Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family

 Sirach 3:2-6, 13-14

Colossians 3:12-21

Luke 2:22-40

Merry Christmas! I have to say that I have always found it to be a great shame when some people exercise the option to shorten our second reading today, as well as the shortened other readings involving the Sacrament of Matrimony, such as Ephesians 5:22-33 when that comes up in the Lectionary. Sometimes this is done out of defference to the modern feminist movement, because an important explanation of the sacramental theology of marriage is deemed by some not to be politically correct in this day and age. 

Still others prefer to exclude these important readings because they fear that it may give license to abusive spouses to "lord it over" their wives and simply order them around and you ladies are supposed to do whatever we say. St Paul would have understood that if that was what he meant, it was going to go over like a lead balloon even in the ancient world. Remember that he is writing to a lot of people who are former pagans, and the wives in that cultural milieu likely would not have taken very well to simply being ordered around. What Saint Paul was telling the Colossians and the Ephesians and us today is that Christian matrimony is to be patterned after Christ's relationship with the Church, we are the bride and Christ is the bridegroom. 

What that means in practical application is that our homes are to be a domestic Church, and husbands and wives can be Christ to one another, but in a family context, the husband should be the one to have spiritual leadership in a home, just as Christ has spiritual leadership over the Church.

We see the ultimate clear example of that in the story of the flight into Egypt.. When the time came to follow the spiritual guidance of the Lord and to leave Israel and go to Egypt, there is no way that this could have been an easy decision. Joseph already had to take his espoused wife from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census ordered by Caesar Augustus. Now he was being told that Herod and the authorities in Jerusalem were threatening Jesus' life, and Joseph took the lead, following the direction of the Lord as told him by the angel, heeding God's command, and taking the lead over his family when it counted. Similarly, when Herod died, the angel made it known to Joseph, and Joseph followed the Divine directive. St. Joseph exercised spiritual leadership, because he took charge not only of Jesus physical protection, but the spiritual welfare of his family.

Similarly, in the Gospel today we see Mary and Joseph going together as a family to the temple to present Jesus. When this happened, Jesus would have been identified as Joseph's son before the priests and the rabbis of the Temple. We see the declarations of who Jesus is from Simeon the holy man, and Anna the prophetess, but probably the most important passage of the Gospel is what we see near the end when it tells us that the Holy family returned to Nazareth, and that "Jesus became strong and filled with wisdom and the favor of God was upon him." Even Jesus had the example of holy people around him. What we are left to presume is that Jesus grew up not unlike any other child of his day, we don't hear from his childhood except for the finding in the temple at the age of 12. After that incident, we don't hear from St Joseph in Sacred Scripture at all, but we know that he was the leader in the family when it counted. Early on in Our Lord's life, Joseph is seen making the difficult decisions under God's direction.

Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity, is the Son of God and He is God. He could have come into the world in any way that he chose in order to carry out his mission to redeem humanity, but from the foundation of the world it was chosen that he would come into the world as part of an ordinary household and a family with a mother and a father, in part to show us that this is the normative way in which children should be raised.

For a very long time in our society today, it seems that if children are to have any religious upbringing at all, it is often the lady of the house who does the hard work to ensure that the children know something about God. I've known of a few cases where it's even the grandparents who take that responsibility unto themselves. Sacred Scripture is quite clear, however, that Holy Matrimony is a type, or a living example, of the relationship between Christ and the Church. While spouses are to be Christ to each other in their personal relationship (and I don't know about you, but I can think of plenty of times when my spouse has truly been Christ to me), it is the man of the house who stands in the place of Christ as bridegroom in the Sacrament of Matrimony. Just as Christ is the spiritual leader of the Church, the man of the house is supposed to be the spiritual leader of the home. We know that there are often negative spiritual consequences if things don't happen that way.

A few years back, Touchstone magazine published a study from Switzerland that was undertaken throughout Europe and recorded by the European Union. The study found that if both the father and mother of a family attended church regularly, 33% of their children will be regular churchgoers, and another 41% will be irregular churchgoers but consider themselves practicing. only about a quarter of the children of faith-filled marriages end up not practicing their faith in any way at all. Conversely, if mother practices her faith but father doesn't practice his at all, only about 2% of those children become regular churchgoers. Another 37% of those children will attend church on an irregular basis, and 60% of those children will not practice their faith at all. Interestingly, if Dad is the regular churchgoer and Mom is not, the same study showed that far more children were likely to be loyal to their faith, between 38 and 44% of them depending on the circumstances. Some American studies have shown that practicing Dads yield children that are as much as two-thirds more likely to remain loyal to their faith. Some U.S. studies show the number when Dad is active in church to be as high as 93% of children who remain in the practice of Christianity.

