Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23; Solemnity of the Holy Family

The Holy Family is Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and not just Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Holy does not mean flawless and so holy is for every family.

Our parents are not perfect any more than we children are saints. And speaking of saints, in the words of Frederick Buechner, “the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else’s, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them.”

And so every family is sagrada not because of what we’ve done but only because of what God has decided to do through us. Today we celebrate God’s choosing to love us through family.

God loving us in and through family can bring about three wonderful things. First, such a love can turn a house into a home. Second, this love can turn a family outward, beyond itself. And last, love at home can turn people back to God our true home.

Let’s start with house into a home. House is tirahan, home is tahanan. The difference? Love. House is walls and a roof. Home is faces around a table, a roomful of shared lives and stories, a shield against the elements, a place where tears and rain subside. Tahan na, we say to the distraught child. Home is Mary hushing her child to sleep. Home is Joseph heeding God’s dream to take mother and child to a safe place away from harm.

Home is the joy we are to our parents. Just by coming to life, we become a source of indescribable joy to them. Without doing anything, just by being born, we changed our parents. We made them happy; we dissolved their tiredness when they came home from work; we taught them to love. Willingly, gladly.

If parents can be so happy with their own child, imagine how God can be so delighted in us, just by being ourselves.

Second, the love of God at home can and does turn a family outward, beyond itself. Mary realized this early on when she had to wean her child off her own body. Joseph and Mary learned this when the child turned twelve and they found him in the temple.

Home is where we begin to come into our own. It is where we start to wear our own identity, the time we realize we are not our parents, and our parents discover that we are our own person. Home is where our love gathers enough strength to let go.

The love of God sends us outward beyond the comfort of our own homes. Such a love turns our compassion toward the streets where the ones who are loved least can barely live and are homeless. Such a love does not indulge dynasties that are turned in on themselves, political dynasties who perpetuate their own family in power.

If we can and must love those outside our home, imagine how wide and deep and inclusive the love of God is, just by being God.

Third and last, God loving us through family can bring us back to God, our true home. Family is where we first learn to pray, the time we come to believe in God who is not a fairytale. It is where we are always little enough to be grateful again for gifts we could never have deserved or given ourselves.

It is at home where our images of father and mother take shape. We first relate to God with these images, however limited and wanting the likeness will always be. When Jesus teaches us to pray to God our Father, there is a touch of his own experience of the fatherhood of Joseph. Our devotion to Mary reflects the love of Jesus for his own mother. Our affection for her traces the love we bear for our own mothers. We know Mary to be close to us because she was there with her son to the very end, as she is with us “now and at the hour of our death.”

Even if we should run away from God, as we do from time to time, we can always come home to God who worryingly waits for us through the night. It is in family where we first learn about how “[love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor 13:7)

If we can so wait and open our doors to the prodigal one who returns to us, imagine the heart of God bursting with joy, just by our coming home to him.

The holy family is every family. And every family is holy because God continues to love us in and through every home.

*Image by Getty Images / FG Trade Latin