January 1, 1997 Holy Family

January 1, 1997

Holy Family

Before I get to the crux of what I'd like to say this morning, I'd like to just point out that Luke's Gospel is very interesting in that it very consciously pairs men and women, over and over, establishing parity between them. Remember Zachary gets a message from an angel, then Mary gets a message from an angel; Simean blesses a child, then Anna blesses a child; a shepherd loses a sheep, then a lady loses a diamond in her house; so it goes, and so it goes. It is really important, I think, to see that this is one of the things that the earliest layers of the Christian movement was conscious of; namely, this extraordinary equality between men and women.

So today is the Feast of the Holy Family, and I think there is a real pattern in the presentation in the Scriptures of this notion of family. We have, first of all in Genesis, a kind of archetypal father: Abraham, the father of all believers; Sarah, of course, the mother of all believers. Abraham was ancient, fourteen-hundred--I don't know... Sarah was post-menopausal by a long way, and yet she had this child. And out of this child whose life was threatened, remember God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, this son of Sarah, comes the whole family which is the family of God, Judaism, and then expanded in the second pivotal family that is Joseph, Mary, and Jesus that we are talking about today. And here too, we run into the same thing, what I could reasonably call a radical implausibility. There should not be a family. Abraham should not have begotten Isaac, Sarah was too old, Mary was a virgin. How can this happen? None of this stuff makes sense. And so I'd like to look at this notion of implausibility which seems to me very consciously presented in the Scripture.

"The family should not happen," is what they are basically saying, and yet it does. Try to see where that can be located in our experience of the family. As I've frequently said up here, becoming, not a biological, but a real psychological father to some kids is probably the most important thing that has ever happened to me, and one of the things that has become very, very clear to me, and clear to everybody else in this room that has kids, is that they're really not your own. You get that information in a variety of ways. Most of the time I thought they were not my own because I thought they were being perverse a lot of the time, but there is a deeper sense that they are not my own which I didn't alert to very often, and that is to know that they are God's. More fundamentally than they are mine, they are God's, and in that sense, they are not my own. This is where the implausibility comes up. I am supposed to raise these kids and I don't know who they are. The great line in Paul says that "who we are is hidden with Christ in God." Normally we would not think of this in the context of the family, but that is precisely where it fits. Anybody who has had the quiet, and that of course is a major problem, and the peace, and the distance can sit back and say: "I really don't know who these little human beings are, I get them out of bed every morning, I wash their clothes, I prepare their meals, I tell them to stay out of the street, to not play with matches, don't drink too much, etc., etc., etc., but I don't know who they are." So in that sense there is a fundamental implausibility in a family. I mean, if the result of my raising these kids is to somehow get them connected with me and with their siblings, if there are any, it does not make any sense. It should not be possible.

We're all conscious of, and have probably had at least some sense of, the family of Hitler Youth Corps. You get three-zillion kids marching in rank and file in these wonderful straight lines displaying that kind of super-imposed discipline and order which rides rough-shod over the individual reality of these people, we all know that, in one way or another. That is not a family. I think where this leads us to is precisely this desire to take your time and reflect on the fact that they are not mine and that God does know who they are. To the extent that I am open to God, I have a somehow deeper understanding about the mysteriousness of these little human beings. And even if I only understand their mysteriousness, that is a major step forward, I think, in raising them. That will make me cautious, and humble, and at times tentative in my reaction to them, all of which, I think, are very useful, and out of which a family can be created.

The other implausibility has to do with the notion of the Holy Family as we get it out of Scripture. What is the Holy Family? Well, the creation of this Feast is very recent, I meant to check the date that it was invented but I didn't get around to it, I think it was the nineteenth century, maybe a little earlier, but I think, if it didn't arise out of that environment, it certainly has been treated as a kind of sentimental, idealized connection of this husband and wife, and this perfect little kid. That's it, that's God's family, that's the Holy Family, this menage a trois. But the real family that we get out of the Bible is the family of everybody. That, and only that, is truly the Holy Family. I mean Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is merely a cell in this huge cosmic body that is the human race. It is an important cell, an enormous cell, but it is only a cell because the Holy Family does not just terminate with everybody being ga-ga over this ideal mother, this ideal kid--no, no, no.

The real implausibility is how this Holy Family is supposed to encompass everybody. That's where I think the real implausibility is located. But that's exactly what Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and the whole Christian business, and Abraham, is supposed to make us aware of. This is a problem because I find that when all my kids are at home that I have this tight-knit little unit, but that's wrong. The whole business of raising kids is to make them available to everybody else, to make them agents in the creation of this truly Holy Family which is everybody. And here too, the need for doing that, the need for quiet, and distance, and reflection, and, at times, an enormously painful detachment from my own ideas, from my own plans, and from my own ambitions for these kids is really necessary. So, lest the feast of the Holy Family becomes, again as I suggested on Christmas Day, a form of self-indulgence, we have to keep in mind the full scope of this stuff as we get it from the Scriptures, and that nothing is impossible with God: "The arm of the Lord is not foreshortened."

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