Dear Friends,
It was just a day ago that we were celebrating the birth of Jesus and now as the church celebrates the feast of the Holy Family we are given the story of Jesus at age 12 staying behind at the Temple to learn from and teach the scholars of scripture. The liturgical calendar has never been concerned with narrative chronology. We have so very little information in scripture about the life of Jesus when he was living at home in Nazareth, so the liturgical celebration leaps ahead to find one of the stories of Jesus as a boy.
I heard a fellow recently say he had a hard time believing all this stuff from the Christmas story – heavens filled with angels, shepherds in the fields, a star leading Magi from the east, a virgin birth in a stable. He thought it was all too much like a story for children. He was a smart man and those things did not fit intellectually into his mind and his life.
Yet if you think about it, these things aren’t even close to being the most difficult things to believe about the Nativity story. The deepest mystery of the Christmas story isn’t how all this took place – it is why. Why would the God of the universe, the all-powerful one, care so much about losers like us that he would humble himself to take on human flesh and enter humanity at such a low state?
The Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ is just as unfathomable to us as it was to the folks in the Christmas story two thousand years ago. It is such an amazing act on the part of God that we need to either say it true or it is crazy, but there is no middle ground.
If we can believe that God took on human flesh out of love for us, then all the other miracles we believe as Christians are minor. I am always surprised when someone will believe that Jesus Christ is God but not believe that he is really present in the Eucharist because that is too much of a stretch. Really? God can become a baby, but God cannot be present in the bread and wine at Mass?
Today, as we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family, the church holds up Mary and Joseph, the earthly parents of Jesus, as examples of faith and as one more place where the divine and the human meet. In Luke 11:27-28 we hear a woman cry out to Jesus “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts which nursed you.” He says, “More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” At first sight this may look like a reprimand and a slight to Mary, but scholars say that is a poor reading of the text. Jesus isn’t saying “Sure, but…” He is saying “yes, and…” That Mary gave birth to Jesus and cared for him is holy and beautiful, but that pales in comparison to the fact that she heard the word of God and kept it. She follows Jesus wherever he leads. She is not blessed simply because she is the mother of Jesus, she is blessed because of the choice she makes to be the first follower of her son.
May we grow into a deeper belief today of the amazing love God has for us and allow him to take flesh in our families and in our homes – making them holy.
Peace,
Fr. Damian