Men matter, fathers matter, and we live in an age when masculinity and fatherhood are both under terrible attack. St. Joseph is given to us as an example and a model of manhood, of leadership, of fatherhood. It is time for men to reclaim the example of St. Joseph and reclaim spiritual leadership of their homes and families. The model of the Holy Family can show us the way.

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family

Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14

Colossians 3:12-21

Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

It is always a source of some discouragement to me that our second reading today is often shortened by many so as not to read the section which says "wives be subordinate to your husbands as is proper in the Lord." In that entire section of the reading, St. Paul lays down a very simple model of the Christian home. In addition to his admonition about wives and husbands, he urges children to obey their parents, something he also says in the Letter to the Ephesians, telling children to obey their parents "in the Lord," which is a very important distinction, and fathers not to provoke their "children to wrath." 

To understand what St Paul means here, we really need to look at a passage of Scripture that should be seen as the companion to our second reading today, and that is Ephesians 5:21-33. In this passage, Saint Paul underscores a reality that both the Second Vatican Council and recent Popes have reminded us of, and that is that just as the Church is the Bride of Christ, that the home should be a domestic Church. This is why Paul calls on wives to be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, but he also calls on husbands to love their wives in the same way that Christ loved the Church, in other words they are to love their wives to the point of even being willing to lay down their lives for them, just as Christ did for His own bride. 

The Apostles were keen that men should exercise the spiritual leadership in their homes in the same way that Christ exercises the spiritual leadership over the Church. There are some who misinterpret these passages and take them out of context, as if to say that the apostles would condemn women being in any leadership role in the larger society. They were more concerned about men behaving as Christ would, and taking the spiritual leadership in their own domestic Church.

The Church clearly teaches us that women are equal in dignity and worth to men, and we know that women can be equal (and often surpass us) in talent, abilities, and gifts. But what the Church has never taught is that men should abdicate the role of spiritual leadership in the domestic Church. The whole Church is built upon a Nuptial model, the Church is the bride of Christ, Christ is the bridegroom, and indeed the priest acts in the person of Christ. This is the reason why Sacred Ordination is limited to men, it has nothing to do with the equality, dignity or ability of women. 

When men abdicate the spiritual leadership of the home, this will begin to affect the leadership of the Church as well, since the family is the domestic Church. Studies on Church participation have repeatedly shown over and over again that in families where both the father and the mother attend Church with their children, the children are vastly more likely to continue in the practice of their religious faith. Saint Paul wasn't just an old fashioned male chauvinist fuddy duddy, he saw it with his own eyes in the early Church. When men take the role of spiritual leadership in their families, the families follow them, and that impacts the Church as a whole, and even the larger society.

Increasingly, in those households where the children are fortunate to have both parents present, it is not uncommon for men to abdicate the role of spiritual leadership and spiritual educator to the women of the house. Holy women set holy examples, holy families usually have holy men willing to be the spiritual guide that they need to be.

We see this very example in today's Gospel. When the angel made Joseph aware of the threat to the life of the holy child Jesus, Joseph led his family to Egypt, and when the time came to leave that place, the Gospel tells us that it was he who made the decision to return to Nazareth to avoid any further threats to the Lord Jesus. 

When Saint Paul repeatedly urges men to take the lead and wives to submit to their husbands as to the Lord, he is calling on Christian men to take that spiritual leadership. Our society needs the spiritual example of Christian men even more in our own day and age. Saying that does not mean that the contribution of holy and zealous mothers, daughters, and women in the Church is less valuable to the Kingdom of God or any less important, but it is saying that men should not abdicate their biblical and apostolic role.

All too often, we have seen mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, be the ones to cry out in prayer for their straying family members, their children and grandchildren. Sometimes, men in families think that the women should take charge of the children's religious training, I've even heard some men say that the women are better at that, but the home that has families that pray together, including and especially Dad, is more likely to have children who observe the faith. When Dad takes God seriously, it is far more likely that the whole family is going to take the things of God seriously as well.

God's Word tells us that, in the end, there is nothing new under the sun, and so this is a problem that the Apostles saw in their own day. St. Paul reminds us that in our brokenness and our sinfulness, our home should still function as a domestic Church, and the Church is still the bride of Christ and is organized itself as a family, with Christ as the head and we as His bride.

It is not an accident that it was the plan of God that the Second Person of the Trinity, His only-begotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, would enter into the world and be born into a human family, and then he would make his Church in the image of a family with himself at the head of it, and ordained men who represent Him at various levels leading the Church on earth.

 We have been fed a steady diet of scandal in the Church now for many years. What the feast of the Holy Family should remind us of is the reality that as the family goes, so goes the Church, and as the Church goes, so goes the nation and the culture. All of the problems we see in the Church and in society don't happen in a vacuum, they happen in a family, or in the lack of one. In our own brokenness let us pray that the Holy Family will be the model for our own, and that as we rebuild our families, we will rebuild our Church, and rebuild our nation and our world.