The Redemption Of Families – Feast Of The Holy Family – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; December 29, 2024

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. (Jn 1:14) When the Son of God became man, he was not just born of the Virgin Mary, he did not just enter into a particular line of physical descent, he entered into a human family, with a father, and through that family into a larger clan and a whole people, in a particular time and place, with a particular history. In this way he has his human identity, indeed the messianic identity, as the son of Joseph, son of David, son of Abraham. (cf. Mt 1:1-25) All this was foreordained by God for the fullness of time.

In the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. (Gal 4:4-5) We could perhaps adapt these words and suggest that the Son of God was born into a family, to redeem families, that they might become part of the family of God.

If we turn our attention now to today’s Gospel, we meet the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, outwardly like any other family of the time, traveling together with a larger group of relatives and acquaintances on an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the central religious celebration of the Jewish people, which commemorated the foundational event in the life of the people, their deliverance by God, through Moses, from slavery in Egypt.

There is a little bit more hidden in this festival custom. The law of Moses prescribed that the adult males were to present themselves before the Lord three times a year, the Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Booths (cf. Ex 23:14-17; Dt 16:16-17) The women were not required to go up to the temple on these occasions. Nor were the children. That the Holy Family all went up, every year, shows their devotion beyond the minimum requirement of the law of Moses. On this occasion, however, there is something different. Jesus is now twelve years old and the requirement to go up to the Feast applies to him for the first time; he is of an age in which he is now regarded as responsible for observing the law of Moses.

Let me note here that Luke, who records this event when Jesus was twelve, is also the one who tells us that Jesus began his “public ministry” after being baptized by John, when he was about thirty years old. These two ages signified two basic stages of maturity that would have been commonly recognized in the ancient world: we could call them the age of moral responsibility and the age of public capacity, in particular the public capacity of a man. They are distinct things: the expectation that a person knows the difference between right and wrong and the capacity to assume a role in the public life of the people.

In any case, Jesus, who as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us “did nothing unbecoming of his age” (ST IIIa q12a3 ad3), chose the official age of moral responsibility explicitly to subordinate his human family to his divine person and mission, foreshadowing thereby his public mission, the work of redemption he was to accomplish and introducing Mary and Joseph into that work.

First, by choosing to stay behind and hiding himself from Mary and Joseph, he exercised his divine authority. This was not a matter of a boy getting lost or being accidentally separated from his parents. Indeed, the larger company of relatives and acquaintances provided the occasion for Jesus to “hide himself” without any sort of negligence on the part of his parents. He thereby leaves the two of them to search for him with great sorrow for a period of three days, foreshadowing his time in the tomb, when he “hid himself” from the Apostles.

The Virgin Mary thereby experiences beforehand something of the sorrow she will later pass through at the foot of the Cross. Only at the foot of the Cross she will understand, even though she must behold the whole bloody spectacle, and she will wait in faith the three days for the resurrection. Now, however, she experiences the pain of not understanding, a pain that will lead, as she kept all these things in her heart, to understanding, preparing her thereby for the greater trial of the Cross.

As for St. Joseph, he will not be allowed to stand by Jesus at the Cross but will depart from the world beforehand. Nevertheless, through the sorrow of these three days, he too is given to share beforehand, in a real way, the suffering of the Cross.

Likewise, the resurrection is revealed when they find him on the third day in the temple teaching the teachers of the law. Again, take note that he does nothing unbecoming of his age, for he does not teach by setting forth a doctrine, but by asking questions as a young student. Nevertheless, in the scene of Jesus teaching the teachers, we see foreshadowed the wisdom of God instructing the teachers. The Church receives her wisdom from the same Jesus who taught the teachers in the Temple, whom if they possessed any true wisdom had received it from the interior teaching by the same Son of God, who stood before them as a young boy.

The justification for Jesus’ action is because he must be occupied with his Father’s affairs.  The justification for his action is that he belongs first to the divine family of the Holy Trinity as the eternal Son of the Father, before he ever belongs to the Holy Family as the Son of Mary and Joseph.

Yet having made that point, Jesus does something remarkable: he returns with them to Nazareth and is obedient to them; he resumes his subordinate place in his human family.

