Feast of Holy Family

See Commentary on Luke 2:41-52

Homily 1 - 2007

Luke said that Jesus increased in wisdom. How do you grow in wisdom? Perhaps, before that, what is wisdom?

I think that one way of viewing wisdom is: the capacity to respond to life, to its complexity and its never-ending train of experiences, with faith, hope and love.

It begins with the capacity to respond to life with faith. What does that mean? It’s to recognise that there is another dimension to what is going on, a dimension that is trustworthy. I do not need to be in control. What matters is not what is happening but the possibilities that are there in what is happening.

It doesn’t require that God be there to make things happen, but that God is there empowering me to respond – well - and, in the process, to grow.

Trusting in God, wisdom then sets free the capacity to respond to life with hope. God is good. The God who made me, who sustains me right now, who empowers me, who calls and inspires me, is good.

Somehow all will be well – not that I understand “well”. I don’t need to understand “well”, but I believe all will be well – and so I hope; and hope gives me energy. Wisdom is the capacity to use that energy and so to respond to life also with love.

Love ultimately is the way I choose to respond to the God who empowers me and to the people present, and involved with me, in my life. It’s allowing my judgements about people’s behaviour to be irrelevant to my acceptance of them as persons. Love is also allowing my judgements about my own behaviour to be irrelevant to my acceptance of myself as a person.

That doesn’t mean answering - or giving in - to people’s every want. It may indeed mean refusing to give them whatever they want, or to get caught up in their games and their manipulations or their violence - out of my need for their acceptance. It may, indeed, mean calling them to account and demanding responsibility.

Loving, though, does mean a readiness to respond to their true needs to the extent that I responsibly can – and I am, it is important to remember, a limited person with limited energy reserves, limited skills and limited emotional freedom.

But how do I get such faith, hope and love?

I don’t think I have to. They’re there, already given to me by the God who made me, sustains me right now, empowers me, calls and inspires me. They’re there in the core of my being - but they need to be set free. There is an enormous stack of accumulated garbage piled on top of them. 

As well, they can be so easily overwhelmed by the constant noise and visual bombardment of our modern life-style. So we need some silence, some stillness – a lot of it, as much as we responsibly can get.

In the silence and the stillness we need to look at the accumulated garbage (and that can be hard, even frightening), to take stock of it, to sort it out, and to let the sun, the rain and the wind get at it (as it were)  until it settles down a bit. (There can even be useful stuff in there among it all!) The Sacrament of Reconciliation, or a bit of spiritual direction, can often be of help in that process.

Mary’s way to handle the constant flow of experience and to come to terms with life,

wasn’t bad. As Luke said of her a few times in his Infancy Narrative: She treasured her experiences, and pondered them in her heart.

She must have taught Jesus to do the same because, as his life unfolded with all its experiences, Luke declared that he increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and others.

They might make an interesting model for many families.

Homily 2 - 2010

With all the hype surrounding Christmas, I gather it can be, for a lot of people, a time of stress. I must have been lucky as a kid. We didn’t have a great lot of rellies, and the adults got on OK together. Some I found a bit boring … and I was a bit scared of one of my cousins. But no great tensions.  

The Gospels, generally, don’t give families a good press – natural families, that is. Even with regard to Jesus’ extended natural family, the record is not really crash hot. They tell how, at one stage, his mother and his brothers worried whether he had gone mad; and his brothers, as they were called, didn’t believe in him – at least before he died.

So there’s family – and there’s family! Unfortunately, families can be set-ups where children learn how to criticise, how to hate, how to never forgive, how to keep the score, how to be dishonest, to pretend there’s no elephant in the room, how to communicate without really communicating – where boys, particularly, but also girls, grow up without ever having been healthily fathered, or mothered; or where girls have been unfairly crushed by unquestioned, often unrecognised, patriarchal attitudes and behaviours, where domestic violence and sexual abuse go on, and nothing gets said.

I have read, and am inclined to believe, that it was the grandmothers in Northern Ireland who held the memories, brooded over for decades, that fanned the flames of sectarian distrust and hatred. Even worse in Serbia and Albania where the siege of Srebreniza was, apparently, pay-back for a humiliating defeat suffered six centuries beforehand – and never forgotten.

That’s not the whole story, of course, and for most of us, please God, our experience has been wonderfully different because there exists, also, the Christian family. The Christian family is not simply a culturally conditioned construct, but a constant work in progress. It is never a given, simply there, static, unquestioned reality. 

It’s a product of deliberate decisions, of constant effort, and of hard work – where everyone, particularly mum and dad, consciously practise love, forgiveness, honesty, openness and welcome. If we think that’s easy, or comes naturally, we haven’t tried it.

The good news is that it’s worth the effort … and God is on our side. And, if we’ve made mistakes, and are living with their consequences, forgiveness is possible, as is self-acceptance, and the ingenuity to make the best of whatever’s real.

Christian family is always a work in progress, and comes in lots of shapes and sizes, and often sporting a few band-aids.

Homily 3 - 2012

Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and favour with God and with people in general.

 If children eat their muesli for breakfast, there is a fair chance they will grow in stature.  Growing in favour is less defined – a kind of attractiveness, made up of a combination of personal characteristics: liveliness, cheerfulness, considerateness, courtesy, etc.  

