29 December, Christmas I 2024
Readings: 1 Sam. 2.18-20,26; Col. 3.12-17; Lk. 2.41-end
Theme: The Holy Family
The scene that we are presented with in St Luke’s gospel today, of the finding of Jesus in the temple after three days, is clearly not without echoes of what the life and death of Jesus will entail. It follows on from the passage concerned with the theme of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple by his parents, which was part of the Jewish custom at the time that required a ritual of purification for the mother following the birth of a child.
These incidents are an echo of our first reading in which the mother of Samuel, Hannah, presents the young Samuel to Eli, the high priest, for service in order to fulfil the promise that she had made to the Lord. From the presentation in the Temple, we learn that the family of Jesus are poor Jews, they offer only a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons. This was the offering prescribed in Leviticus 12.8 for those of slender means who could not afford to offer a sheep. We also learn from both incidents, the presentation in the Temple and the finding in the Temple following their annual Passover pilgrimage, that they are observant Jews who follow Torah. They come to Jerusalem to present Jesus in the Temple, for the purification of Mary, as prescribed in the Law of Moses, and they make an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. In other words, these interconnected passages tell us clearly that Jesus is part of a poor and Torah obedient family. In a word, he is thoroughly Jewish.
So, if we want to better understand the meaning of this feast of the Holy Family, we must look into the significance of the family in the Jewish tradition. The family acted as the bedrock of Jewish society. It gave a clear social matrix for relations with clear gender roles allotted and was obviously a patriarchal system with the father as the head of the household. Extended families would often live together and so it was a different model to the nuclear family that we have inherited in modern times in many places of the world. Central to this tradition of the Jewish family was obedience. Children were to be obedient to their parents as prescribed in the fifth commandment of Exodus 20.12. This is why the exchange between Jesus and Mary in Lk. 2.48-50 is really quite extraordinary. Following Mary’s rebuke of Jesus for causing them so much stress due to losing him in the Temple, Jesus reminds Mary that he was already with his Father, in his house, the Temple.
Read in the light of the resurrection of Jesus, through which Luke is portraying this incident, a number of things come together to teach us that Jesus is the one who is to save his people and to set them free. The allusion to the three days in the Temple is an echo of three days in the tomb. The finding of Jesus in the Temple is an allusion to the women finding the tomb empty and then encountering the Lord in his resurrected form. Jesus is found by Mary his mother in this incident in his Father’s house, which in the gospel passage is the Temple of Jerusalem, and this alludes to the heaven to which the resurrected Jesus is now located in following his ascension. But what does all this tell us about the Holy Family.
It tells us a number of things. First, it reveals that the Father of Jesus is God, the Father. In other words, Jesus is the Son of God. Second, it tells us that this Son of God is the one who fulfils the Jewish Law. He is the one who brings the Law of Moses to its fulfilment in the perfect offering of himself for us as a sacrifice to expiate our sins. Third, it tells us that there is a certain ambiguity in the model of the family which the Holy Family reveals. It tells us that the family to which we belong on earth is only part of the story. As children of God, sharing in the sonship of Jesus, we are adopted children, adopted that is into the family of God. This transcends our belonging to our earthly families and reveals that, we are part of the universal family of God, God’s chosen people of every tribe, race and nation. So, whilst it is natural to feel a special bond of affiliation to our earthly families, through grace we are invited to experience a bond of union with all of our brother and sisters.
This calling to belong to a larger family through grace, is the invitation of the Holy Family to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of our belonging, through adoption and not by nature, to the Holy Family, which is the Trinity. The pattern of all family belonging is given in the mystery of God revealed to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The interpenetrating love of mutual indwelling in one another is what the Holy Trinity reveals to us as the ground of all family life. To feel what the other feels, to rejoice with their joy, the cry with their sorrow and to desire only their best is what we experience, if ever so faintly in those of us who have been blessed by the experiences of a good family life, and which will be brought to its fulfilment in our union with the holy family of the Blessed Trinity when our earthly pilgrimage is done.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.