Feast of the Holy Family: A tale of two fathers

The Feast of the Holy Family is a time to consider the happiness and the place of family in our lives. Everyone wants to have a happy family. But love and happiness are never far from suffering and sacrifice. That is just the reality of love. Today in the Gospel, St. Joseph has a choice between what he wants his life to be and what it is. The first choice was when an angel, which comes from the word angelos, meaning, “message”, told him Mary is pregnant and he was not the biological father although she was betrothed to him. That is a complicated story, as you know. Now, the angel tells him to flee into Egypt because Herod wants to kill this child. St. Joseph could have run away at the message of the first angel. He almost did, but he didn’t. This second angel is another opportunity to make an exit, but he doesn’t.
 
Jesus is born into a complicated family. The geneaology that began the Christmas season was put in Matthew’s gospel to demonstrate that Jesus family tree has faithful hard-working people and incest, prostitutes and bad kings. Jesus’ family tree is a mixed bag. His parent’s marriage is a challenge. Unexpected pregnancy, mom and dad travelling in the final weeks of a difficult pregnancy, and now a forced relocation for King Herod’s bogus reasons. Colleen Carroll Campbell wrote a book about our desire for a misguided notion of perfection. The idea that if we just make our families and lives perfect, then we have succeeded. She wrote,

God’s Word spurs me to love because it tells me the truth about who God is. That truth bears little resemblance to my childhood caricatures of a benevolent dictator with a mile-wide mean streak. The Father who knit me in my mother’s womb, sent His Son to die for me on the cross, and sustains my every breath with His Holy Spirit is for me, not against (Rom. 8:31). Think about that for a second. Let it sink in. God is for you. He’s not rooting against you. He’s not waiting for you to screw up. He’s not itching to teach you a lesson. He is passionately, undeniably, and irrevocably for you. Campbell, Colleen Carroll. The Heart of Perfection: How the Saints Taught Me to Trade My Dream of Perfect for God's (pp. 102-103). Howard Books. Kindle Edition.

 St. Joseph, Mary and Jesus’ life was not ‘perfect’ in any conventional sense. A Holy Family is formed in adversity. Adversity is when the true nature of the love of husband, wife and child is revealed. Not an easy message, but at least it is true. This is Oro Valley Catholic and I am Fr. John Arnold. Consider, the scriptures today.
 
St. Paul gives good advice to families:
Dad’s the first reading from Sirach has a scriptural line that you must memorize.

Whoever honors his father atones for sins,
and preserves himself from them.
When he prays, he is heard;
he stores up riches who reveres his mother.
Sirach 3

 In short, be good to dad and your sins are forgiven. God has your back. St. Paul also has some much needed advice. In his letter to the Colossians he writes

 “Brothers and sisters: 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, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.”

 Compassion is only needed when there is weakness, probably my weakness and my need for compassion. Difficult circumstances create our need for kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. The scriptures assume human weakness. It is there that God’s spirit dwells made manifest in our kindness, humility, gentleness and forgiveness. Adversity is what makes the presence of God real. St. Paul observes the necessary foundation for the Christian family when he writes

 And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

 All of this is rooted in reading scripture, praying the psalms and singing hymns to God. The Gospel from Matthew today, tells a story about two fathers, one who loved the God revealed in scripture and one who was afraid. There is adversity in both stories, St. Joseph and King Herod. How each father deals with adversity displays the difference between them.
 
A Story of Two Father
Herod the Great wanted a great family that would carry on his legacy. A family that of which he could be proud. His problem is that he was a horrible man who was very paranoid about losing his throne. He wanted his family to be great on his terms. To achieve his goal, he killed his competitors for the throne, because they threatened his legacy. That killing included two of his sons.

He didn’t listen to God. Remember that the story of Herod’s desire too kill the innocent children of Bethlehem is that he heard the story of the Magi, he listened to the rabbi’s who told him about the Messiah, but took exactly the wrong meaning from it all. He didn’t see God as a savior, but as a competitor. Consider his pretensions to be the Messiah, not make way for him.

Part of the mission of the Messiah was to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. So in order to establish his messianic credentials, Herod embarked on massive building projects to demonstrate that he himself was a glorious and true king. He built Masada, famous as Israel’s last stand. But, in his own time, the most famous of these was the building and the expansion of the temple in Jerusalem. Because there was a Jewish expectation that when the Messiah finally came, one of the ways you would know He was the Messiah is that He would build a temple. He would make a new temple, and it would be even greater than Solomon’s temple. It was, apparently, a magnificent Temple complex and parts of it still remain in Jerusalem, most notably, the wailing wall.

Do you remember how Jesus dealt with Herod’s pretensions. He said that he would tear the temple down and rebuild it in three days. He was referring to his resurrection. Interesting how the stories of Jesus father is the common thread in the scriptures.

