We’ve just heard tell of
a perfectly loving family. But that
perfectly loving family isn’t the one our feast celebrates today: the one
perfectly loving family is not Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but God. By which I mean: God the Father, and Jesus
the Son. God is family, and by that I
don’t mean that God really likes families (though he does), or God is close to
us like a familial relative (though he is), I mean it as literally as we can
mean anything about God: God is a family, the one perfectly loving family. The relationship of love between God the
Father and Jesus the Son is the love from which all other love is spun. It’s a love between father and son that drove
everything that Jesus did; and everything that Jesus did serves to invite us
into that love and empower us to respond in love. It’s why had to be in his father’s house,
about his father’s business. It’s why
Jesus prayed so much. It’s the love that
gave Jesus the strength and the trust to be able to offer everything for
us. It’s the love that drew Jesus up to
return to his father after his resurrection, to continue to show us what love
looks like, and that led him to send us the Spirit that we might live in that
love.
And that
Jesus, Mary and Joseph didn’t form a perfect family doesn’t mean it’s not
totally right to call them still the Holy Family, because holiness isn’t really
about perfection. Even with two of the
three members of the family being totally without sin, they still manage to
leave their 12-year-old son in Jerusalem while they walk for a day. And when they find him, they don’t understand
what he says to them. In a way, that can
be a great relief for us: that holiness isn’t about understanding everything,
never making a mistake. It’s about
seeking out the lost, and keeping all these things in our hearts, but it’s not
about 100% success rates and never failing at anything.
If we want
perfect unfailing love, though, we have a witness to that, we have the love
between Father and Son that Jesus came to show us. To show us, and to lead us into. John’s letter says it powerfully: “We are God’s
children now.” What Jesus had by nature,
we are given by grace through baptism.
Commenting on this passage, the Venerable Bede commented that God’s love
is freely bestowed on us “so that we might both know and be able to love him;
to love him… not as lowly faithful hired servants love their masters, but as
children love their father.” And John tells
us that God’s adoption of us as children will lead us to grow unimaginably like
our God, “what we shall be has not yet been revealed,” but as we grapple with
that and journey by grace towards it, we are already God’s children, we have
already been granted a real and precious foretaste of that perfect love.
And we can
give and receive something as humans that is a real image of God’s love. Not something that would ever eclipse it or
compete with it even, but a real and precious foretaste, that makes more
tangible what we know our God to be holding out to us. And families can be a real place of encounter
with that love, both the Holy Family, and each of our families, closer
to home. The love between parent and
child, between spouses, between siblings and friends, prepares us for and
expresses our longing for that love that God truly is. But, we’re not there yet, and that makes
family life hard. And in our frailty and
our failing, we can rest secure on the perfection of God’s love. It is our hope and our prayer that everyone
encounters love within human families, and we ask the Holy Family to join in
that prayer, but the embrace of God’s family, into which we are invited, is
real, and powerful, even if the analogy with our human families sometimes
limps.
I once baptized
three siblings at once: 2, 4 and 7 years old.
The 2 and 4 year-olds didn’t remember their father, but Justin did. At age 7, he didn’t know the phrase ‘restraining
order,’ but he could remember what life had been like when his father had been
around, and that it was a very good thing that he wasn’t anymore. I spent some time in the preparation process
playing with them with the things we’d use for the baptism, those tangible signs
of God’s love outpoured, and trying to help them understand some of what we
believe happens in baptism. Some bits of
our teaching they really couldn’t latch on to, but being claimed as God’s
adopted daughters and sons, getting a new Dad, that resonated especially with
Julian. As I poured the water over his
head “in the name of the Father, and of the…” I saw his beaming smile as he
blinked away the water. And I learned
something about love: that we want every child to learn what the Father’s love
is from the care and nurture and mutual love of their parents. That’s how we humans were made to learn
love. But God won’t let human frailty,
or even wickedness, stand in the way of welcoming us into that perfect love.
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