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Holy families | National Catholic journalist

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“He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them” (Luke 2:51).

Holy family

Si 3: 2-6; 12-14; Ps 128; Col 3: 12-21; Luke 2: 41-52

After our Christmas celebration, the liturgy immediately advances us to Holy Family Sunday with the last story of Luke’s childhood account of the infant Jesus in the temple with scholars. This text revolves in the lectionary with Luke’s story of the presentation of the child whom the two prophets, Simeon and Anna witnessed, and the dramatic account of Matthew of Joseph taking Mary and the child to Egypt to escape Herod.

If anyone imagines that being the Holy Family was easy, all the stories in Luke and Matthew’s childhood accounts mix the joy of Jesus’ birth with the stressful challenges for Joseph and Mary because it is takes place in a hillside cave, followed by a flight to escape violence, or amid predictions of future suffering during his presentation at the temple and, years later, the anxious separation they endured when Jesus stay with the scholars, which is today’s evangelical selection.

Parents will quickly identify with anxiety any time a child’s life is threatened by danger, illness or separation. We feel for Joseph as the protector of the family through crisis after crisis. Mary’s heart will be brought to breaking point again and again as Jesus fulfills his mission and accepts death on the cross. Every parent will understand the inevitable moment when a child must leave the family to find their own path and purpose.

It is these deeply human experiences that show us the meaning of being a holy family. Love risks everything to form a child obedient to this inner call to fulfill his own destiny. For Joseph, it was the mystery of loving a woman he couldn’t have and raising a child that wasn’t his. Isn’t that the challenge of every husband and father? For Mary, full of grace, it was emptying herself into her child, then letting him go for God’s plan, even knowing that this would mean enormous suffering. Isn’t that the challenge of every wife and mother?

In between these times of heroic virtue, we meet the Holy Family every day in the ordinary tasks of community life, working hard, listening and learning to be patient and altruistic, open to the lessons of life, to the needs of those around us. . Jesus lives anonymously in such a family for most of his life until God calls him to assume his public ministry. This life is hidden for a purpose. There is nothing extraordinary to see in this family just like our families. Grace is hidden in ordinary things, but doing them makes us holy and prepares us for the service of God, Whoever He is.

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