Feast of the Holy Family, C December 28, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
When I say “holy family,” what do you picture? Jesus, Mary, & Joseph are the Holy Family, but what if I ask you to picture a more generic idea of a holy family? Perfectly behaved kids sitting quietly in church? An immaculate home? A strict father surrounded by his solemn-faced wife and kids praying the rosary with unbroken concentration?
When I picture a holy family, I see a noisy family meal, the chaotic joy of Christmas morning, a family rosary punctuated by random noises from toys and children drifting back and forth between praying and playing. I see a father apologizing to his son for losing his temper, a husband and wife quietly hashing out what went wrong at the park that day that led to a total meltdown, a grieved mother trying to understand why her daughter is acting the way she is. I see a family always at Sunday Mass… except when serious illness or childbirth or something prevents them – and that happens sometimes. I see a family willing to “miss out” on some of the sporting events or whatever, willing to sometimes put down the tech and just be together.
In other words, a holy family is not necessarily a “perfect” family. Even Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would not fit some definitions of that word “perfect.” Despite the fact that one of them was completely without sin and the other was a righteous man, Mary and Joseph lost their son. It took them a whole day to even realize it! Not that they did something wrong, necessarily – it was a reasonable assumption that some aunt or uncle had him – but still. It wouldn’t exactly look good on social media to say you lost your son for three whole days.
But they were… are holy. God chose to become a child, to live life in a human family for that reason: to bring holiness to every human family. Even better, Jesus has made it so that every person can become holy through their family. Not every person has access to a 24/7 prayer chapel. Not every person has regular access to Mass, Confession, or even to the bible. But every person has a family. Good, bad, or ugly, to exist as a human being means you came from a family. And thanks to Jesus Christ’s choice to sanctify the family, every human being has the option to grow in holiness through that.
I say “good, bad, or ugly” on purpose because so many of us do in fact have bad families, broken families, messy families. Perhaps our families are even gone, absentee, unknown to us. But they still do exist! Like it or not, we came from our parents. Even if we never know them, that fact puts us in a position to practice gratitude and humility in acknowledging that our existence depended on something other than ourselves. Whatever the case, family can be for us an instrument of sanctification – of becoming holier – which is the real key to lasting joy. How can that be? Because holiness comes through love and families provide us the opportunity to love, whether or not they are good.
Any Catholic with siblings has had to go to confession and say “Forgive me, father, I fought with my sister” or “I resented my brother.” One of my preferred penances for that confession is to have the child – or adult! – pray a prayer of thanksgiving for that sibling. Why? Because that troublesome brother or sister is a chance to practice love in the form of patience and forgiveness and sacrifice. I mean it quite literally when I say this: your sibling gives you the chance to be holier. “You drive me crazy, but thank you for making me grow in love!”
That principle applies to the whole family. As St. Paul puts it, the family is the place to practice “heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another.” Yes, this applies to our interactions with everyone, but for the vast majority of human beings, it must be learned first in the home and with the family. Your parents and siblings are people you are forced to put up with so that you can learn to choose to put up with, to love people you could avoid, to become family to the rest of us.
This is why the Church fights so hard to defend what we’ve always taught about the family! It is possible to be good coming from a broken or absent family, but it is so much harder than it needs to be. The lessons that you are loved, that you have to share your life and your stuff with imperfect people, that you have an obligation to obey authority and to care for others, that you have a loving Father in heaven – these lessons are much more easily grasped when the family is intact.
Family: man and woman in an exclusive lifelong union raising their children – this is not an invention of human culture or the government. It is not something that can be redefined, no matter what the people in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, or Washington D.C. say. Those of you who have been deprived of that… are victims of a grave injustice. A person does not have the right to have a child, but every child has the right to their own mother and father. They need both. Sadly, fatherlessness is a pandemic. A missing mother is just as tragic, but far less common. Is it any wonder that so many people reject God the father when more than half the country grew up without a loving father?
And I get it. Some of you have probably already cringed at what I’ve said… or you thought of people who would be upset about it. Some of you may have cringed at that line in the second reading: “Wives be subordinate to your husbands.” But that “cringe factor,” that discomfort is exactly what I’m driving at. Our perspective on family life – even for the lucky few with healthy, intact families – our perspective is skewed by the rebellious, self-centered, individualistic culture we live in.
I cannot, in a single homily, lay out the full panoramic beauty of the Church’s teaching on family life. I’ll leave some links in this homily when I post it, but what I want you to take away from this for now is that that beautiful vision does exist and that it is not what you see in our culture. The Gospel is good news. For most of us living today, the gospel vision of family really is new, despite being around for millennia.
Being “subordinate” has always been a reciprocal thing in marriage – it is not the dystopian fever-dream of “Handmaid’s Tale.” Living chastely despite your attractions to the same sex will not doom you to isolation. Having children isn’t about hitting the right number, but cooperation with God. Being obedient to your mother and father as a child will actually make you freer in the long run. Being faithful to someone who isn’t faithful to you is not foolishness. Caring for your parents who have dementia will not rob you of a good life. In each case, there is an option to have faith, to forgive, to love, to grow.
Whatever your family situation, whatever brokenness you’ve inherited or caused… it is not beyond God to work in that. Mary lost Jesus for 3 days despite being without sin. She eventually found him in the Temple, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” We lost Jesus for 3 days because we crucified him with our sins. Of course we sinners sometimes lose Jesus in the day-to-day of our broken and messy family life! But just as Jesus was found in the temple after 3 days, so he was raised from the dead on the third day. If you can shoulder the cross of family, if you’re willing accept your weakness and search for Jesus, if you’ll accept your own adoption into the family of God, the family of the Church, then you become the Father’s house. There you’ll discover that, although you may not always see him, Jesus is here. And what does Jesus want for you? Two things: to make you holy and to call you family.