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.