And it came to pass after three days, they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.
For those who think that Jesus was some sort of religious whiz kid this gospel and that verse make no sense. For those who fudge Jesus’ humanity and see him as the God in the flesh who pretends to be human—and ignorance is fundamental to being human—this gospel makes no sense. For those who see Jesus as going through the motions of boyhood when in reality the boy knows everything there is to know because of his relationship with God the Father, this gospel makes no sense. For those for whom the Holy Family is something that merely belongs on a sentimental religious holy card beyond the reach of any of us, this whole feast, never mind this verse, makes no sense, at least in the real word in which we live.
But we do live in the real world, the world of fallen humanity, but more to the point to today’s feast, the world of the Christian family which is part of the fallen world. Each year this feast is difficult for me to preach about, not because I do not believe in what the feast is celebrating, but because what people expect to hear on this feast is something that has no relevance to their own family, and because it has no relevance to their own family, they can breathe a sigh of relief and dismiss it all as Catholic piety, something that makes one feel warm but has no relation to one’s real life. It is not merely the denial by most homilists of the deep tension that today’s gospel reveals within the Holy Family; it is deeper than that, so much deeper.
Listen to this excerpt from yesterday’s lead op-ed piece in the NY Times. You say: I don’t care what the New York Times says and why should you inflict this on us. I say to you: one must read Pravda in order to know how the truth is being twisted and what the cultural message that is being broadcast to our Catholic people. If the priest does not know this, he might as well hitch up a wagon and join the Amish and circle the wagons and become part of an esoteric sect that refuses to engage the darkness of the world, that refuses to insist on the light of Christ amidst the darkness, that refuses to utter those words: et verbum caro factum est, and instead retreats into mere religion.
With apologies for that introduction listen to these words from a man who apparently has taken the place of those who have written their strident ant-Christian and anti-Catholic editorials for the past forty years. His name is not important but what he says is more direct and more to the point than anyone else. The title of the op-ed is irrelevant to the point. The article purports to deal with the false hopes of the conservative movement to rise to the occasion once again. It sees everything in terms of conservative vs liberal and states unequivocally that time is on the side of liberalism, here defined as freedom from all strictures that would impede the author’s view of the future. Some of you here are muttering to yourself that this is more of the same and why should we be talking about this on the feast of the Holy Family. But listen to this. This. “The demographics of the country are rapidly changing, young people are becoming increasingly liberal on social issues, and rigid, dogmatic religious stricture is loosening its grip on the throat of our culture.” I read this several times, trying not to believe what I was reading. Now it is true that this writer has no idea what liberalism is. But for him whatever it is demands the death of any religiously based understanding of our culture. Notice the violent phrase: loosening its grip on the throat of our culture. It is not far-fetched to relate this phrase to the Fascism and Nazism and Stalinism of the middle of the most bloody century in human history. For the leaders of those cults—and they were cults—understood clearly that the Judaeo-Christian basis of western culture must be destroyed if they were to succeed in their conquest of humanity.
One side of the feast of the Holy Family is the danger that is always present to the very idea of the family that is grounded in the love of the living God. The flight into Egypt is more than a reason for artists to paint some lovely paintings. Joseph took his family and fled into Egypt to escape death, death from a tyrant who correctly understood the threat this seemingly insignificant family posed to the power structure of the time. They returned when the coast was clear, or so it seems. But the coast is never clear, for the tyrant is never satisfied with trying to make sure that the power is solely his, whether that power be that of a king or that of religious leaders. That danger is real for the holy family of the Church today. And this not only in those parts of the world in which the Church is under physical attack, like in Malaysia, in India, in Turkey, in Egypt. It is true above all right now in Europe, where the European identity is in severe crisis, in a crisis, literally, because of the official refusal of the new Europe to acknowledge in any way that its identity cannot be separated from its Christian and even more deeply, its Catholic roots. One by one the leaders of the European nations fall over each other in their attempt to deny their roots and usher in the brave new world of marriage whose understanding is dictated by the State, of a multi-culturalism that denies the reality of truth as the basis of culture, of an offensive against any form of Christianity that dares to assert itself in the public sphere.
But this offensive against the Christian culture, which is the culture of the West, is not confined to Europe. The cultured despisers of religion have a strong foothold in this country, and the segment from yesterday’s op-ed in the Times shows not only their presence but their perception that the battle is won. And this battle is not against atheism; it is not against Dawkins and that gang who battle against belief in God in ignorance and almost comical antiquarianism. The battle is against the religion of secularism, a religion that is militant, a religion that knows its enemy, whose grey eminence is the real threat to not only our culture but to the Church. Secularism is the face of the gates of hell today. And this challenge must be faced, not by a flight to Egypt in the negative sense, but rather by doing what the 12 year old Jesus did in today’s gospel.
What did Jesus do? He sat at the feet of the teachers of the faith, listening to them and asking them questions. The religion of secularism has been so successful because of the ignorance of Christians about their faith. And this is deeply true of Catholics. How many Catholics could defend their faith in rational terms when called upon to do so? How many could defend the Christian understanding of marriage and of the family in rational terms? The horrible irony, and it is indeed horrible, is that at a time when Catholics have never been better educated even in the worldly sense, they have little clue about what their faith means. The Catholic Church has become a dysfunctional family that is a mirror image of the dysfunctionality of so many of our families.
But how to get out of this mess? That is the question. And the question is answered today—not magically but rather to those who think at all—in today’s gospel. We must sit at the feet of the teachers, we must sit at the feet of the Tradition of the Church and conversely we must cease to pant after the secular nonsense of the world that encourages us to look to the future that holds some magic that will fulfill our deepest desires. But this does not mean that we must retreat into the past. No, this is always an error. But this means that we must sit at the feet of the Tradition of the Church, we must listen to the Tradition, we must ask questions, we must become—oh the horror, the unthinkable—Catholics who think boldly within the Tradition of the Church. This does not mean exclusively but does not exclude study of Scripture and Tradition. It means in the first and foremost place doing what we are doing right now: it is in this Mass, it is in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, it is in the Mass that links us strongly by strong arms to the Tradition of the Church: it is by our active participation in this act that is the deepest and most central act of the Church that we touch and feel and taste and understand and come into contact with the Tradition whose content is the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. Oh how I rejoice in and with the families who are here today and every Sunday and who bring their young children here to this Mass, for you are doing what Jesus did in today’s gospel: you are bringing them to the Tradition, you are equipping them to ask and to absorb and to believe and to know. You are filling them with that hope and courage that is the only answer to the chilling challenge of those who are determined to destroy the faith that is the basis of Western Culture. Those who drink deeply of the wine of this Mass, and this transcends age, come into contact with the joyful witness of Peter and Paul, of Ignatius of Antioch, of Teresa of Avila, of Therese of Lisieux, of the Venerable John Henry Newman, of Padre Pio. And ultimately, it is here that one does what the young Jesus does: is here that we sit at the feet of the Father and contemplate the Son in adoration and are filled with the Holy Spirit.
This is what lay at the heart of the Holy Family. This is what they knew and experienced at every moment of their lives in the grace of God. Oh God, on this feast of the Holy Family, may we, amidst the real sorrows and perplexities of our lives, know the joy and peace of the Holy Family.
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