A few days ago, we made an incredible statement of faith: that God, creator of everything visible and invisible, became visible in the incarnation of Jesus. After thousands of years of being on the search for God who was totally out of our reach, it was God who came to us. We claim that this act of divine revelation sets humanity on a whole new stage of our human journey as we now experience God near and far, familiar, yet foreign, graspable and beyond us at the same time.  

Both experiences are important.

I need to experience the nearness of God in my life so that I can be confident and unafraid to live in God’s presence. Only then will I hear and accept the identity that Jesus brings to me which the first letter of John proclaims: Beloved, we are God’s children now. To be a child of God means that you and I share in God’s divine nature, which in the next chapter of this first letter of John reveals as: God is love (1 John 4:7). You can only experience the love of that which is near, which is why only in Jesus, God incarnate, can we experience the love of God.

But this love also has to be more than my own human experience of love, and so the love of God also has to be near but also far, familiar yet also foreign, graspable yet beyond us at the same time. In that way, I never take ownership of God’s love, I never treat it as if it belongs to me. We do that with human love, it becomes possessive, we want what we love, and even with the best intentions, we enslave that which we love. So if I am to share in the divine life, which is divine love, then this love which I can now experience in the nearness of Jesus must at the same time be beyond my reach of possessiveness.

This is a totally different way of relating with God, and that means we have to learn how to live within this new reality that Jesus brought us. The reason we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family right after Christmas is because the family is essential for learning how to live in the divine life.

We understand the divine life as love because it is lived in communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If I am made in God’s image, then you and I are also made for community, and the closest experience we have to this ungraspable reality is the family. It is in the human family that God become incarnate, and so it is in the family that we learn how to live in the divine life.

 It is in our families that we first learn about love, where we discover our gifts and talents and begin to form possibilities for our lives, even when our families are not ideal. People who don’t know my own family background often think that I must have come from a perfect family – nope. None of us do, though some have a better experience of family than others. Family life is challenging, and in case you have not figured that out yourself, scripture has been very honest about that fact.

We heard a bit of the story of a dysfunctional family in the first reading from the book of Samuel, the story of Hannah and her husband Elkanah when they give birth to their child Samuel. There is drama before this happened, however. Hannah at first could not get pregnant, so as any good husband Elkanah stood by her side in support, right? Nope. As many men did in the ancient world, Elkanah marries a second woman, so now there are two wives and one husband in this relationship (dos mujeres un camino).

As you would not have been able to guess, there was jealousy between the two wives living in the same household. Hannah began to blame herself as she feels her husband no longer loves her, which created strains in their relationship. Elkanah finds her crying and asks why do you weep and why do you refuse to eat? Why do you grieve? Am I not more to you than ten sons? He did everything he could to help her and possibly have a child with her. Year after year he took her on pilgrimage from his city to pray together for this intention, but every time Hannah would weep and refuse to eat. Finally, the Lord gave Hannah a child and she was so grateful for the gift of being a mother, that she does what any mother would do: give her son up for adoption… she goes to the temple and gives her son as a gift of thanksgiving to God, to serve as a priest in the temple. She learned about divine love from her struggle of infertility, and then after receiving a gesture of God’s divine love by finally conceiving a son, she loved divinely, not possessive, she does a divine act of giving her son to God:

As you live, my lord,
I am the woman who stood near you here, praying to the LORD.
I prayed for this child, and the LORD granted my request.
Now I, in turn, give him to the LORD;
as long as he lives, he shall be dedicated to the LORD.”
Hannah left Samuel there.

What an amazing story.

Turn now to the gospel where find another family: Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. We call them the Holy Family, not because they were perfect, not because it was three of them like the trinity, not because they didn’t have any problems, but because of the way in which they faced challenges. We just heard last week in the Gospel of Matthew that when Mary became pregnant with Jesus, the first thing Joseph thought was that she had cheated on him. The explanation she gave him was literally unbelievable, imaging hearing form your spouse that it was the Holy Spirit that got you pregnant – probably not going to go very well. That conversation led to Joseph certain that she was lying, and he would divorce her – he lost trust in her. It wasn’t until he himself received a divine relation that Mary was telling the truth that convinced him to stay.

Now we have in the gospel of Luke a glimpse as to family life during Jesus’ teen years, and it shows the frustration of two parents as they can’t seem to understand the changes Jesus is undergoing. Any of you parents of teens that can relate?

On the one hand, Jesus is beginning to become independent. On the other, he is developing his own interests as he is slowly discovering his place, his mission in the world – which for him happened to be a growing interest in reading scripture, in praying, in speaking to others about God. It must have been a strange experience for Mary and Joseph… between realizing that okay, the Angel of the Lord did tell them he would be different and coming to terms with the possibility of him having to suffer, and their desire for him to not, for him to be like any other teen. They struggle between understanding and being supportive, while still being parents and needing to correct him and demand his obedience.

These are the stories of two holy families, and part of what made them holy was not abandoning their spiritual life no matter what challenges they were undergoing. Despite their marital problems, dealing with infertility and the jealousy of two wives, Hannah and Elkanah went on pilgrimage each year, prayed together. Despite Mary and Joseph starting off with mistrust, they went to Jerusalem each year for feast of Passover, prioritized his own growth in faith, prayed together. The family that prays together stays together – because you are putting God first, as your priority. Jesus himself will demand this very thing: Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me (Matthew 10:37). That is how we live in the divine life.

Family life is incredibly demanding, especially from a culture that demands you be a well-rounded and multi-tasked individual. Parents try to keep up by taking their children to every possible extracurricular activity so that they discover what they like and become experts at whatever they seem to be good at, often at the expense of prioritizing their worldly success rather than their spiritual growth.

The Bible, as realistic as it about the challenges of family life, also warns us that this attitude will deprive our families of the only source of support that cannot be replaced by anything else. When I do marriage prep, I ask couples if they pray together. Few do, most say they never talked about that, that it would be award, and if they pray it’s a personal thing. What we see in these couples in the Bible is how prayer and worship together as a family is what keeps them united through the challenges. And yes, if a family is not used to that, it will feel awkward and uncomfortable at first… near and far, familiar yet foreign, graspable and beyond us at the same time. I didn’t grow up in a family that prayed together very often, and even now when we do, it still feels awkward, but we are learning how to do that, how to ask each other for prayer which we never did before, and that makes a difference. The family is where we learn really to give ourselves for others.

To conclude, the 1st letter of John says if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and we receive for him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandment… and his commandment is this; love one another just as he commanded us.

We fulfill the commandment of Jesus first in our family, where we have to learn to live, accept, and love people we didn’t really choose… those who have kids, you get what you get! Some members of the family are going to need more support others will be called to support.  

Then God calls us out of our immediate family to embrace the human family and see each other as sister and brother. The divine love that you and I receive and is nurtured in our immediate family cannot stay there, it must go beyond our immediate reach, which is Jesus when asked about his immediate family says “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers (Matthew 12:48).

We are God’s children. Jesus became incarnate in the middle of family life, shared in our humanity, so that you and I can share in his divinity, and calls us beyond our human capacity to love which is near and familiar to love as God loves, with is far and wide. Today is a day to remember that the family is the most important element in God’s plan for his people, that no matter how difficult our family life may be, we can overcome any difficulty if we remain close to God. So no, we don’t have to be a perfect family to be a Holy Family, we just need to be willing to put God at the center of our home, and allow the presence of Jesus teach us to love unselfishly as he himself loves us.

Fr. Carlos