Reflection on the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

1 Samuel 1:20-28         1 John 3:1-24            Luke 2:41-52

The focus of this Sunday in Christmas week is family.  We celebrate the Holy Family and we celebrate the entire extended family of the Holy One. 

The focus on family brings to my mind a young Jewish couple I knew when I was in graduate school.  One Friday they invited me to their apartment for the Sabbath meal, my very first.  They were newly pregnant with their first child, leading us to talk about how central family is in Jewish faith and practice.  For them, creating a family meant adding new life to the whole Jewish community, a sacred task.  They questioned how I could deliberately choose not to establish a family, not to mother children, and by implication, not to bring new life to the human community.  That Sabbath evening was in 1967.  Since then, I have regularly prayed for my Jewish friends and their family, which I hope has grown to the fourth generation. And I have questioned myself again: what am I  doing to bring new life to the human community.

Today’s first reading from the Hebrew Scriptures introduces us to another Jewish family – Hannah, El-kan-ah and their newborn son, Samuel. Hannah had been unable to conceive, and because she was childless, her value and position in the Jewish community was painfully diminished.  Not even her husband’s wholehearted love, nor his preference for her over his other wife, was enough to relieve Hannah of shame in the eyes of the community.  

Hannah begged God to give her a child.  She went up to Jerusalem and stood in the temple, right next to Eli the High Priest, hoping his prayers would lift hers to God.  God answered Hannah’s prayer, and Samuel was born.  In return, Hannah dedicated her child to the service of God for the whole of his life, allowing God’s gift to her to be a blessing for all the community. It was Samuel who anointed Israel’s greatest king, David.  Thereafter, Hannah was known in the community as a prophetess, for in her faithful deeds and in her hopeful prayer Hannah proclaimed the greatness of God to the whole Jewish people:

¹“My heart rejoices in the Lord;
    in the Lord my horn is lifted high.

⁴“The bows of warriors are broken,
    but those who stumbled are armed with strength.

⁸ “He raises the poor from the dust
    and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes
    and has them inherit a throne of honor.”

The evangelist Luke, whose words we read this morning, echoes Hannah’s prayer and Hannah’s story in the first two chapters of his Gospel in the way he tells stories of the Holy Family.  Luke even includes echoes of the echoes by telling parallel stories of Elizabeth, Zachariah and their child, John.  Some elements are rearranged yet all are similarly focused around miraculous pregnancy – new life given as a blessing for the whole community.  Like Hannah, both Mary and Zachariah sing songs of grateful praise.  Both husbands, Joseph and Zachariah, offer courageous, trusting support despite the lack of evidence. The Holy Family makes not one but two memorable journeys to the temple in Jerusalem.  Finally, just as Hannah dedicated her child’s whole lifetime to God’s service in the temple, so also the pre-teen Jesus is ready to remain in the temple for the rest of his life, saying to his mother, “Surely you realize that I must be in my Father’s house.”

All these overlapping stories of miraculous new life, service to God and blessings for the community, come together in today’s second reading. The beloved apostle, John, tells us what he learned while resting his head on the breast of Jesus.  We are all of the same family, miraculously given life by one Mother-Father God, for a lifetime of loving, and life-giving service, in the house of the Holy One.

All persons across the globe are of the same family, miraculously given life by one Mother-Father God, destined for a lifetime of loving, designed for life-giving service on our blue planet, the House of the Holy One.