The word “family” has many meanings, and several of these are put in tension with each other in the readings for this Feast Day of the Holy Family. In the Gospel reading from Luke, at least three distinct uses of “family” are invoked. There is the nuclear family consisting of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus; there are the people of Israel united by tradition and reverence for God’s Law; and there is the future community of revealed Christianity, encompassing both Jew and Gentile, foreseen by the prophet Simeon. In consecrating their child at the Temple in Jerusalem, the nuclear family ritually demonstrates that it submits and belongs to Israel. In this way, the Holy Family finds a place in that larger family, Israel, by conducting itself as Israelites must. Luke is at great pains to emphasize that Joseph and Mary are simply doing what the Law commands of them and that they do not seek anything exceptional for themselves or their son in coming to the Temple.

It turns out, mysteriously, that doing what custom requires is what makes Jesus’s family exceptional. Amidst the “customary rituals,” Mary and Joseph “marvel” at Simeon and Anna’s prophecies that their son will be the salvation of Israel and the Gentiles as well as the “rejected sign” that reveals who the righteous and unrighteous are. The family’s adherence to tradition – the simple intent to have their son lawfully belong to the Jewish people – will expand who belongs to the chosen people and revolutionize who will count as high and low, first and last, among the Israelites. These are difficult words. How should we understand that the extraordinary must come from the ordinary, the revolutionary from the traditional? For this, indeed, is one of the paradoxes at play in Luke’s gospel.

Long before Marx and Engels’ The Holy Family (1845), the institution of the nuclear family had already come under criticism for its conservatism. In the main, the criticism is that the social function of the family is to train the child to respect and perpetuate the existing order. Yet in the gospel, Mary and Joseph’s very endeavor to fulfill this function is shown to bear within it a radical challenge to Israel’s identity and hierarchy. Several interpretations present themselves to us here. Perhaps the paradox drives home the point that it is our role to keep the laws and God’s role to revolutionize the meaning of the law and the social order where it has force. A less quietist interpretation is that, whether intentionally or nay, families who sincerely keep the law and tradition inevitably conflict with the institutions that police them, since these institutions make concessions to power and interests. Still another interpretation is that a tradition can still be – maybe must be – tradition even in periods of serious discontinuity. As the philosopher Georg Lukács said about Marxism, orthodoxy doesn’t mean everything stays the same forever; it means that a tradition’s animating spirit finds ways of renewing itself when faced with new conditions. Whatever interpretation we favor, one implication of the paradox in the gospel seems clear: the institution of the family is not necessarily conservative. The Holy Family, the archetype of the institution for a millennium’s worth of Christians, served a revolutionary purpose.

I would suggest seeing the readings from Sirach, Psalm 128, and Colossians in the light of Luke’s gospel. Both Sirach and Colossians stress filial piety, our duties to parents and children, and the benefits that flow from honoring our parents. Given the ideological capture of “family values” by conservative and reactionary interests in western societies, it is easy for readings like this week’s to strike us as banal. Luke’s gospel affords us a different vantage on the other scriptures, however. While families inescapably play a role in fitting individuals into a tradition and a larger community, the relations of love, care, and mutual responsibility that should define the family give the institution a potential power of resistance against ossified social orders. The philosopher Adorno wrote in the years after the Holocaust that modern capitalism is tending to a “state of affairs in which everyone who lifts the lid of the nearest trashcan can expect to find his own parents in it.” In such a world, the expectation that one will care for one’s parents even when their faculties have declined does possess a dignity not at all banal. If the institution of the family can sustain traditions that make wanton disregard for human beings more difficult and conflictual for individuals socialized into capitalism, then strengthening the family would indeed be a socially transformative project.

A Contemplative Exercise

Let us pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance in being members, critics, and supporters of families today. Let us pray for the bonds of love and care that help us know who we are and what we must do. Let us pray for the transformation of our institutions so that they reflect bonds of love and care, instead of suppressing them.

Amen.

Reflection Questions

• What structure, and which people do you think of when you think of family? How do you wish your family was structured?
• What does it mean to reclaim the meaning of family in the name of liberation?

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