feast of the Holy Family” should be changed to the “Feast of the Wholly Family.” What strikes me is how different Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are than the “ideal family” presented in our first and second readings. These readings present the family in the context of the traditional Jewish (Sirach) and Greco-Roman (Colossians) family that seems perfectly ordered, with a perhaps stern but very benevolent father clearly in charge, a wife submissive to the husband but also authoritative in terms of the children, and the children lovingly obedient to the parents.

But, as I say, what a different picture we get of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. In our gospel we see them as migrants, fleeing for their lives into Egypt, afraid to return even after the angel tells Joseph that the coast was clear. Elsewhere in the gospels we read about how Joseph was troubled by Mary’s pregnancy and thought of calling their engagement off, of how Mary almost became a single mother, and how her son Jesus was born not in the warmth and brightness of his parents’ home, but in the darkness and probably cold of a stable. In the gospel of Luke (2:41-52) we read how Jesus slipped away from his parents on one of the family’s annual trips to Jerusalem to be about “his Father’s business.” And at one point in the gospel of Mark (3:20-21) Jesus’ relatives thought he was out of his mind, and so came to Caparnaum to take him home.

Jesus’ family sounds less like the ideal Hebrew and Greco-Roman family and much more like our own today. The “Holy Family” is “Wholly Family”! How many of us are from families broken by divorce, or sons and daughters of single mothers—or fathers. How many of our brothers or sisters or other relatives are not married in the church, or not married at all. Chances are that one or two of our relatives are in a single sex relationship. My own sister and brother-in-law are raising their son’s two children. My nephew and both nieces are divorced and remarried. I have friends whose daughter and son-in-law have children by a surrogate mother. I’m not sure I know a single family that fits the picture of Sirach or Colossians. Every family has its tensions, its problems, its disappointments.

And yet, the “Wholly Family” of Nazareth is a “Holy Family,” and in this way points to the fact that our “wholly families” can be “holy families” too. Despite all our regularities, and difficult relatives, and complex relationships, there is a lot of love in our families. Like Joseph and Mary in hard times in Egypt and later in Nazareth, our families pull together and really work at living together in peace and harmony, even if we don’t always succeed. The holiness of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is not the holiness depicted on a holy card. It is the holiness that is born out of living honestly together, “bearing with one another, and forgiving one another,” as the second reading puts it. This is the same holiness that our “wholly families” can also achieve, and that often shines through despite the struggles and problems that our families have to deal with.

Image: Family Jump by Evil Erin. Found on Wikimedia under the Creative Commons License. http://www.flickr.com/photos/evilerin/ / CC BY 2.0