Holy Family (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, December 28, 2024

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family, C, Vigil
December 28, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Msgr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation God wants to have with each of us, as together we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We celebrate this feast on the Sunday between Christmas and the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, on January 1. It is an opportunity for us to focus on how when, the Word of God took on our humanity and dwelled among us in order to save us, he chose to enter the human race in a family, just as each of us does, so that he could redeem the family that the devil had attacked from the beginning with Adam and Eve, and so that he could in fact make the Church a family. The Church is the extension of the Holy Family of Bethlehem and Nazareth, comprised of those who, like the Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph, hear the Word of God and observe it, and who seek to live their life centered on God-with-us, Emmanuel.
• This year’s celebration of the Feast of the Holy Family is particularly special because it is taking place as part of the long-awaited Jubilee of Hope, which Pope Francis inaugurated during Christmas Mass-During-the-Night on Christmas Eve at St. Peter’s in the Vatican. In a wheelchair, the Holy Father movingly opened the Jubilee Door and invited the whole Church to make a pilgrimage through that door, leaving behind a world in which there are so many signs of desperation and entering through the door who is Christ our hope. But that was just the start of the Jubilee. On the Feast of the Holy Family, two things are happening. First, in Rome, Pope Francis will open the Holy Door at his Cathedral, the Archbasilica of Saint John in the Lateran. Second, he decreed that in every cathedral and co-cathedral of the world, bishops are to celebrate Holy Mass as the solemn opening of the Jubilee year. So in the mother church of every diocese in the world, including your own diocesan Cathedral, there will be a special Mass with particular prayers for the occasion. I would urge you to try to go to your Cathedral this Sunday to celebrate in a particular way this Jubilee along with the successor of apostles sent to shepherd you in your part of Christ’s worldwide vineyard. And the Jubilee will continue in each diocese of the world until the Feast of the Holy Family next year. This shows us that the Jubilee is meant to be marked not just in Rome, and not just in every Diocese, but in every family, seeking to help every family model itself on the Holy Family and become a beacon of hope for the world, as Christian families individually and collectively give a reason for the hope we bear within us (1 Pet 3:15).
• The Feast of the Holy Family this year will take place on the fifth day of Christmas and it’s key, if we’re going to understand and live out the Jubilee well, for us to grasp the true meaning of hope. If you look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it says that hope is the “theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1817). Hope is, therefore, a gift of God by which we ground our life trustingly in Christ’s words and promises and avail ourselves of the help of God to seek to live in his kingdom, in but not of the world, with our hearts set on God and the great hope of eternal loving communion with him. That’s a very beautiful, rich definition. And at Christmas time we can think about all of the promises God made that were fulfilled with the birth of Jesus the Messiah of a virgin in Bethlehem of Ephrathah, and all of the other promises that would be fulfilled in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. But I’ve always loved the definition suggested to us by Pope Benedict in his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope called Spe Salvi, or “Saved by Hope.” In it, relying on St. Paul’s words to the Ephesians, the Holy Father said that to live “without hope” is to live “without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). That’s kind of like a photographic negative. The virtue of hope, therefore, is to live with God in the world. We know this to be true. No matter what challenge we’re facing, what mountain we need to climb, if we seek to do it on our own, it can often prove overwhelming. If we face the problem conscious that God is with us, helping us and sustaining us, we see that nothing is impossible. That’s the hope Christ sought to bring into the world. Isaiah prophesied that he would be “Emmanuel,” which means God-is-with-us. He is indeed with us in the world. He is with us in the dark valleys and the beautiful summits. He is with us on rainy and sunny days. He is with us always, as he promised at his Ascension, until the end of the world. And because he is with us, we are never without hope.
• In this Sunday’s Gospel, we discover what happens when we’re not with the God who has come to be God-with-us. We see it in the lives of the two greatest saints of all time, Mary and Joseph, when they lose the third member of the Holy Family, Jesus. The scene of losing Jesus for three days and then finding him in the Temple constitutes both one of the seven sorrows of Mary as well as the fifth Joyful Mystery. It’s an episode in the life of the Holy Family that, unless we regularly meditate on the mysteries of the Holy Rosary, we may not ponder enough, since it comes up at Mass only every third year on the Feast of the Holy Family and then only on the optional Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But it’s a scene from which we can learn so much. Within the context of the Jubilee, I want to focus on what it teaches us about hope and hopelessness.
