2023/12/31 SCRIPTURE REFLECTION

Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

-Father Matt Litak, Associate Pastor

Christmas celebrates the historical event of God becoming human 2000 years ago. The full understanding of what it means for God to take on a human nature is something that would be debated about for centuries, and it gets explored in today’s feast, wherein we’re told Jesus “grew and became strong and filled with wisdom.” This line would be echoed a few verses later when Jesus is found after having been lost in the temple and we’re told that He, “advanced [in] wisdom and age and favor before God and man.” There is a poignancy to the idea that the eternal God who brought the universe into being, could learn and grow. And yet, that’s what He did. God’s self-emptying humility is fathomless. But, the wonder of the feast, is not fully expressed just in God’s humility, but in something to which we can all relate; families. The Feast of the Holy Family, following Christmas, spotlights the holiness to be found not only with Jesus, alongside Mary and Joseph, but in families generally. The family unit is the building block of the Church, and the place where we first learn what it is to love and be loved. Just like all parents, Joseph and Mary would have been stretched to love and care for their newborn child. How would they teach him? What would they teach Him? While certainly magnified in the case of the parents to the Messiah, these are feelings and questions every new parent has faced. Parenthood definitively stretches parents, and changes their hearts. I once heard a mom say that she didn’t know what unconditional love meant until she had her child. Parents are changed and grow from their experience of parenting, but they also imprint from who they are. Grace builds on nature. Joseph and Mary from their own natures would have displayed to Jesus what it was to trust in God, what it was to pray, what it was to submit their wills to God’s plans. Our own parents shape us and share with us from themselves. They help us to learn about love. My mother’s patient sacrificial witness is something that has and continues to shape me. I recall her constantly taking the smallest or worst portion so my siblings and I could have more or better. I can also recall my parents skimping on themselves to give us something. I learned the most important things from my parents, as I learned self-sacrifice, hope, and faith from them. Certainly, we know that families are not perfect. We know our parents are not and were not perfect, and neither are children. Families can be sources of great pain. But they aren’t meant to be. In the Feast of the Holy Family, we see what they are meant to be. We see a family grounded in love, grounded in God, that is a blessing upon the earth. We see the place where Jesus came to know love. In our families, those thrust upon us naturally, and those we make, we find ourselves capable and challenged to love, to sacrifice, to forgive, and be forgiven. Families are the first place we do that, and if we do learn, in this very human reality, then we become more like God.