He was, of course, always obedient to Mary and Joseph. Nevertheless, there is a difference between the obedience of a child who knows nothing else and an adolescent who is beginning to discover his identity. So also there is a difference between the obedience of the younger Jesus, who had himself done nothing to reveal his identity, not even to his parents (though they knew from the message of the angel Gabriel, by the Virgin birth, and by the external signs reported by the shepherds and the Magi, as well as the prophecy of Simeon) and the obedience of Jesus, after he has officially entered the age of moral responsibility and has asserted his divine identity to his parents.

From the moment he first entered the world, Jesus was obedient to the Father, saying interiorly, Behold, I come to do your will. (cf. He 10:7) Now he outwardly assumes the form of obedience in the human order, obedience unto death, from obedience to Mary and Joseph, to his recognition of the authority of Pontius Pilate, when standing before the human judgment seat he says, You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above. (Jn 19:11) This is, as he will later say when St. John the Baptist protests at the prospect of baptizing his Lord, to fulfill all righteousness. (Mt 3:15)

In all this, Jesus gives us an example and teaches us that the pattern of his death and resurrection must lie at the heart of family life, which must be subordinated to the good of God’s family, the Father’s house, and how dear the 4^th commandment, honor thy father and thy mother, is to the heart of God. In all this, Jesus reveals the right order of the human family, a legitimate husband and wife together with their children, inserted into the order of God’s family, the Church, which shares the life of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

God sets a father in honor over his children. He even set St. Joseph in honor over Jesus Christ.

This teaching is not obvious, especially in our world today. Indeed, today especially the unique honor of the father is denied and rejected. Maybe that is because of the sins of fathers, but the solution is not rejection but conversion and healing. Single motherhood means a deeply wounded family, lacking paternal authority and love.

This teaching is not obvious because while a child naturally knows his mother, he only knows his father through his mother. Marriage is what guarantees the father’s presence and the child’s knowledge of his father. The father’s authority derives not only from giving life to his children, but also through his marital commitment to the mother.

The father is the first and primary example of authority in human life. Without paternal authority, all higher authority becomes artificial and foreign. Without paternal authority the mother loses, effectively, her authority over her sons. Note well, paternal authority must be loving authority; if it is not real authority, it is not paternal; if it is not loving, it becomes destructive, rather than life-giving, contrary to the very notion of fatherhood.

Wives, be subordinate to your husbands. The father rightly should be honored, but unless the wife subordinates herself to her husband, the father’s honor in the household will be lost. The mother should have authority over her sons, but unless the father backs her up, she will hardly be able to assert herself, certainly not in a healthy fashion. The children need their mother to teach them to know and honor their father and they need to see their father supporting their mother.

There is an equality of dignity in human nature, created in the image of God; there is an equality of love, because we have all been redeemed by the Blood of Christ; nevertheless, that equality does not and must not undermine the proper hierarchy of service. The husband is the head of the family, who has the responsibility of integrating the family into human society; the wife is the heart of the family, who makes the house to be a true home, who holds the primacy in love; the children, quite naturally need the guidance, teaching, protection and provision of both father and mother. (cf. Pius XI, Castii Connubii, 27)

That is the way it should be, but today family life is deeply wounded all around. Even relatively intact and healthy families must go forward without the public, social support that is due to them, but must rather swim against the current of the “culture of death.” The wounds that afflict families may require adaptation to actual circumstances, but should not lead to the rejection, in principle, of the right order. Conversion and healing, rather than rejection of the right order, is needed.

Nevertheless, it is love that makes the right order possible, while without love the outward structure becomes brutal and harsh. The family is meant by God to be a school of love and without love the family fails in its purpose, no matter how big a house they live in and no matter how many cars they own and no matter how many expensive vacations they go on.

The family is the first school of the heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, and forgiveness of which St. Paul writes in today’s 2^nd reading, all of which must be united in the love of charity as the bond of perfection, all of which must be brought into the peace of the Body of Christ, the Church, the family of God. Therefore it is also all inseparable from instruction in the word of God, the life of prayer, the worship of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, the offering of all that we do in word and deed, giving thanks to God the Father through Jesus Christ, in the Holy Eucharist, the great and perfect sacrifice of thanksgiving, from which true love receives its necessary nourishment.

The simplicity of the life of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, reveals the greatness of the mystery hidden in the life of the family that lives in the grace of God, that seems plain and ordinary in the eyes of the world, but which shares in the glory of the Father’s house.