Feast of the Holy Family, B December 31, 2023
Fr. Alexander Albert
[No recording available]
Abraham “reasoned that God was able to raise even from the dead, and he received Isaac back as a symbol.” A symbol of what? God promised Abraham a lot of descendants. He finally had Isaac when he was 100 years old and God said his descendants would come from Isaac. So, when God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac before Isaac even had the chance to have his own children, Abraham correctly guessed that God must be able to raise people from the dead.
As we know, God just stops Isaac from dying in the first place. Abraham’s trust in God is rewarded and he has no reason to worry that God’s promises won’t be fulfilled. So what more does Abraham need? The reality is right in front of him and the mystery is solved. Why would he need Isaac to be a “symbol” of anything? Because Abraham never actually saw proof that God can raise people from the dead. He believed it enough to be willing to make the sacrifice but never saw proof. That and the symbolism is for us, not him.
Like Abraham, we too believe that God can raise people from the dead. We profess it every Sunday. We quite seriously make the historical claim that Jesus rose from the dead at a specific point in the past. Unlike Abraham, however, we have the benefit of knowing that it happened while he could only imagine the future possibility.
This letter implies that Abraham still believed it was possible even after Isaac was spared. Abraham didn’t look back on events and think “Oh, God was just bluffing. Maybe he can’t actually raise people from the dead.” For Abraham, receiving Isaac back alive wasn’t evidence that God was playing games with him, but a “symbol,” a sign that God does indeed have power over life and death.
Of course, the way that Scripture tells this story is meant as a symbol for us, a reminder that Abraham’s faith in God’s power to raise the dead is the ancestor of our own faith. This is why the 1st Eucharistic Prayer which I will pray in a few minutes refers to Abraham as our “Father in Faith.” Our faith isn’t just like Abraham’s faith. Our faith is descended from his. There is a real spiritual bond between us and him… his faith has made possible our faith just as our biological fathers have made our lives possible.
Do we, however, really live up to the claim of being spiritual descendants of Abraham? Even with the benefit of a two-thousand-year-old Church and all the physical evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, do we have faith anywhere near as persistent and enduring as his? Even in today’s gospel we are given two witnesses of the kind of endurance it takes to be considered “faithful” by biblical standards.
Even though he was given a promise by the Holy Spirit, Simeon is an old man by the time he sees that promise fulfilled – kind of like Abraham himself. So great was his wait that he says, “I’ve waited my whole life for this moment and now that it’s come, there’s no reason not to move on.” The prophetess Anna is eighty-four years old and had lived her life in the kind of constant prayer that few saints in history have been able to match.
Then there’s the example of Mary and Joseph, the Holy Family that we especially celebrate today. Though both received visits from angels and were witnesses to the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus, Mary and Joseph still had to endure in the faith they shared with Abraham their ancestor. 30 years Jesus spent in their care in Nazareth and there are only a very few moments of obvious supernatural intervention in all that time.
In the Letter to the Hebrews, we are told “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” Faith requires hiddenness and hope. Just as Jesus is hidden so long in Nazareth, just as Simeon and Anna express the long await hope, just as Abraham hoped for a resurrection that he never saw during his life… we must do likewise. And we can begin with our own families.
Jesus chose to be born of Mary and raised by his foster-father Joseph for a reason. He spent more time with the two of them than with anyone else on earth. We have almost nothing recorded about the inner life of that family. In the face of all that hiddenness, we can only trust that God, who is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful considered it the best thing to do with the majority of his time on earth. What, then, does that say about our own families? Our own hiddenness?
It says that when the ordinariness of family life – the tediousness of providing a home, raising children, and putting up with the same old faults and quirks of the same old family members – this must be an important part of God’s mysterious plan. How often do we dream of being involved in great things, of doing the important work? How often do we prefer to escape into hobbies and distractions? There is a time and a place for such things, but we ought to meet the ordinary and hidden demands of family life with a love elevated by faith in things not seen.
Even as we more deeply embrace our personal Nazareth, we prepare ourselves to leave it. There will be times when our duty to God pulls us away from the comforts of family life just as it did for Jesus. We ought to meet such moments with the same faith, the same trust as Abraham. To love our families with a love inspired by faith is to embrace the truth that they belong to God even more than to us. It means that we sometimes – perhaps often – put the good of our souls and theirs above the good of enjoying their affection. Abraham’s offering of Isaac was a symbol for us – not of literally sacrificing people, but of the deeper, more meaningful spiritual sacrifice we are to make. We must be willing to leave behind everything the world offers – including our own family – for the sake of following Jesus Christ. But this is not a fatalistic teaching! Abraham received back Isaac as a symbol… a symbol to us that, precisely by being willing to give our family to God, to put them in his hands over our own, to love them for his sake rather than for selfish reasons, to risk losing their affections for the sake of salvation, we too hope to receive them back. To have them back as not just biological family members subject to death, but as brothers and sisters in the Lord, able to belong to us and us to them for all eternity.
What a gift that God so loved us as to give us family! What a joy that, in choosing to give us back our lives if we are willing to lay them down, he also chose to give us back our families if we are willing to lay them down. So lay them down. In your hearts now, place upon the altar all your loved ones, all the trials and joys they bring, all the hopes you have for them in the new year. Unite them to Christ’s offering on the cross and, with the enduring faith of Abraham, Simeon, Anna, Joseph, and Mary, look forward to that day when they along with us will rise to everlasting life and the eternal feast of our divine family.