Readings (Year A):
Sirach 3:2 – 6, 12 – 14
Psalm 128:1 – 2, 3, 4 – 5
Colossians 3:12 – 21 or 3:12 – 17
Matthew 2:13 – 15, 19 – 23
Reflection: Will you welcome the Holy Family?
Your family is fast asleep at night, when a message comes: flee for your lives. Someone wants to murder your child.
You pack your food and meager belongings, bundle your baby up, and creep out of the house. As you tiptoe down darkened streets, you pray your baby doesn’t cry and alert any hostile watchers. Then you make your way on foot, some hundred miles across the border into a neighboring territory where your child will be safe.
That’s what Mary and Joseph had to do, to keep baby Jesus safe from Herod, as today’s gospel records. And that’s what thousands of refugees and migrants are doing, across the globe, as they flee war, violence, persecution, natural disasters, and poverty.
The gospel for the Feast of the Holy Family recounts the flight into Egypt. It tells the story of a single family, a strange and unusual family, fleeing dire circumstances. But the other readings emphasize relationships within families and perpetuate some conventional ideas. Some such ideas seem to have little to do with Christianity, and more to do with the cultures in which the texts were written—including the infamous line in Colossians about women being subordinate to their husbands.
Religious leaders sometimes pluck these passages out of context and argue that this is what being a “holy family” is all about. But there’s nothing especially Christian about a patriarchal family structure. Men lording it over women would not have been exceptional in the Roman empire. If anything, the patriarchal family structure looks less Christian, given the broader context of Jesus’ radically egalitarian teachings. The early church, at least in the beginning, lived out those teachings: “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, man nor woman.”
Various scripture scholars have tried to make sense of what looks like a contradiction, between an emphasis on human-made hierarchies, and Jesus’ disruption of those hierarchies. Some suggest that such passages are specific to issues in particular communities, Others argue that these rules were interpolations—human biases creeping in.
Whatever the case, any snippet like this must be read within the broader context of the Christian vision—which, as we saw all through Advent, is about eliminating inequalities, not reinforcing them. The Holy Family’s flight into Egypt to escape Herod is a perfect reminder of the chasm that exists between God’s kingdom and the “princes of the world.”
How you honor the Holy Family, this Sunday, has little to do with venerating statues or images, or uttering flowery things about idealized, abstract family life. It has everything to do with how you treat the real live individual families in your communities today. “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.”
The family that fled violence and danger to save the life of their child is approaching our border now. They are refuging in our communities, living in fear that the emissaries of today’s Herods will find them—but also in hope, knowing their own resilience and trusting the courage of communities of good will.
Whatever you do to the families of immigrants, refugees, and migrants, you do to the Holy Family. Will you hand them over to Herod? Or will you welcome them today?
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