of the Holy Family
Dec. 30, 2012
Luke 2: 41-52
Ursulines, Willow Dr., New Rochelle
“Did you not know that I
must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2: 49).
So read most of our
modern translations. An alternative
translation, e.g., in the King James, the Douay-Rheims, and the original
Jerusalem Bible, as well as in footnotes to some other versions, reads “must be
about my Father’s business” or something similar. If you prayed Evening Prayer last nite, you
may have noticed that the intercessions use both forms.
Either rendition is
valid, Luke’s Greek and Jerome’s Latin being ambiguous. Jerome puts it thus: “Nesciebatis quia in his quae Patris mei sunt oportet me esse?” “Didn’t you know that I had to be in my
Father’s things?” (Both classical texts
use a plural indefinite form—tois in
Greek, or his quae—which doesn’t line
up precisely with the idea of “house.”)
“My Father’s house” does
obviously fit the context, for Mary and Joseph have found the boy in the
Temple. At the same time, there he’s
found “sitting in the midst of the teachers [of Torah], listening to them and
asking them questions” (2:46); this, too, is his Father’s “things,” his
Father’s business: to understand and to
carry out the Torah.
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| Child Jesus in the Temple stained glass, Holy Savior Church, Bruges |
A little too seriously
in his parents’ eyes, of course: “Son,
why have you done this to us?” (2:48). It’s
a cry of anxiety, as Mary says (2:48), of consternation, of stifled anger
perhaps, of relief, that any parent would understand. The anxiety, the fears, the terror of
separation from a child were brought home to us all too tragically on the 14th.
Jesus, on the other
hand, has a gentle rebuke for his mother and the man who has functioned as his
earthly father for 12 years. When he
refers to his “Father’s house” (or his “Father’s affairs”), he’s not referring
to Joseph. Can we imagine how that must
have startled both Mary and Joseph—no matter how well they may remember the
amazing story of this child’s origin, they have to have settled comfortably into
their parental roles. Wouldn’t Joseph,
after 12 years, have begun to think of Jesus as his own son just as much as
Mary did? Is Mary’s exclamation, “Your father and I have been looking for
you” (2:48), meant only for public appearance—how else could she speak of her
husband here?—or does it represent a way of thinking that both she and Joseph
have just taken on naturally over the course of the quiet years?
So Jesus recalls them to
a different set of relationships. Mary
and Joseph are his family—as we celebrate today—but God is his Father. His Father’s house is the Temple; whether by
design or not, Luke doesn’t say, “He went home
with them and came to Nazareth,” but, “He went down with them and came to Nazareth” (2:51). “Going down” and “going up” were the ordinary
ways of speaking about leaving or going to Jerusalem, sited as it is on a
prominent height. Luke’s phrasing may be
nothing more than that. On the other
hand, he could hardly have referred to Nazareth as Jesus’ home right after what
the boy had just said.
The word house shows up 5 times in today’s
liturgy: once, as “household,” in the OT
reading; once in the psalm, besides “dwelling place,” and in the psalm refrain;
once, sort of, in the gospel, as we’ve been considering; and once in the
Collect. The word, as we know, can mean
both a physical building, like the Temple, and a family, like Elkanah’s
household (1 Sam 1:21) or “the house of David” to which Joseph belonged or
God’s “house” in heaven (Collect). In
addition to those 5 usages, Hannah brings her son to God’s house, tho that word
isn’t used, and Samuel becomes a member of the priestly household, “dedicated
to the Lord” (1:24,28).
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| St. Mary's Church, Fredericksburg, Va. |
As we celebrate the Holy
Family, we pay homage to their “shining example” and pray that we might
“imitate them” in our own natural or religious family, our household dedicated
to the Lord (Collect). But we also look
to a heavenly family—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—which Joseph and Mary
entered mystically by taking God’s Son into their home, and which we, also,
enter mystically thru our religious consecration. The Holy Trinity was present in their home at
Nazareth thru the Son’s union with his Father and the Holy Spirit. No doubt the Spirit guided Mary’s meditations
as she “kept in her heart all the things” that she witnessed and took part in
(Luke 2:51). No doubt the Spirit was
part of the boy’s advancement in wisdom (2:52)—as that’s understood by human
beings, of course, since Divine Wisdom has no need to grow.
The Holy Trinity made
the “house” of God in Jerusalem into a temple.
They call us, invite us, to come to the heavenly temple, to become part
of their heavenly household. Without
using the word house or household, St. John voices that idea,
too: the Father’s love bestowed on us
enables us to “be called children of God” (1 John 3:1), i.e., members of his
family. But, according to John, that’s
only a start: “we are God’s children
now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall
be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1:2). When we do finally come to the Father’s house,
a tighter bond, a tighter relationship, than Father to children, awaits us,
John seems to be saying. Seeing God in
his essence is going to transform us in some manner presently unknown to us. Perhaps this is related to what we prayed in
the 3d Mass of Christmas: “that we may
share in the divinity of Christ” (Collect), however that’s to be understood.
This divine
transformation begins here below. John
links our relationship with God as his children to 2 things: “belief in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ,
and love [for] one another just as he commanded us” (3:23). “Those who keep his commandments remain in
him, and he in them” (3:24); i.e., they dwell with and in the Son, and vice
versa, sharing in the Son’s relationship with his Father “from the Spirit [that
the Son] gave us” (3:24).
The Collect is perhaps a
little more specific about those commandments when it prays that our imitation
of the Holy Family include “practicing the virtues of family life and the bonds
of charity.” What precisely those
virtues and that charity might be, in practice, in a household of religious
women—that you pretty much know after your many years of practice; and you may,
of course, imitate the Virgin Mother by continuing to “keep these things in
your heart” in such wise that the virtues of Ursuline family life and the bonds
of Christ-like charity become more and more deeply rooted. All of this amounts to imitating Jesus in “being
about the Father’s business”: study and
meditation upon the Torah, or more broadly, the commandments of Christian life,
and loving one another in day-to-day practice—acting like we already belong to
God’s household, his family. And what we
shall later be…will eventually be revealed to us, by God’s grace.
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