Courtney McGrailThe relationship between us and God is the deepest relationship of all, writes Fr Martin Henry
Fr Martin Henry
The feast of the Holy Family, celebrated in the Christmas season, has often been seized upon by Christian teachers, not unreasonably, as an ideal opportunity to reassert the traditional virtues needed to keep family life on an even keel: the obedience of children to their parents, the exercise of authority without tyranny by parents over their children, or, more controversially, the submission of wives to their husbands, according to St Paul (Eph 5: 22; Col 3: 18).
Yet if we look a bit more closely at the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we can see at once that this was not quite a normal family.
According to Christian tradition, Mary and Joseph did not live like a normal married couple, and Jesus was Mary’s only child. In Christian countries, in the past at any rate, the norm tended to be for married couples to have, if possible, large families, with many children, not just one.
Inspiring
So, in the light of this long tradition, the Holy Family is very uncharacteristic of the usual Christian family or, to say the least, it’s atypical of the ideal the Church has often put before Christian spouses. So why is a family with just one child given the inspiring title of “the Holy Family” and held up for admiration?
Could it be that the meaning of the feast of the Holy Family has, in actual fact, very little or maybe nothing at all to do with the traditional understanding of marriage and the family? If true, this would not, of course, imply that the traditional understanding of marriage and the family has no intrinsic value. But the feast of the Holy Family is perhaps about something else. And what it may have to convey is, above all, something of importance about the meaning of the incarnation.
The Holy Family is a holy family because the child of this family is the son of God. And hence this family is God’s family. Put slightly differently, God didn’t become man, just for the sake of becoming man, so to speak. The incarnation wasn’t some kind of extraordinary stunt or magic trick performed by God in order to impress or even dazzle us. On the contrary, God became man for a reason or a purpose. The early Church teachers had this in mind when they argued that God became man so that we human beings could become divine, or, as it could also be put, so that we human beings could all become members of God’s family.
But as Jesus himself taught: whether we are or become members of God’s family is decided by whether or not we are ready to do God’s will. It is not decided by when or where or into which family we happen to be born. ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother,’ said Jesus (Mk 3: 35). That is to say, being a genuine member of God’s family is not decided by an accident of birth.
President Charles de Gaulle is said to have replied to the question ‘Why are you a Catholic?’, by answering: “I am a Catholic by history and by geography.”
Now, it is undoubtedly the case that most people are born into a religion, as part of their human inheritance, just as most get their language, their ‘mother’ tongue, from their family. But being a member of God’s family is not quite so straightforward. It cannot be decided simply ‘by history and by geography’.
Important
That implies furthermore that there is something more important, something deeper in our lives than ‘history and geography,’ significant though these clearly are. From history comes the deepest human relationships we are aware of: those between parents and children, or between married couples, or between siblings. From geography comes the land we are born into, and the attachment that will normally develop between people and their native country.
But the lesson of the Holy Family is that there are relationships that are deeper still, and these are the relationships between God and us. These relationships can be compared to those within a family in the sense that, like those between parents and children, they are irreversible. But they also transcend family ties because we can never pin God down (‘The spirit blows where it wills,’ as St John’s Gospel has it), or indeed pin down where being a member of God’s family, assuming we become such, might eventually take us.
The chance of becoming a permanent member of God’s family, besides being a member of a human family, and sometimes, alas, maybe even despite what may happen in a human family, is, I think, an important aspect of the truth of Christmas that is brought to the fore particularly on the feast of the Holy Family.
Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, is a priest of the Diocese of Down and Connor.