December 28th Essay: The Holy Family: Symbol of Hope
Christmas has the power to trigger potent emotions and memories, particularly around families. While many of those are warm to recall, it is a reality of the human condition that families can be complicated. For some of us, Christmas might be an unwelcome reminder of the many ways families can fracture—estrangement, divorce, death, addiction—and the ways that politics have divided families and our nation. I feel a kind of tension, a “holy sadness,” around the concept of family this time of year. I reverence the truth that the Divine Child is seeking to be born in my heart in a new way, while also recognizing that my families—of origin, of religion, of country—are in need of his healing light.
This Advent, several of our fellow parishioners and I had the privilege of studying, discussing, and praying with Matthew’s Gospel. This evangelist begins his story in a most creative and unexpected way—Abraham begetting Isaac. The gospel goes on to list a veritable rogues’ gallery of ancestors. Among them are Jacob (who defrauded his brother and deceived his blind father), Judah (who was seduced by a prostitute who turned out to be his daughter-in-law), David (who had his lover’s husband killed), and Ahaz (who sacrificed his son to an Assyrian idol). What a remarkably dysfunctional family tree! Yet despite these deeply flawed characters, God managed to find a way to work with and through them, to Jesus, to us.
The Holy Family, whose feast we celebrate today, knew difficulty and dysfunction intimately. Matthew’s story continues with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, a transgression punishable by death, and a husband who was ready to walk away in shame from his betrothed. And if this crisis wasn’t enough to endure, political tensions created by a cruel king and his agents force this fledgling family to flee from their home. If it weren’t for a few timely dreams and some good judgement on the part of his parents, Jesus might not have survived infancy. What a statement of solidarity God makes by choosing to enter the human condition through such a complicated, vulnerable situation!
Henri Nouwen wrote, “Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.” This Christmas, I find myself turning to the weak, vulnerable, powerless dimensions of the Holy Family’s story. As I experience our national family becoming more deeply estranged; as I live with our worldwide Catholic family struggling to find healing and common ground; as I hold the tensions and broken-ness that are present in my own family, I feel a deep solidarity flowing from the hearts of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Theirs was no angelic existence where they floated three inches off the ground. No—they, too, were fully immersed in the complexity of being human. And that is where God came and met them, becoming weak, vulnerable and and powerless, all in order to demonstrate great compassion.
Today’s Gospel ends with a journey, from Bethlehem, to Egypt, to Nazareth. I can only imagine the anxiety, the terror, the loneliness, the resentment, the confusion the Holy Family must have felt while wading through such danger and broken-ness. Nonetheless, they found a way, by the grace of God, through the chaos to a new kind of life. This is the promise of this Divine Child who comes to us at the darkest time of year, seeking to bring his light and hope to the darkest corners of the human heart—and the lesson we learn from his parents, who chose to trust in that light. Today I pray in gratitude for God’s compassion and solidarity, and I pray that I may also trust that God is coming to meet us in our most broken places.
— Brian Pinter, Pastoral Associate