Feast of the Holy Family Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons

El Greco - La Sagrada Familia

31st December 2023

I'd suggest we throw out all the New Year resolutions we may have tentatively made, and instead take up the words of Colossians in our second reading as the direction and task ahead. It says all we need to know or do and is probably a much better set of resolutions that what we might make up for ourselves:

" Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection". (Col 3: 12-14)

Can we do this? We can but try! However in order to help us grasp this rather exciting set of ideas, we might also take heart from the fact we are being reminded in every feast all through this Nativity season, of just why these gifts are something freely on offer from the Christ, and not impositions loaded on our backs!

You see we really need to get out of the dreadful habit of that tendency to drift into negative thinking, which all too often permeates people's ideas of faith. I've been around too long to enjoy the descent into maudlin sentimentality or breast-beating sinfulness that some religious people find appropriate to explain and articulate as their own spiritual journey. Instead I'm looking, as many of you are, for signs of hope, ways out of difficult situations, some positive guidance for my own daily journey and the situations I discover in our world. Above all I need to desperately understand and know that somehow the `Lord is with me'!

So these words from Colossians mean a lot to me, I am part of 'God's chosen ones', I am also despite everything else, 'holy and beloved' and I need to recognise that in Christ 'the Lord has forgiven me' and all this, because through His incarnation, birth, death and resurrection, I like you, have become part of Christ's body, one of His own true family.

That theme is why this Sunday's feast of the `Holy Family is so important, Christ becoming one amongst us, is also firmly linked into out existence, and we into His. His earthly family is often cited as an example of what our family life should be, but I'd stop going along those lines, they don't quite fit. For a start we just don't know what the hidden years of Jesus were like, we might guess, we might take hints from the stories of his own ministry about what he was like as a human, but there is no way we can make absolutely factual statements about his family life being an exemplar for us all, unless perhaps it is to suddenly realise that all kinds of relationships that bind, unite, bring together in supportive, growth filled ways matter?

What is does do for me though, is to blast away one unsuitable notion about what a family should be like, and that is inward looking, enclosed in itself ! The family of Jesus not only includes Mary and Joseph and others hinted at in the Gospels, it eventually expands to include all, including the 'least' of the world, for these too are my brothers and sisters says Jesus. Don't get me wrong, family life matters, but we cannot limit it to one particular way of living out a set of relationships that matter.

In many ways the key to understanding the Holy Family is to insert yourself into the story, remind oneself that we are part of the Holy Family, not of `Nazareth, but of the Kingdom, and that in this imperfect world, the exiles, displaced, the migrant, the poverty stricken yet hopeful refugee and all else that are rejected are as much part of it as anybody else. If Simeon can see salvation in the vulnerability of a baby-child whose birth came as a muddled surprise and brought pain in its wake, then we can see salvation in any person who comes to us in vulnerability.

This is where the letter to the Colossians matters for us all, it clothes us metaphorically in the true garments of a new family, we are to put on, just as we have 'put on ' Christ in Baptism, and been sealed and signed by the Spirit in Confirmation, these garments as signs of our new family life. But above all is urges us to let Christ be part of our lives, not today, nor tomorrow, but always. "And let the peace of Christ control your hearts, the peace into which you were also called in one body. And be thankful."(Col 3: 15)

May I wish each and everyone of you a blessed and very happy new year!

Lectio

Colossians 3: 16, 17.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

"God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety-that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken."

Poem

My Song of Simeon

Down the months of days
Across the different years,
I search for You,
The One I call Lord
The One I know so vaguely
The One I cannot clearly see

Down the minutes of my life
All those restless moments
Of joys and sorrows mixed together
You were always there
Walking with me and others
but I did not fully understand.

In those still times of my heart-prayer,
in those dark nights awakened
restlessly searching,
asking You questions
that never seem to be answered,
I saw the Morning Star.

Always in the souls dry arid days
another voice is ever gently calling;
'Onwards little one
the shepherd knows the sheep
the calm will come,
I will always light your journey!'.

Then at that sheepfold
At that gate with every one gathered
There I shall then truly see
The face of You, the One I call Lord
Shining in each of us there
And I shall be glad
Rejoicing, for I then will be home.

( Written by Fr Robert Gibbons
RPPG Presentation of the Lord MMXXII)