• The Holy Family of Bethlehem and Nazareth was holy first and foremost because it was centered on God, who literally dwelled among them, whom they held in their arms, nursed, clothed, taught, and helped grow according to his humanity. But we see in this Sunday’s Gospel that there was a time in which Mary and Joseph took their eyes off Jesus. After one of their three 60-mile pilgrimages each year from Nazareth to Jerusalem, as they were heading home, Mary thought Jesus was with Joseph and Joseph thought he was with Mary, but neither of them had Jesus in the forefront of their attention. After a day’s journey, they saw they were both wrong when they discovered that Jesus was with neither of them nor any of the others traveling back with them in the caravan toward Galilee. Both were distracted. Both had taken their eyes off Jesus. This wasn’t a sin, but it clearly was an imperfection; they took his presence for granted and that the other was taking care of him. So they began to look for him, with ever greater anxiety, in the camp, but didn’t find him. It is of course every parent’s nightmare to lose a child. They had not just lost a child, but also the Son of God who had been entrusted to them. So they journeyed all the way straight up the hill to Jerusalem and began to look for him there, at the places where they had stayed, eaten, visited, and so on. They searched a whole second day without finding him, as doubtless their dread began to grow. Finally, on the third day, they found him in the precincts of the Temple area, sitting in the midst of the teachers, astounding them with his understanding, questions and answers. When they confessed that they had been looking for him for three days with great anxiety, the twelve-year-old Jesus asked why they hadn’t realized that he would have had to have been in God his Father’s house, busy about his Father’s work. While they had taken their eyes off him, he had not taken his eyes off his Father. Losing Jesus for three days is not just something that points to his eventual three days in the tomb, when the whole human race would, in some sense, lose his presence for that period. It also points to the anxiety, the hopelessness, even the despair that comes when we really lose the presence of Jesus in our life. We can become like Mary Magdalene the morning of resurrection asking everyone where they have taken the body of the Lord. The remedy is to keep our eyes focused on Jesus, to be with him in seeking the will of the Father, to stay with him even for a while in the Father’s house, the Church, so that we, like him, can be about God the Father’s business, seeking to accomplish the Father’s will just like we see Jesus doing. To be with Jesus in this way is something that will ground our hope always. This scene of the anxiety of Mary and Joseph puts into relief that the Holy Family otherwise was totally focused on Jesus, on helping him and each other to do the will of God. Our families, as well as the Church as the family of God, is meant to help us to center our life on Jesus in a similar way.
• There’s another aspect of the Jubilee and the family that Pope Francis brings up in his letter proclaiming the Jubilee. It’s about openness to life, which is a manifestation of hope in every age. The Holy Father writes, “Looking to the future with hope also entails having enthusiasm for life and a readiness to share it. Sadly, in many situations this is lacking. A first effect of this is the loss of the desire to transmit life. A number of countries are experiencing an alarming decline in the birthrateas a result of today’s frenetic pace, fears about the future, the lack of job security and adequate social policies, and social models whose agenda is dictated by the quest for profit rather than concern for relationships.” We see that almost a third of young people today say they don’t want to marry and have a family for the sake of preserving the planet from more carbon dioxide emitters. Pope Francis says, however, that “openness to life and responsible parenthood is … a mission that the Lord has entrusted to spouses and to their love. … For the desire of young people to give birth to new sons and daughters as a sign of the fruitfulness of their love ensures a future for every society. This is a matter of hope: it is born of hope and it generates hope. Consequently, the Christian community should be at the forefront in pointing out the need for a social covenant to support and foster hope, … working for a future filled with the laughter of babies and children, in order to fill the empty cradles in so many parts of our world.” Love, St. Paul says, hopes all things. If we’re hopeful toward the future, we want to bring children into the world; if we’re fearful, we don’t. Openness to life is a sign that the married couple recognizes that Jesus the Bridegroom, the Good Shepherd, is with them, and gives them the courage to look to the future with hope rather than fear. Children are a concrete sign of the hope that Christians bear in the world and those children are meant to become agents of hope, as the saints of the future. Openness to life as members of a family trying to become holy is one of the important ways that Catholics can give our contemporaries a convincing account of the hope that inspires us, as we, in our own families, recapitulate a little bit of the hope of the child in Bethlehem. It’s one way that we show how those who have hope live differently.
• As we celebrate on Sunday the Feast of the Holy Family and the inauguration of the Jubilee in our various dioceses, let us ask God-with-us to convince us in a particular way of his holy presence so that we may fulfill Pope Francis’ prayer for the Church as we begin this special holy year. “Through our witness,” he wrote at the end of his inaugural letter, “may hope spread to all those who anxiously seek it. May the way we live our lives say to them in so many words: ‘Hope in the Lord! Hold firm, take heart and hope in the Lord! (Ps27:14).” Jesus, Mary and Joseph, pray for us to become witnesses of hope for others as you are for us!

The Gospel passages on which the homily was based was: 

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