A homily for the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, December 29, 2024
Sir 3:2-6, 12-14, Col 3:12-17, Lk 2:41-52
Nearly every day between Thanksgiving and Easter, I wear a scarf. They’re always warm and occasionally stylish, though I’m not really aiming for a GQ-kind-of image.
I have a large, though not massive, collection of fuzzy scarves, and through the 26 weeks or so of Scarf Season, I wear all but one of them at least once.
My no-longer-to-be-worn scarf was a Valentine’s Day gift from my mother in 1964, and I keep it as a token of her love. (I also received a red-plaid Thermos bottle for my tomato soup, but a brat named Tiger knocked my steel lunch box out of my hand at the joint Catholic-public bus stop and the glass liner shattered. Maybe a story for another day…)
Are scarves my version of Linus Van Pelt’s security blanket? Dunno, though I do remember a line from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in which a young worker in Scrooge’s office refers to his scarf as a comforter.
No matter how old we are, we all have some keeper or another from our lives at home, our first home, our family home.
For some of us, those items provoke memories of injustices imposed on us, and we lock them away, physically, mentally or emotionally. Sometimes the pain comes flooding back whenever we see or think about that house, that coat, that dinner plate.
If that’s the case for some folks among us, I hope and pray those angsts diminish, though I know they will haunt us forever.
And then there are the scarves, the security blankets, the Christmas ornaments, the ratty stuffed animals, and even the dented Thermos bottles and scratched lunch boxes. They remind us of a time and place when we had a safe harbor, a warm embrace, a pillow on which to rest our heads.
A holy family of our own.
When the tween or young teen Jesus hung back at the temple to preach and teach and meditate upon the wisdom of the ages with the sages, Mary and Joseph worried — and reacted — the way any of our parents ever did when we wandered off at the mall. They scolded him and then hugged the stuffings out of him. Sound familiar?
The Gospels then leave us in the lurch for about 20 years of Jesus’s life; we’re on our own to dope out what he did from day to day until he changed water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
[Jesus] went down with them and came to Nazareth,
and was obedient to them;
and his mother kept all these things in her heart.
And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor
before God and man.
It’s possible that, through the course of Jesus’s early life, he accomplished things his earthly parents celebrated. Maybe not a Little League championship or spelling bee trophy, but something like his astonishing discourse in the temple. Something that Mary indeed could keep in her heart until it was pierced by the nails and the lance at her son’s crucifixion.
Historians tell us life in first-century Judea was simple, weather-driven, work-driven, faith-driven.
Jesus did chores (and there were a lot of them). Jesus learned a trade. Jesus learned the Law and the Prophets. Jesus had friends, which means Jesus laughed and played and skipped rocks across ponds and sat on hilltops admiring sunrises and sunsets.
True God and true man.
Truly himself.
Because of his safe harbor, his loving home.
Because of Mary and Joseph, and their extended family — yes, it takes a village — and the example they set.
Because of the Holy Family.
Because of the gift of the Holy Family, a gift God invites us to share.
All of us have the opportunity to dedicate our families to love, the love God showers upon us and fills our hearts with whenever we open those human, not stony, hearts to that love.
All of us are challenged by God to dedicate ourselves and our families to love, fairness, creativity and respect for our uniqueness.
God gives us families by birth, by adoption, by marriage, by choice. Our family life forges who we are and how we act in our lives outside the house.
With God at the center of our lives and our families, we live securely.
Fully.
Wholly.
Holy.
