Feast of Holy Family - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2015

I was not totally wrapped with the Synod on the Family in Rome in October – a couple of hundred unmarried male celibates making suggestions to the Pope, with not one woman, married or unmarried, able to cast a vote. So, to be consistent, I had better watch where I tread myself today.

What I can talk about is the final comment that Luke made in today’s Gospel passage, “Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature and in favour with God and men” – though I shall modify the translation for the sake of clarity.

Jesus grew in wisdom – which means that at any one stage of his life he did not have all the answers. He still had more to learn – because wisdom, after all, is largely the fruit of reflection on experience, and neither reflection nor experience need ever stop. Like his mother, no doubt, who, as Luke observed, stored up experience in her heart, Jesus let life touch and challenge him, too, as he strove to make sense of it and to discover there the life-giving presence of his Father.

Today’s translation then notes that he grew in stature. I would prefer to translate, he grew in maturity, that is, he developed psychologically from childhood, through his teenage years and across adulthood, learning to make sense of the complexities and contradictions of life and to integrate the insights arising from experience into more and more adequate patterns of meaning.

Accompanying this growth was what Luke called favour with God and his contemporaries – an attractiveness that was supernatural gift on the one hand and natural consequence of his human maturing on the other. People were consistently struck, for example, by what some called his air of inner authority.

Not explicitly mentioned here by Luke but clearly and abundantly illustrated by Jesus’ deeds and his teaching was the growth in his capacity to love. We in the Church tend to talk a lot about love and its corollary forgiveness, as though we were experts in the field. I am not so sure we are. Love is hard enough to understand; forgiveness is even harder. So many experiences are called love that hardly merit the title, if at all. Some are nothing more than powerful, if momentarily fascinating, projections of people’s unconscious. Others are hardly more than enlightened self-interest. Most are tightly selective or conditional, and consequently are capricious and unpredictable.

When preaching the good news of God’s Kingdom, Jesus called first for repentance. We instinctively think of moral improvement. But in areas of morality, Pharisees were already streets ahead of most of us. Repentance means a change in the way we look at things; and it calls for a degree of maturity, perhaps a high degree of maturity. Essentially it involves the capacity to hold apparent contradictions in tension without denying or letting go of any of them. How else can we truly forgive? How can we even love? To forgive is essentially to reach back with respect, acceptance, even love, to someone who certainly does not deserve it. We cannot excuse the deed done; we need not forget it; we do not deny or avoid it. We honestly face it, feel the hurt – and yet, at the same time, we freely choose to withhold acceptance no longer. Nor does that mean that we recklessly take no precautions to protect ourselves from further possible hurt. 

In order truly to forgive, truly to love, I believe we need to have moved beyond the usual categories of reward and punishment as our way of making sense of the complexities of life. If we still see things from an “either/or” standpoint, I think that forgiveness and true love are impossible. “Either/or” has to grow into “both/and”. How does it happen? We may be able to catch it from someone who has reached that level. It often comes with persistent contemplation. It may develop from the determined discipline and determination to grow in love. Jesus managed it. And so have a lot of others. It is one aspect of the experience of the Kingdom of God.