HOMILY for the Feast of the HOLY FAMILY [A], December 29th., 2013.
“Escape into Egypt”
The Sunday after Christmas Day and the priest may want to say: “Where have they all gone, those crowds of
the other day?” Where have they fled to?” He may even want to say reproachful things about those who
are not there, which is pointless as they are not there to hear them.
Anyway, why are they not here? Just possibly they don’t really find much here. They look for God but
they do not find him, just as they may have been wanting God to solve their problems, but he hasn’t. Has
God fled, just as they have fled?
There is no point in harping on about this but we might usefully take it as a springboard to consider the child
Jesus as ‘the God who flees’. God flees into Egypt to escape Herod, and then flees to Nazareth to escape
Archelaus –an even crueller man than Herod, one who had 3000 killed at the very entrance to the Temple.
Jesus presented as the Lord of flight, an image which would return in his adulthood, as he fled to the desert
to prevent the people making him king. Or, supremely, when he was in the Cross and felt that his Father
had fled: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
On top of that, let us consider where he flees to. To Egypt. Fleeing king Herod, who would murder the
little children of Bethlehem, he flees to Egypt, where once Pharaoh had murdered the male Jewish children to
prevent their race multiplying. What a place to choose to flee to – it would be like a refugee from Syria
fleeing to Baghdad.
All of which shows us that comfortable images of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the Holy Family, are quite wrong,
a plaster of Paris holy family. From the outset Jesus has to confront evil, quite different from those 19 th.
century images where Joseph is quietly carving, Mary quietly sewing and Jesus quietly playing with the wood
shavings.
And even when there is no danger without, there is possible tension within. A famous icon of the Holy
Family has Joseph looking hard at Mary, Mary looking hard at Jesus, and Jesus .... looking out into space, a
swaddled child and yet with his imagination roaming free. Just as they say children are fascinated with the
infinite, except that here Jesus goes still further, totally breaking the family mould.
Any well-meant
education programme which Joseph and Mary have in mind for the child is going to have to be set aside.
All the same, Jesus has to learn by experience. The early Church rejected the approach to the childhood of
Jesus which would be more fitting for the “Golden Legend”, that medieval collection of saints’ lives where
each story strives to outdo the others in improbability.
This is not a story which is going to be told
beginning: “There once was a pretty girl called Mary”, and the Church set aside the Christ-child stories of the
apocryphal Gospels, as where a sick infant shares the bathwater with little Jesus and is instantly cured. No,
the ‘real’ Gospels wanted to show Jesus’ character not as a miracle, but as the result of development,
maturing, fulfilment.
No wonder, then, that when the adult Jesus speaks about the family it is often in terms of tension: “Who are
my mother and my brothers?”, “Woman, my hour has not come yet”, or the parable of the Prodigal Son.
The Gospel of today is very much at variance in its mood with the other two readings about domestic virtues.
We may smile at these pictures of domestic tranquillity, which only slightly hint at the strains which lie under
the surface, where Daddy has gone ga-ga in his old age, and the teenage child is furiously rebelling in his or
her bedroom, extracting revenge through deafening rock music.
In those readings, children care for their parents. That was presumed. Priests notice how on this Sunday
with these readings families sometimes look at each other down the pew, as if the older members were
reminding the younger of their duties – even when the younger are now aged 40.
In the ancient world, a
child was a nobody. Yet in the Gospel, in an act of role reversal, Joseph is at the service of Jesus. And
Jesus is God. God is threatened by humanity, and puts himself into the hands of a human family, and an
angel coming to the domestic scene (whereas normally angels dealt with grand and mighty designs).
There is often talk of “family values”, whatever they are. But such values are not unique to Christians.
What should be distinct about the Christian family, as likewise the Christian school, is that it should exist to
allow its members to accomplish the plan of God. As has been said: “The life of the Christian family is
crossed by a transcendent initiative which we call ‘The Angel of the Lord’”. It is a different dimension.
If the family exists to allow one to achieve one’s God-given destiny, then Jesus the child has to be taken to
safety. He is not to die yet; his “hour has not yet come”.
In earthly families, there are two opposite
dangers, one where parents try to dictate the destiny of their child, which caused the French writer André
Gide to say: “Families, I hate you!”, or the other where the child is absolute king, a total little tyrant. In the
Holy Family, through it all, Jesus’ centre of gravity is his Father in heaven, and this Joseph and Mary respect
even when they do not fully understand.
This is a confusing time for families. But then perhaps it has always been a confusing time for families,
where family life has shifted throughout the centuries as society shifts, no matter what some people may say.
There are challenges at many levels, including the financial. Young people present today, do you know that
in S.E. England a young person has, by the age of 21, on average, cost their parents £237,233? Better start
saving now for when their minds fail.
And the greatest challenge is to centre on God so that the destiny of each may be fulfilled. Joseph’s task was
to preserve the child for that very purpose. And Jesus hides, as it were, so that later on he can better snatch
humanity from the emptiness of non-fulfilled being, and allow humanity to reach its destiny.
But in the final analysis there is hope. All the scurrying from one place to another which is presented n the
Gospel today shows in symbolic form that Jesus is present everywhere, that he has not actually fled from us
at all, and that even in the worst moments he is sustaining us, for the worst moments he himself has known.
As Psalm 138 says: “Even there, I am”.