We celebrate the feast of the Holy Family. What comes to mind first when we hear the word family? Love? Acceptance? Support? Indeed, it is also a community. Perhaps it also includes responsibility, upbringing, and care. There is also concern about protection. We can say it is God’s work and following God in the mission to create – to create, to create.
I know from my own family that family is also a commitment, looking ahead and thinking one step ahead, parents for their children. In addition, care and fear, and I could probably list many more things.
Today’s Gospel, on the feast of the Holy Family, offers us a picture of two kinds of care. The first is human – very familiar to us. The second is divine and is sometimes quite neglected by us humans. Even though it shouldn’t be, it is.
We have certainly heard what we will read in the Gospel today. In it, we see Joseph and Mary, who, together with the little Jesus, travel to Jerusalem and the temple. And just as they go to the temple to pray, they return home. Nothing unusual.
We have a holiday season; we also go to church every day – to Holy Mass; we also go to visit people every day and then go back home. The way there and the way back. And sometimes we are happy when we are home.
We hear about Mary and Joseph and their care. It is parental care, natural. Even though as soon as the news in the Gospel comes that Jesus was lost to them, someone might say to themselves – typical parents with stressed and hectic lives, they even forgot and lost their child. It’s almost like today.
Well, Jesus is lost. Parents lose their children. What is the first reaction? Fear, pain, worry, discomfort. We would also add arguments and accusations in our time: it’s your fault!
The Gospel is good news; Mary and Joseph will also experience joy. They will find their son. They will find Jesus – not lost, but in the temple, teaching others. Shame-no shame, we have found our son. The worries are gone. The care continues. And as with all good parents, the question comes, gently bordering on reproach – every parent, teacher, employer, or boss knows this.
Mary, as a mother, states: “My son, what have you done to us?” And she continues with justified regret: “Behold, your father and I have been looking for you with sorrow!” Each of us can imagine this fear and concern of a parent. We have it with small children, we have it with young people, and we also have it with adults. We are afraid of people, especially if they are very close to us, especially if we have a relationship with them.
When a child goes to school, parents are concerned that they will arrive and return safely. If a college student goes to boarding school and studies at a university, they are afraid that nothing terrible will happen to him in the city, usually a large one. If someone travels for work or on vacation, a trip, parents are always afraid that nothing will happen.
But there have been enough human considerations and views. Here, we also have an image of a second concern. And it is offered to us by the words of the little Jesus: “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
Jesus warns us to remember another kind of care – education is not only education to make a young person good, wise, decent or successful, but it is also a call for formation – education in faith. And we should not forget this in our families either. Guidance, accompaniment, and faith formation are essential elements of education in families.
Sometimes, it’s hard because even in the family itself, not only in public, we fear this word – faith. It is essential for us, and it is also personal. It is a testimony about God, and it is also about the fact that sometimes we don’t know how to testify at home.
“Dear parents, you are to be where the Father is concerned – you are to be witnesses of faith in the Father.”
Here, I would like to help with something official. Spouses – parents, do you remember the day of your sacramental marriage and one of the questions the priest or deacon asked you? “Do you want to start a family? I ask you before God and the Church. Are you willing to accept children with love as a gift from God and to raise them according to the Gospel of Christ and the laws of his Church?”
And you remember the day of your child’s baptism and the question: “Dear parents, you are requesting baptism for your child. By doing so, you are taking upon yourself the obligation to raise him in the faith, so that he will then keep God’s commandments and love the Lord God and his neighbor, as Christ taught us. Are you aware of this obligation?”
Unfortunately, some may have taken it formally at one point or another but publicly confessed before God that they wanted to bring children to God through active faith. That is a beautiful responsibility and essential care. Just as a young person does not learn to read and write independently – they learn at school, from older siblings, or books by “tracing” the letters – they always need someone or something, the same is true with faith.
As the extraordinary Pope Pius XI wrote in his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in his message to the world:
“Faith in the Church cannot remain pure and unadulterated unless it is based on faith in the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. At the very moment when Peter, before all the apostles and disciples, confessed his faith in Christ, the Son of the living God, Christ’s response – rewarding his faith and his confession – was the word about the building of his Church, the only Church founded on Peter as on the rock.”
You, too, dear parents, are to fulfill the words about building the Church, which the Lord founded on the rock, just as fearlessly and resolutely as the Pope, pointing out the evils, injustices, and sinfulness of fascism and Nazism.
Jesus, in his words to Mary and Joseph, says that he is to be where the Father is. I would gently paraphrase his words: Dear parents, you are to be where the Father is – you are to be witnesses of faith in the Father. This care is as serious as caring for anything else. And it is primarily up to you. If you want, keep these words in your heart and let them become reality.