St. Joseph is the other story in the gospel about a dad. What characterizes St. Joseph’s story is that he, unlike Herod, listens to God. God is his father, not his competitor. He is not afraid of God, he fears God, like a son reveres a father.   The immediate picture is that he listens to God’s angels. He listens to both angels who tell him how to be a guardian to his adoptive son. He accepts that adversity and struggle are part of his life. The bigger picture that Matthew catches, is that he is caught between two kings. He probably doesn’t understand it, but that is how St. Matthew sees his life in retrospect.

Two Kings are also in the story
The two kings are Herod and Pharaoh in the book of Exodus  Remember what Matthews Gospel said about the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. Matthew quoted the prophet Hosea, “This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” (Matthew 2:15b) This is an example of ‘typology.’  Typology is a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences.  In archaeology, it would be a type of pottery used for cremation, for example. In scriptural studies, typology is the study and interpretation of types and symbols in the Bible.

So Matthew picks up on the patterns of human history as a signpost to the divine. In the story of the Exodus, God sent Moses to lead the escape of his people from Pharaoh who was killing Israel’s sons. Remember, Pharaoh told the Israelite midwives to throw the newborn Israelite boys into the river because there were too many of them. That is how Moses was thrown into the River. Matthew recalls that Herod wanted to kill all the boys in Bethlehem because one of them was a competitor to be king of Israel. Two murderous kings are the type. Recapitulation is restating or summarizing the themes of another story, that is similar, but not identical. So, typology and recapitulation reminds us of the tendency of powerful to abuse the weak and innocent. Yet, God works his will even when our families live in a world of evil and danger. Matthew says someone else is working in the world for our good. So Matthew, sees a bigger reality in the story of St. Joseph; probably one that Joseph himself didn’t realize. Probably, none of us realize what is truly important in our lives and how the inconveniences and adversity in our life are what greatness and holiness are composed. When we encounter adversity do we see God as a competitor or a father? St. Joseph sees God as a providential father. As a result, there is larger message in the Holy Family’s struggles. A new Exodus is underway lead by his Son.

St. Joseph and the Family

St. Joseph listens in prayer to God:
The popes emphasize that scripture must be read as a whole. When seemingly difficult passages are taken out of context, they are read in a distorted way. “Wives be subordinate to your husbands” is one such passage. That the image of the family is the love of Trinity. In the Trinity Father, Son and Holy Spirit do not dominate each other, but live in fruitful harmony of charity. Father is to be the guardian and protector from evil forces that seek to destroy the family, Father does that by listening” according to St. John Paul. Pope Pius XI, who was pope when my mom was a kid, uses the image of the head and the heart in describing the love of the family:  

But it [St. Paul’s teaching] forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family, the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love...

St. Joseph protects his family in a difficult world.

As the western world has changed, the challenges to the family have changed. In the biblical world, the family was mostly involved in agricultural work. Today, children don’t work on the farm, so much, but go to school so that they can be prepared for the world as it is. Often both parents work outside the home. In my mom’s family, they lived off what the farm would produce in South Dakota. They didn’t have much money, no health insurance, no electricity and no phone as she grew into her teenage years. Her children and grandchildren grew up in a very different environment. In their families, mostly both parents worked outside the home. In both experiences of family, St. Joseph was seen as the guardian of the family.

St. John Paul II, relying on the work done by Popes Pius XI and Leo XIII, wrote extensively about marriage and family life in a changing world. He didn’t see the family as just a unit of production in a complicated globalized economy. He saw the family as a basic human need that participated in the same complicated world as did the Holy Family, but had the same needs and demands as the Holy Family. So St. John Paul wrote,    

“… so Joseph, guardian and cooperator in the providential mystery of God, even in exile watched over the one who brings about the New Covenant.”
 
“ One hundred years ago, Pope Leo XIII had already exhorted the Catholic world to pray for the protection of St. Joseph, Patron of the whole Church. That pope appealed to Joseph's "fatherly love...for the child Jesus" and commended to him, as "the provident guardian of the divine Family," … Since that time, the Church has implored the protection of St. Joseph on the basis of "that sacred bond of charity which united him to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God," and the Church has commended to Joseph all of her cares, including those dangers which threaten the human family. Even today we have many reasons to pray in a similar way:

"Most beloved father, dispel the evil of falsehood and sin...graciously assist us from heaven in our struggle with the powers of darkness...and just as once you saved the Child Jesus from mortal danger, so now defend God's holy Church from the snares of her enemies and from all adversity." Today we still have good reason to commend everyone to St. Joseph. [i]

Dads and Moms have threats to protect their families from. What kids watch on tv or through social media. Parents can’t stop every threat, but they can prepare their kids for the world by being people that children feel confident coming to. Mom and Dad, are listeners. If God can speak through an angel, he can speak through your kids.
 
Everybody has a job in the family. Mom and Dad’s job is to build their marriage and the children’s job is to honor their parents. St. Paul says, “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they may not become discouraged.” Love works every which way.  Adversity, clashes, family illness, the death of parents and children is where the love of the family is revealed, and hopefully, strengthened. So, we come back to the advice of St. Paul.

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, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection

 May they protect and help your family in this New Year.  I wish you a peaceful, happy and holy New Year to you and your family.