Family Relationships

	Fr. Roger Vermalen Karban

The readings for Sunday, December 30, 2001, Holy Family, are Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14, Colossians 3:12-21, Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23.

It doesn’t seem too difficult being a parent when angels appear at crucial moments to point you in the right direction, and you can surface Scripture quotes validating your every decision. Yet that’s precisely what Matthew says happened to Joseph and Mary.

Scripture scholars have been warning us for a long time not to take Luke and Matthew’s Infancy Narratives literally. The early Christian community certainly didn’t think they were totally historical, else they wouldn’t have included these two well-known — but contradictory — accounts in the same collection. (If you have a few minutes, compare both narratives. How many contradictions can you find?)

By the time the evangelists compose their Gospels, they’re much more interested in the significance of events than in the exact historicity of those events. All four Gospels, for instance, refer to Jesus’ “brothers and sisters,” yet in their Infancy Narratives, Matthew and Luke zero in only on Mary, Joseph and Jesus, rarely saying anything which even suggests the three are part of an extended family.

Matthew is actually reflecting on the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection in today’s reading, not on the significance of his early years. He uses these latter events only as a springboard to delve into the meaning of future events. Those who don’t understand his methodology could believe that Jesus’ life, unlike our own, is very simple. Of course, if someone would sit down one day and figure out the significance of our lives, they’d also appear to be very simple.

But until someone actually determines what aspects of our lives are significant and which aren’t, we must live those lives according to the principles put forth in our first two readings.

We Catholics especially need to hear Sirach’s call to care for one’s parents. Some of us pre-Vatican II old-timers remember when a whole segment of the church was dispensed from caring for their mothers and fathers when they were “old”: priest and nuns. I still vividly recall the night almost 55 years ago when my great-grandfather was dying. His daughter, my grandmother, was frantically on the phone to her sister’s motherhouse, trying to get permission for her to come the 100 miles to be at the bedside of a father who was asking for her. Her religious superiors never granted the permission.

It’s impossible to reconcile Sirach’s words with the refused permission. But back then some in the church reasoned that concern for one’s parents would actually hinder priests and nuns from doing God’s work.
Paul believes God’s work primarily revolves around our family relationships. He begins today’s Colossians pericope by giving general principles about showing love. We are to have “. . . heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another . . .” Then he quickly shifts to specifics — all of which concern family relations.

Though we smile today at Paul’s instruction that women “. . . be subordinate to your husbands . . .,” we understand that our practical, everyday human relations are rooted in the unknowns of life. We have no idea what the long term effects will be when we apply love to concrete family situations. Few of us today believe husbands are superior to their wives. But the only way husbands and wives eventually reached an insight of equality was by first loving one another, then reflecting on the implications of that love.

Only if we spend our lives in service to others — especially those closest to us — will anyone be even tempted one day to surface the significance of our lives. Such acts of loving service eventually make everything else in our lives disappear into oblivion.