This Sunday is the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph Year C, and the readings give solid practical advice straight from God to each of our families. Here are takeaways from previous This Sunday columns.
Advice from God is badly needed, because we’ve been listening to his his enemy.
In a famous radio monologue, the great Paul Harvey explains what he would do if he were the devil.
“If I were the Prince of Darkness, I’d want to engulf the whole world in darkness,” he says. “I’d begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: ‘Do as you please.’”
He goes on to presciently describe just how the devil takes aim at churches, politics, education, and the media, but he says a significant aim of the devil is the family. “If I were the devil, I’d soon have families at war with themselves,” he said. “I would convince the young that marriage is old-fashioned.”
He ends, “In other words, if I were the devil, I would just keep right on doing what he’s doing.”
If that’s the state of the world — and it is — then our lives are an even more extreme version of what Mary and Joseph face in Sunday’s Gospel.
They take a family trip for the Passover, and “as they were returning, the boy Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem, but his parents didn’t know it.”
One minute, they had Jesus in their lives, the One who gave their family its meaning, and then, the next minute, they didn’t. They lost him. So often we lose him, too, in one way or another. We might assume he will always be with us automatically and stop making that effort that is so necessary to keep him close.
When we discover he is missing, we might do what they did. They “journeyed for a day” thinking he was somewhere nearby, just out of sight as they “looked for him among their relatives and acquaintances.”
We do that, also. We underestimate what it will take to bring meaning back into our lives and start out looking for it in a merely human way, looking to those around us and the best human advice we can find. But as important as our family and communities are, they are not sufficient to deliver what we need. We have to take a step outside our family for that.
That’s what they did. They finally “returned to Jerusalem to look for him.” They went to the place where we are guaranteed to find Jesus: His Father’s House. For them that was the Temple; for us, the Church.
If we go to the Church to look for Jesus, we will find him in the Church’s teachings, in Scripture, and in all the sacraments, above all the Blessed Sacrament, present in the tabernacle where he still sits, asking questions and giving “astounding answers.”
We get four of those “astounding answers” in the readings today.
First: The readings describe how children should treat parents.
As St. Paul says in the Second Reading, “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord.” We know it is pleasing to the Lord, because he told us in his Fourth Commandment: “Honor your father and mother.” The greatest example of this is in the Gospel. Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, God-made-man, and yet, at the end of the reading, “He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them.”
The Catechism goes so far as to say “The everyday obedience of Jesus to Joseph and Mary both announced and anticipated the obedience of Holy Thursday” where he said “Not my will but yours be done” to the Father.
Jesus doesn’t obey his parents because they are greater than him; they are in fact infinitely below him. He obeys them because it is the right thing to do to bring order and harmony to the family relationship. This applies to us throughout our parents’ lives as the First Reading makes clear, saying: “My son, take care of your father when he is old; grieve him not as long as he lives. Even if his mind fail, be considerate of him.”
Parents deserve honor and respect from children when they are young and kindness and care when they are old and frail. If this advice was ever obvious, it certainly isn’t today. Parental authority is probably more tenuous than ever, and aged parents are more alone than ever.
Second: The readings describe how to treat spouses.
When the Second Reading says, “Wives be subordinate to your husbands as is proper in the Lord” it is not really as shocking as it often sounds to our ears.
When he talks to husbands he tells them what to do and what to avoid: “love your wives and avoid any bitterness toward them” he says, meaning “sacrifice for your wife and don’t dwell on their worst qualities.” His advice to wives could be similarly stated as “Wives, respect your husbands and avoid dominating or manipulating them.”
The basic message is that wives shouldn’t be controlling and husbands shouldn’t be distant or resentful — good advice that most married couples need to hear.
There is an example of this in the Gospel reading, when Mary presents a united front with Joseph as she confronts Jesus, asking him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”
Jesus’s answer to her explains the most important relationship of all.
Third: The Gospel demonstrates how to treat God.
Mary does indeed confront Jesus, and thereby shows the proper, direct approach to prayer, in which we speak to God without hiding our true feelings or putting on a false front, but are very clear about what is wrong.
Jesus answers the way God often answers such prayers: With pointed questions that make us revise our own self-conception. “Why were you looking for me?” Jesus asks. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
His answer to prayer is often a whole new perspective. In this case, among many other things, the questions he asks say that, as important as the family is, it isn’t the time we spend with each other that makes us whole. It is the time we spend with God.
Mary and Joseph are a family that prays, and that is what brings them back together. They are a family that takes pilgrimages together, and a family whose members each have an individual relationship with God: Joseph obeys, Mary “ponders” God’s truth in his heart, and Jesus longs to be “in my Father’s House.” This transforms them. If the advice “The family that prays together, stays together,” sounds trite, it shouldn’t. It is advice that St. John Paul II and Mother Teresa both often gave.
And that brings us to the fourth and final piece of advice for families in these readings, one I often forget: families evangelize.
In his Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, St. John Paul II defines the Christian family as a domestic Church, “a believing and evangelizing community,” going so far as to say, “future evangelization depends largely on the domestic Church.”
This is more true than ever in the 21st century. As major Catholic institutions have less and less credibility in the world’s eyes, it is left to families to be the place where the world encounters the virtues of the Kingdom of Christ.
St. Paul describes these in the Second Reading, when he says, “Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. And over all these put on love.”
He wants us to be living examples of the Kingdom of Christ and to get there, he says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.”
It’s no longer possible to leave evangelization and the passing on of Christian virtues to the culture or to Church organizations. We have to do it ourselves. If the world doesn’t see the kingdom in us, it won’t see the kingdom at all.
This Sunday, like Mary and Joseph, find Jesus in the Church, in the tabernacle and in the Mass, and then take him out to others.
Once we have Jesus in our lives again, we can return to our family enriched, and in the way we live, show the world the good news: With God, a life centered on love is possible and real peace is near.
Image: Wikimedia; William Holman Hunt –
The Finding of the Savior in the Temple – Google Art Project
