SANCTÆ FAMILIÆ JESU MARIÆ JOSEPH
“The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood. Woe to the sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a wicked seed, ungracious children: they have forsaken the Lord, they have blasphemed the Holy One of Israel, they are gone away backwards”. These are the words spoken centuries ago by the prophet Isaias (Is. I, III-IV) and, as it is said, are one of the reasons why we place an ox and a donkey in our Nativity scenes every Christmas.
Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. That’s why I´d like to focus our attention on the importance of having Jesus in the center of our own families, looking at the Holy Family as our model. Without Christ as the center of their family, St. Joseph and Our Lady would not have successfully overcome so many difficulties they faced: The possible rumors of people about the conception of Our Lord; the magnitude of the plan of God as a superior cause above their own lives, their own honor, their own projects; the flight into Egypt with all the physical and mental effort involved; and, as we heard today, the challenge of having a Son with a knowledge far superior of their own human understanding of things.
But they succeeded. They succeeded because even if they couldn’t understand everything, they always had their love focused on God and their trust placed in Him. They were fully committed to God and God never disappoints nor abandons His children. “Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? and if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee” (Is. XLIX, XV) God said, also through the mouth of the Prophet Isaias.
Perhaps this is also why last Sunday we heard the words of St. Peter that can be fully understood today: Jesus Christ of Nazareth “is the stone which was rejected by you the builders, which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other” (Act. IV, XI-XII). Likewise, St. Paul said elsewhere: “For no one can lay any foundation other than that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus.” (I Cor. III, XI)
Yes! NO ONE CAN LAY ANY OTHER FOUNDATION THAN THE ONE THAT IS LAID! This is the central theme of today’s liturgy: On the one hand, the importance of having Christ as the center of our families and, on the other, the sin of Israel in rejecting the Savior that is repeated today in many of the families of this modern world in which we live.
And it is that both the jews and the modern world do not understand one thing: God does not unite people, God unites purposes.
When two people have a purpose, they themselves are not the most important thing, but what is more important is what they serve. And when there are two people who are united by a higher purpose, their egos are put aside. On the contrary, when each one always thinks only about receiving from the other, there will always be a clash of interests.
Now, if we read the Holy Scripture, we will see that, in many moments, Yahweh calls Israel: “his wife.” The reason for this allusion is both the love that God has for humanity and because of the pact/contract that the Lord decided to make with Israel when he chose Abraham and his descendants, not as a superior race but as the means to transmit the healing truth of His doctrine and prepare the way for the very birth of the Redemptive Truth in a manger in Bethlehem.
Now, strictly speaking, the translation from Hebrew is not exactly “to make a covenant” but “to cut a covenant.”
In Genesis XV, God says he wants to “make a covenant”, which was like a contract with Abraham, a ברית בין הבתרים. But in Hebrew, it doesn’t say “make a covenant”, it says “cut a covenant”. And in order to cut the covenant, God tells Abraham to go and get a bunch of innocent animals, slaughter them, and then make an aisle out of the bloody pieces. Some people suggest that circumcision (the same one that Our Lord had to pass through, and that we remembered precisely a few days ago) is also figure of this covenant.
Now, what would normally happen in a covenant is that the lesser being, Abraham, would walk between the pieces reciting the promises of the covenant as if to say: “if I break the terms of this covenant, may I become like these slain animals”. But in Genesis XV, something happens that occurs nowhere else in all of recorded ancient near-Eastern literature. Just when Abraham was going to walk the pieces, God puts him in a deep sleep. God Himself appears as a flame of fire and God walked the pieces to make the covenant.
In other words, God was saying, if you break this covenant, I’m going to be torn to pieces. And my dear faithful, that is exactly what happened 2000 years later. Jesus, the Lamb of God, was ripped to shreds at the cross. Why? Because the descendants of Abraham broke the covenant.
Now, the story of Abraham, the first “Paterfamilias” of the nations (who was perhaps a prefiguration of the “Paterfamilias” par excellence in the New Testament, that is, Saint Joseph, who also, like Abraham, is said to have been considered a Just Man) is very pedagogical for me, because it teaches us how should be the relationship between a wife and a husband, and how they should view and keep that “contract” that one day they established for their salvation.
In Genesis XVII we read that God changed the names of Abram to Abraham and his wife Sarai to Sarah. God added the Hebrew letter ”ה” to Abram and Sarai´s names. ”ה” is the 5th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and was used to represent God Himself and His Divine Grace. One of the principal ways to refer to God was using the word האשם and its initial the letter ”ה”. ”ה” also made reference to the wind, the breath… (the Spirit of God) blowing on us. It is the divine breath of God breathed into Adam, releasing His life into Adam. The action of adding “ה” to the name mystically expresses the transforming grace of the Spirit.
Therefore, God inserted His own presence and Grace into Abram and Sarai and they eventually became Abraham and Sarah.
This is how we see that a marriage must always be of three: God, he and she. To get married, it is not necessary that he and she be madly in love, but it is essential that both be in love with the marriage itself, because it is their path to the One who is the apex of all love: God. That is precisely what the Holy Family of Bethlehem taught us and what St. Paul reminded us of when he said: NO ONE CAN LAY ANY OTHER FOUNDATION THAN THE ONE LAID! The center of our family has to be Jesus. That same Jesus who was the cornerstone that the builders rejected. That same Jesus who came to this world to pay for the covenant that the jews broke. That same Jesus whom we remembered a few weeks ago wrapped in humble cloths and lying in a manger. That same Jesus whom the ox and the donkey recognize as their Lord, but whom many still do not recognize.
May the example of the Holy Family be the light that illuminates us so that we always recognize Christ as the center of our home, and may the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus tear down the idols that surround our home just as those idols were torn down when the Holy Family passed through Egypt.
