Bound in Love

God comes into the world as one of us on Christmas day, which we just celebrated. Technically, we are still celebrating Christmas Day, as we are in the Octave of Christmas, in which we celebrate for eight days the major feast day. In the modern Church calendar, only the Octave of Easter ranks higher. This reminds us that the birth of God is one of the keys of the Christian faith.

Most religions are appalled by our claim that God is also human. It is a stumbling block for most people raised outside the Christian faith. God comes into the world as one of us on Christmas day so that he can die as one of us on Good Friday, and then rise victorious over death on Easter Sunday. It is even more repugnant to the world to think that a God died. That is, however, what we think as Christians. This highlights the importance of the Octave of Christmas and the Octave of Easter: what the world finds repugnant are the cardinal elements of our faith. Our faith hangs upon the human birth of God and the human death and resurrection of that same God.

As St. Paul tells the church in Corinth, we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. Christmas makes no real sense without Good Friday and Easter Sunday, just as Good Friday and Easter seem to require the Nativity of our Lord and God.

Jesus Christ was by all accounts a member of a devout but otherwise ordinary Jewish family in Galilee. Our Gospel story today depicts the kind of movements we might expect to see in an ordinary religious family. They go to the Temple for a ritual, just as our families today go to Mass at the Church. They lose track of the child as they head home, and upon finding him still at the Temple, it seems like they blame him just a little bit. That sounds like an ordinary family today; when we are not perfect parents we are tempted to blame the children. And the child seems just a bit disrespectful in his response, which is also not uncommon in our modern world. But he goes back to Nazareth and is obedient and grows in wisdom. The next time we see Jesus in the Gospel, he’s starting his public ministry that will culminate on Good Friday.

Today, on the feast of the Holy Family, we think and pray about the outwardly ordinary life that these three people lived in their time in the world. Tradition and scriptures teach us that Joseph was a carpenter, and he probably passed on those skills to his son as he raised him. Perhaps Joseph was an older father, who doted on his son but didn’t get silly with him as many Dads do today.

Living as a carpenter’s family in a small village in the remote region of Galilee, there seems to be nothing extraordinary about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. At the telling of our gospel story, the boy is already 12 years old as they head home to Nazareth. Eighteen more years are going to pass with nothing happening that requires writing it down for history. Jesus lives an anonymous life in a nearly anonymous village in a remote part of a down-on-its-luck nation state controlled by the Roman empire.

It’s almost too boring to keep reading. But we know this holy family is not ordinary and commonplace.

• Already, this family has participated in a virgin birth. Already, this family has experienced a choir of angels singing from heaven at the birth of the child.
• Already, this family has received pagan mystics who have come to offer gifts to a great king.
• This family, when making the traditional sacrifice at the temple for the firstborn, received a prophecy from Simeon about the baby.
• Already, Mary knows her heart will be pierced and that her son will be a sign of contradiction to the people.
• Already, this family has had to fly to Egypt to avoid the ethnic cleansing effort of Herod to wipe out this potential great king. They are living in Nazareth as a place of remote refuge from the powers of the earthly king.

So this is not an ordinary family. Far from it. It is an extraordinary family.

Most of us here feel the great pressures to present as an ordinary family. We bend to social pressures to conform to an external standard given to us by people we don’t really know and for reasons we don’t really understand. The message of the feast of the Holy Family is to be truly extraordinary despite any outward ordinariness.

The holy family is a family understanding its mission, at least in part. They are always prepared for what it is that God has called them to do, but they live an outwardly ordinary life. Joseph has a job, Mary cooks the meals, Jesus goes to school.

The preparation is a spiritual and internal preparation. Mary has already had an angel speak to her, and Joseph as well, in a dream. Mary and Joseph have presented their firstborn at the Temple, as is prescribed in the Mosaic law, where they hear the prophecy of Simeon. We don’t see from the Scriptures much about Joseph in particular, but we have the strong sense that he was with Jesus and Mary for all these early announcements that point to his earthly ministry. The earthly ministry of Jesus culminates on the cross. So even in this reading, where they lose sight of him and find him in the temple speaking with the elders, as they return to an anonymous life in Nazareth they are preparing for his public witness and his final sacrifice.

Are we living our ordinary lives with the same focus? As we work our way through the traffic of the Metro area to our jobs that are today about the same as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow, are we pointing to the culmination of our earthly ministry? Do we live each day as though it might be our last? On our last day we receive our particular judgment. After we are dead, our eternal destination is set.

Understanding this is what can make our ordinary daily lives truly extraordinary. It is extraordinary — as in not ordinary — to live each day according to gospel values. Let us commit to being extraordinarily kind; not the natural kindness of being sweet to people who are nice to us but the extraordinary kindness of being gentle to people who are rough with us. Let us commit to being extraordinarily patient; not the reasonable patience of putting up with the hustle and bustle of our families but the extraordinary patience of bad drivers and pushy people at the grocery store. Let us commit to being extraordinarily humble; the kind of humility that only comes through humiliation. Let us see in that humiliation the gift of humility from our heavenly father whose love for us is revealed in how he gave his son to suffer on the cross.

Let us see the holiness in our religious rituals. Joseph took his family to the Temple just as we take ourselves and our families to Mass. Sundays are days of holy obligation, and we have a few more that might not fall on a Sunday. Obligation is the word we use, but invitation to contemplation is the heart of the thing. The virtue of piety transforms a duty to attend Mass into a participation in adoration and thanksgiving of the God who loves us in our ordinary lives with extraordinary grace.

None of these virtues make sense to the world. All of these virtues are the path of salvation for the world. Our ordinary, daily lives can transform the world if lived by these extraordinary virtues of kindness and patience and humility and piety. Let us live as Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived: anonymous holy lives in an anonymous holy family.