Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-6, 21:1-3; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; Hebrews 11:8, 11-12, 17-19; Luke 2:22-40
Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Yet our readings today invite us to a broader understanding of three related realities: Family, holiness, and blessing. The word of God invites us to see the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as the culmination in human history of family, holiness, and blessing.
For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the faithful of the three great Abrahamic religions, that history begins with Abraham. It is difficult, I think, for us not to feel badly for Abraham at the beginning of the reading we hear this evening from the Book of Genesis. God promises Abraham a son with Sarah, an ancestor to many nations, several times within a few chapters of Genesis. By the time Genesis introduces us to Abram, he is seventy-five years old. He is one hundred years old when Sarah gives birth to Isaac. So Abraham has had to wait a long time for God’s promise of descendants to become reality. Abram begins to feel like God has abandoned him and Sarai. His slave “Eliezer of Damascus” is, so far, his only heir. At this point, Abram has no family, no descendants of his own blood. “Maybe,” Abram could have thought, “I or Sarai have done something wrong. Maybe we have been less than steadfast in holiness.” God certainly seems, so far, to be denying Abram and Sarai the blessing of a child, of descendants.
So, what does God do with Abram? God does not ask Abram to look upon Sarai with love and imagine her expecting a child with him. And Genesis is clear that Abram has been nothing but faithful and patient with God. Abram’s faith and trust in God’s promise of descendants is “reckoned… to him as righteousness.” God does not ask of Abram any greater sign of his faith toward God. So, why does God continue to delay (or deny) Abram the only blessing he really longs for, a child, a family, descendants to populate all nations?
God asks only one thing of Abraham in the reading from Genesis we have just heard: Go outside; “look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them… So shall your descendants be.”
So, what does this encounter between God and Abram—God’s renewed promise (again) to Abraham of a great number of descendants—say to us about family, holiness, blessing? Sisters and brothers, family, holiness, and blessing are not things to be counted in the biblical imagination. In the Bible—the epics of Abraham and Sarah, of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the people and generations in between them—family is not limited to blood relationships. Holiness and blessing, too, are from God. So these are uncountable, infinite gifts to us of God’s grace.
God asks of us that we live according to the holiness and blessing that has been ours since the first moments of our creation. God saw that we were—humanity was—“very good”; God had created us in God’s image and likeness, blessed us, and given to us the care of everything God had created.
For Abraham and Sarah, to live according to this original state of holiness and blessing meant to trust in God’s promise of descendants, a family of nations in faith. It meant to go outside and look up with awe into the limitlessness, uncountable as the stars are uncountable, of God’s blessing to them and all people, all creation for all time. For this, Sarah’s and Abraham’s trust in God, Genesis says today twice, God blesses Sarah, places her and Abraham at the head of God’s historical family in faith.
For the people who hear the Letter to the Hebrews—for us today, hearing this proclamation anew—to live in good faith according to our original state of holiness and blessing is to recognize in God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob the prefigurement of God’s restoration of us to that original state of holiness and blessing in and through Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ we have the human manifestation of “God [who] is able even to raise someone from the dead.” God has raised Jesus from the dead, giving us a share in the blessing of eternal life.
For the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in Luke’s Gospel today, to live according to our original state of holiness and blessing is not so much to look up in awe at the limitlessness of the stars as Abram did, but to look and travel toward the temple of Jerusalem. In the time of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the temple was the centre of the Jewish faith, the dwelling place of God on earth, centred on the Holy of Holies.
Mary and Joseph set out, obedient to God’s call and their faith, to present Jesus in the temple. There is some ambiguity here: The Holy of Holies of the temple is the Holy Family’s destination, the dwelling place of God on earth. Yet Mary and Joseph hold God in human flesh, the infant Jesus, in their arms as they set out on their pilgrimage to the temple. Once the Holy Family arrives at the temple, the Holy of Holies, the baby Jesus, meets the Holy of Holies. But then the focus of this encounter of the Holies becomes the arms of the “righteous and devout” Simeon.
At that point, Simeon has nothing more on earth to live for. God’s Holy Spirit had “revealed to him… that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord.” God’s promise, God’s blessing to the holy Simeon has been fulfilled. So Simeon is able to praise God, Luke’s Gospel says, with one of the most beautiful prayers in all of Scripture. For those of us who pray the Breviary or Liturgy of the Hours, at Night Prayer (Compline) the Church still prays Simeon’s prayer: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
This moment of prayer is a moment of encounter: Blessing, holiness, family all meet in this moment. Now, Simeon may depart this life for eternal life in heaven. He who has looked upon the presence of God, who has held God in the Christ Child in his arms, is an heir to God’s promise to Abraham, who looked up at the limitlessness of God’s promise, God’s holiness, God’s blessing of family: “Look toward heaven and count the stars… So shall your descendants be.”
There is only one thing on earth left for Simeon to do as he returns the baby Jesus to Mary and Joseph: Simeon blesses the Holy Family as he sends them on their way back to Nazareth, their hometown. It is a strange sort of blessing, I imagine unnerving if we had been Mary or Joseph in that situation. “This child,” Simeon says, “is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
What is Simeon talking about? And how are his words to Mary there a blessing? Simeon’s words are a blessing, but with a dose of reality. God has given us every blessing possible under heaven. God has created us with holiness, in God’s own image and likeness. And God has given us the gift of a Saviour, who has restored us to the dignity of being called members of God’s holy family, the People of God.
Yet our mission is to accept these gifts from God. Our mission is to hand on these gifts to still other people, so that all people for all time become heirs to God’s blessing, God’s holiness; all become members of God’s family of peoples and nations. The Christ Child, the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph stand as “a sign that will be [and to this day continue to be] opposed” by many who want to exclude from God’s blessing, God’s people on the grounds that these are somehow not “worthy” of God’s grace, God’s blessing, being called God’s people: The poor, refugees and migrants, people whose relationships are irregular by Church law, and so on. This is the cruel reality present in our world. Yet the encounter between Simeon and Anna and the Holy Family in the temple, prefigured by the encounter of Abraham and Sarah with God, shows us that God’s grace, God’s blessing, God’s holiness, God’s call to us to be universal family of God’s chosen people, will not be so easily limited.
The leaders of Jesus’ own people, of his own time, would try to limit God’s grace, God’s blessing by crucifying the Lord of all grace and all blessing: “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” But life, grace, blessing overcame even that violent attempt to limit it, to limit God. So God continues to call us forth, now from this place of encounter with God to be heralds of God’s blessing, God’s holiness with which we have been created and that is our original state of being, in God’s image and likeness. In the name of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, God invites us to bless the world, to exclude nobody from God’s blessing, so that we become ever more perfectly and universally the holy family of the People of God.
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