Holy Family (December 29, 2024)

Today’s Gospel focuses our attention on the Holy Family, as members of a wider family, the family of God. The Father has bestowed his great love on us in calling us His children, brothers and sisters of Jesus who has shared his very life with us. Our Father’s final gift to His children will be seeing our God as He is – full union with our God forever. The Spirit has been given to us as the pledge of God’s everlasting love.

As God’s children, we are asked to reflect on a strange incident in the life of the Holy Family. What might we learn? When Mary and Joseph discovered that the boy Jesus was missing, they didn’t waste their time arguing about who was to blame. Together, they went to search for Jesus. When they find him in the Temple among the scholars, they expressed their anguish about missing him. Jesus focused them by reminding them that they should expect to find him in his Father’s house.

Jesus was asking them to trust him, even if they didn’t fully understand.

In our experience in the family of God here at Childs, there are often enough misunderstandings and anguish of one kind or another. We can lose sight of Jesus in these difficult moments. Jesus instructs us, as he did Mary and Joseph: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Each day we come here to find Jesus in our Father’s house. Like Mary and Joseph, we can tell Jesus about our misunderstandings and anguish. Jesus always invites us to put them in his hands, then hear our brother’s comforting words to us and join him in offering our sufferings with his to the Father. And he feeds us with his own Body and Blood and gives us his peace. Healed and nourished, we can go forth to grow in wisdom, knowledge and grace as a more united family of God.

May our Eucharist on the feast of the Holy Family encourage us to live more fully as children of our Father, as brothers and sisters of Jesus.