Homily for Feast of the Holy Family

Homily for the
Feast of the Holy Family

Dec. 29, 2024
Ps 84: 2-3, 5-6, 9-10
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!” (Ps 84: 2).

Jerusalem (by Edward Lear)

The responsorial psalm today expresses the longings of pious Jews as they go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and to the Temple in particular.  According to St. Luke, that’s what the Holy Family did habitually for the celebration of Passover, one of 3 feasts on the Jewish calendar for which the Law of Moses urged worship in God’s holy city.  Perhaps it’s Jesus’ 1st time accompanying his mother and foster father on the pilgrimage.

Such pilgrimages weren’t easy.  It wasn’t “over the river and thru the woods to grandmother’s house.”  From Nazareth it was a 90-mile hike over rough roads thru inhospitable Samaria, or 100+ safer miles down the Jordan Valley to Jericho, then a climb up to Jerusalem, perched on Mt. Zion.  Pilgrims traveled in caravans for safety as well as for the company.  Either way would take 6-8 days.  (Can you imagine how many times parents were asked, “Are we there yet?”)

So the psalmist cries out, “Happy the men whose strength you are!  Their hearts are set upon the pilgrimage” (84:6).

The prayer for today’s feast—the prayer properly called the “collect” because it gathers together and voices all our aspirations and pleadings—points to the Holy Family as a “shining example” for us, a family whose virtues, especially charity, we ought to imitate.  That means your families of parents, kids, and perhaps extended family members, and it means my family, too, 14 Salesian priests and brothers dwelling together in New Rochelle—3 Salesian generations ranging in age from 32 to 76, coming from foreign places like India, Vietnam, Poland, and Massachusetts as well as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Florida.  The “bonds of charity” are necessary in every family, yours and mine.

The psalm acclaims, “Happy are they who dwell in your house!”  That’s addressed to the Lord.  The Temple at Jerusalem was his home, literally considered his dwelling place.  So young Jesus explains to his mother, “Didn’t you know that I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49).

By the grace of our Lord Jesus, every Christian home is a dwelling place of the Holy Trinity.  Where “the bonds of charity” bind us together, God dwells.  An 8th-century hymn that the Church still chants on Holy Thursday states “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est”—“Where charity and love are, God is there,” or as one English hymn puts it, “Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found.”

The psalmist sings, “My soul yearns and pines for the courts of the Lord” (84:3).  We yearn for the peace and harmony of a loving family life centered on God—like the Holy Family dwelling in Nazareth or on pilgrimage to God’s holy city.  The proverb “charity begins at home” reminds us that the 1st people we want to love, the 1st we need to love, are those to whom we belong, those we spend most of our time with, those most important in our lives.

Family life can be hard (even in a religious house).  That’s why we need God’s help in married life and religious life.  “Happy the people whose strength you are!” the psalmist prays.  “O Lord of hosts, hear our prayer” (84:9).  Prayer won’t remove all the difficulties of family life, but it will help us handle the difficulties.  Without God’s help, we don’t have a chance—or, as the saying goes, “We don’t have a prayer.”

The psalmist speaks of the pilgrimage of the faithful up to Jerusalem.  The 2d Vatican Council’s teaching on the Church reminds us that we’re all pilgrims, away from the Lord but journeying toward him as if in a foreign land,[1] journeying toward the heavenly Jerusalem, our eternal home with God.  One of the classics of 17th-century English literature is the Puritan book The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come.

The dangers on our pilgrimage are very different from those encountered by 1st-century Jews going up to the Temple.  The Pilgrim’s Progress alludes to numerous vices that obstruct our way toward heaven; we all know the temptations and falls that are part of our life’s journey.  Like the psalmist, we invoke God to shield us from danger and to forgive our sins; we plead with him, “look upon the face of your anointed” (84:10).  In the psalm, God’s anointed is the king, who protects God’s people and the holy city.  But all of us are God’s anointed; we were anointed at Baptism and Confirmation, anointed with sacred chrism that bonds us to Christ, makes us Christians.  So we pray that God our Father recognize us as his Son’s kin, and in our families we strive to imitate Jesus’ immediate kin, Mary and Joseph—so that, like them, “one day we may delight in eternal rewards in the joy of God’s house” (cf. Collect).

[1] Lumen gentium, 6, 8.