Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke each year, Jesus parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. And when he was 12 years old, they went up according to festival custom after they had completed its stays. As they were returning, the boy Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Thinking that he was in the caravan, they journeyed for a day and looked for him among their relatives and acquaintances.
But not finding him, they returned to Jerusalem to look for him.
After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers.
When his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.
And he said to them, why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?
But they did not understand what he said to them.
He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. And his mother kept all these things in her heart.
And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor for God man the Gospel of the Lord.
I've always held this celebration of the gift of the Holy Family as special because in the same way that the Holy Family was made up of mother and Father and perfect Son, so is mine.
But I also can't help but think that if I gave the attitude that Jesus gave to his mother and my dad saw it, it would have been a very uncomfortable bit of time afterwards. We'll just put it that way.
But that's only if you read this story from a very fundamentalist perspective.
And it's always critical that when we look at Scripture, and particularly when we look at the Gospel narrative, that we remember that they are not historical documents. There was no one there recording each and everything that happened and putting them on paper to give us a synopsis of everything that Jesus did and every experience he had. In fact, every story we have in the Gospels is meant to teach us something deeper, more alive than we first realized.
And this particular passage is meant to remind us that even from the very beginnings of his life, Jesus was singular minded in purpose.
And that purpose was to do the will of his Father, which in turn turned out to be the desire of God to offer us perfect love and salvation.
And Jesus did that here by being in the temple. He was a person that would have been constantly at prayer, constantly learning from the tradition, the tradition of his elders, the stories of the Hebrew scriptures, in order to begin to understand more fully his purpose and the revelation of that purpose through faith.
Because a secondary mistake would be to think that Jesus was born in with all knowledge of everything he was about.
Because I don't buy that for a second.
I think the depth of his love comes to us by understanding that he struggled a bit at times.
He prayed. He was open to the promptings of the Father's love in order to be guided to do what he needed to do.
And we know that because even in the midst of his suffering, before he was crucified, said, father, let this cup pass from me. If he knew the whole story, he wouldn't have said that.
He was just being faithful to what the Father had called him to do.
And in the midst of this story, we can also see what God's will is for each one of us.
And that is that we not only know and experience that perfect love that comes through us, through Jesus faithfulness, but that we allow that love to transform who we are so that we can have a chance to participate in what his ministry is making that love continually present in the world.
The Holy Family was the nest, if you will, that allowed that faith to develop and to grow.
It allowed him to be a person of prayer. It allowed him to study and grow in the Scriptures.
And it allowed him to understand what human love was like through the love of his Father and mother.
All of those gifts in similar but distinct ways are offered to each one of us. We can know and experience God's love through prayer.
We can understand better God's will for us through the study of Scripture. And we can experience that love in a tangible way by those people we love and who love us.
So in a way, the Holy Family is our family as well.
