Homily for Holy Family Sunday, Dec. 31, 2023. Gospel of St. Luke 2:22-40. Theme: We All Live in Ordinary Everyday Nazareth
Even though it’s still Christmas-time many of the sights and sounds of the season are starting to slowly disappear. Things are gradually returning to the normal and the ordinary again. And today’s Gospel is very much like that. It starts out sounding a lot like Christmas with Simeon and Anna rejoicing over the Newborn Messiah while His parents stood by in amazement. It must have reminded them of the shepherds of Bethlehem when they came to the stable and told them about angels singing the praises of their Son.
But the Gospel’s closing verses move us away from the extraordinary events surrounding Jesus’ birth. They bring us back to the normal and the ordinary as they tell us of the Holy Family returning to their hometown of Nazareth. Their life in that little village was so very different from all the supernatural phenomena they had been experiencing in Bethlehem and Jerusalem since Jesus’ birth. In Nazareth there are no heavenly angels singing glory to God in the highest! And there are no temple-prophets praising the Messiah-King. Nazareth was not like that at all. Nazareth is a place where the Holy Family lived by faith and not by miracles. It was an ordinary everyday kind of place where they lived an ordinary everyday kind of life.
The Gospels don’t say much about the life of Jesus in Nazareth. All we have are a few verses telling us that He was obedient to His parents as He grew in age, wisdom and grace. We are told that there was nothing extraordinary in what He said or did that made Him stand out from among the other residents of Nazareth, nor even among His own relatives. The Scriptures do inform us that though He was God, Jesus didn’t cling to His divinity nor exploit it as a kind of perk in becoming human. He left all that behind and had to develop as we all do in mind, body and soul. Amazingly, this means that God Who is Love now had to learn what it means to love and what it feels like to be loved as a human being. Imagine that!
Jesus grew up as a rural backwoods boy, experiencing the ups and down of daily life in the boondocks of Galilee. He was socially counted among the poor, because in ancient Israel there was no middle class. Only those in power had it all. Everyone else, including the Holy Family, simply struggled to make ends meet. And so to do Hs part, Christ became a craftsman, a laborer, following in the family business. He earned his living by the sweat of his brow and the work of his hands. He had to pay taxes to the emperor, deal with bills and difficult customers, and meet with the men of the village to arrange for protection and store up provisions. As a devout Israelite, Jesus observed the rituals and festivals of Judaism, went to synagogue every Sabbath, and prayed the Psalms with Joseph and Mary every night at home. He had fun celebrating weddings and births and He mourned as we all do in times of suffering and death. In other words, He was exactly like us in every way and in all things, except for sin.
But is that how we usually think of Jesus? Or do we focus more exclusively on His miracles and majesty? Both are important, of course, but too often I think we just kind of overlook the fact that for 30 of his 33 years as a man, God chose to live the ordinary kind of life that we all live. Now it’s important to remember that God the Son freely chose the condition and status of His earthly life. And since both the Scriptures and the Church teach us that everything He did was for our instruction and salvation, we need to stop and ask ourselves: what is He saying to us in the fact that 90% of His life was lived in obscurity, in spending His days doing the usual and the ordinary? He just has to be saying something to us in all this because God didn’t come to earth simply to waste time! So, what message does Nazareth hold out to us?
I think the message of Nazareth is that we need to stop looking for God and holiness only in the extraordinary and the miraculous. God is present and active in every single aspect of life no matter how insignificant or trivial it may seem. Jesus blessed and sanctified the ordinary and the humdrum simply by participating in it. He knew that this is how most of us live and so He wanted to show us and teach us that loving and serving God can be accomplished even in those everyday things that we don’t think are all that special. And He invites us to also bless and sanctify our daily duties by carrying them out in a spirit of solidarity with Him and His everyday life at Nazareth.
We can do this every morning by simply making a conscious decision to embrace our day and everything we will experience in it in union with Him. It’s really that simple. We can make this decision with words or simply by the intention of our minds and hearts. And when we do so, then everything that makes up our day – all of our prayers, works, joys and sufferings – everything, can become a part of His own offering of His life and work in Nazareth to the glory of God the Father. This spirituality of the daily offering enables us to give deeper meaning to all that we do and enables us to become partners with our Savior in consecrating the world to God. It actually has the capacity and potential to make us into saints.
So, yes, the extraordinary events surrounding the Nativity of the Lord were truly spectacular and awesome and I look forward to celebrating Christmas every year! But honestly, Nazareth stands out to me so much more than Bethlehem, because it’s where the Gift of God’s only Son is unwrapped, so to speak, revealing for us what it meant, what it looked like, for God to become a man. Nazareth is where I see Jesus most fully and most humbly and most amazingly living out His Christmas name of Emmanuel, which means God-with-us, God-as-one-of us.
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