And what is wisdom? We usually don't attribute it to children.  It seems to grow out of life experience, and the responses made to that experience.  However we view it, Jesus increased in it.  In fact, he continued to grow in it, to deepen it, right across his life – as he allowed experience to stretch him.  The Epistle to the Hebrews writes of his becoming perfect, at last, through the suffering of his passion and death.

How might we grow in wisdom? Today's Gospel gives us some helpful clues.  Jesus listened to the doctors in the temple.  He learnt the story.  He learnt the facts.  He listened to the sense that other respected people before him had sought to make of that story and those facts. 

But he did not stop there.  He asked them questions.  And questions come from wondering. Wondering can be more than just seeking further facts.  Wondering can also be the search for meaning, for the meaning of past history, but also, and perhaps more importantly, for the meaning of present life experience.  There is a questioning that looks for answers.  But there is a different level of questioning that looks for insight and understanding [both beautiful words!], that is open to mystery and seeks to explore ever further. 

In the search for meaning and the exploration of mystery, the question eventually arises about God.  Suffering can painfully force the question: Why does God … ? or How can God … ? – not unlike Jesus' tormented cry: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? To these questions there is rarely a satisfying answer, particularly an emotionally satisfying answer.

Behind those questions others lie unrecognised: Who is God? What is God? We all have some sense of God that we bring with us from childhood – and is deeply embedded in our psyche.  Even atheists have their sense of God that to them makes no sense.  So they make the jump and say there is no God.  It might be more helpful were they to face the question: Might their sense of God be wrong? Should they let go of it, and keep wondering, searching, seeking sense – with an open mind? 

If we keep growing in wisdom, we need to lose faith in our childhood sense of God.  Becoming honestly adult means that we also need to lose faith in the view of God that made sense in adolescence and early adulthood.  That can feel quite threatening, unsettling, until deeper insight grows and brings a richer, more adequate sense of the mystery that is God. 

The ancient Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, once wrote: All who learn must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. 

I read a book last year written by a theologian who had formerly been an atheist.  He said that the wise believer could resonate with the anguish of the wise and honest atheist.  St Therese of Lisieux apparently wrestled with the temptation to atheism for months before her agonising death.  But she died resolutely choosing to believe.  Only when we see God face to face will the choice to believe give way to the experience of truly knowing. 

We could well take a leaf from Mary's book.  Luke said of her: She stored up all these things in her heart.  She let life touch her; she took it in; she pondered it in her heart.  She said nothing; but she allowed herself to wonder, and to keep on wondering.  

It seems that her Son took after her.  Right across life, his wisdom grew – deeper and deeper.

 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.

 Homily 5 -- 2018

We can all imagine as much as we like what life was like in the Holy Family, but we have little hard evidence beyond an ambiguous instance in Jesus’ public life when his mother and his brothers showed up once at Capharnaum with the intention of restraining him, saying he was out of his mind. Certainly, as far as adult believers were concerned, Jesus clearly claimed that the demands of the Kingdom outweighed all natural family ties. Then we have a number of instances in the later epistles [as we heard in this evening’s Second Reading], extolling the virtues of decidedly patriarchal family relationships. Societies evolve, and customs change.

It can be dangerous to idealise family life too much. It can lead some people to regard themselves as failures. What family is perfect? And yet families are important – very important; and precisely perhaps because they are not perfect. What families do provide instead is an excellent practical school for rounded human growth across life.

It is wonderful to see the idealism of so many young couples when they come to get married. And yet, in many ways, what they idealise is a dream. Almost inevitably, they are in love with being in love. Only as time goes on do they confront reality – the reality of the imperfection of their partner and, what can be more humiliating, the reality of their own imperfection. And that can be a tough time. Sadly, there are many couples who do not negotiate the difficulties successfully, and break up, usually breaking hearts in the process.

But a time of struggle and shattered dreams is a necessary time, because it is through dealing with imperfection and disappointment that love is stretched and can grow, opening up the possibility to live life more maturely, more fully, and increasingly grounded. The arrival of children, who by definition are immature and instinctively selfish, means another twenty years of stretching. Through persevering, people come to realise that real love is unconditional love, and that becomes their pursuit. No one needs to be perfect in order to love; and no one needs to be perfect to be loved.

Fortunately, love has a creative power of its own. It sets the other free; it helps them come more alive; it fosters their capacity for joy. And when it is two-way, the potential is exponential and the outcomes can be wonderful.

And then there is the erotic side of love that can be excitingly pleasurable. So-called platonic love can be redefined, becoming play for one and tonic for the other! A bit like a wild horse, it needs to be broken in and brought under control – but once it is, it becomes a tower of strength.

Today, families come in many shapes and sizes. Where is God in all this? It is God who makes it all possible. God is love, and we are made in the image and likeness of God. Where we see love, we see the trace of God. God is obviously at home in the company of imperfection. But is there a limit? I think as Catholics we struggle with this. We can get by with a modicum of imperfection but we often tend to draw the line with what is obviously mess, particularly other people’s mess.

Yet mess does not faze God. God so loved this mess of a world that he sent his Son to show us the way to life and to save it. When you consider it, could you think of a messier set of circumstances to be born in than what Luke and Matthew conjured up for Jesus? And then, thirty or so years later, could it have turned out worse than it did – with the redeemer hanging tortured and dehumanized on a cross? Yet God was not there reluctantly. God was present in the world he was redeeming – because in the mess was love. There lie the message, and the mystery, of Christmas.