Homily for Holy Family Sunday, December 29, 2024. Gospel of St. Luke 2:41-52. Theme: Unwrapping the Christmas Gift from God
Unlike the culture around us, we Catholics make a big deal about Christmas by observing it as an Octave which means 8 days of celebration. And so today is the 5th Day of Christmas. but during this Octave our Liturgy doesn’t keep us in Bethlehem repeating the story of the Nativity story over and over again. It has us move on to other aspects of Jesus’ childhood and family life because Christmas isn't just about one event that had significance for just one day. Rather, it was the starting point to the unfolding of the great mystery of God becoming man. The rest of what Christmas means was played out over the ensuing years as the Holy Family carried on with their everyday lives in the obscure backwoods village of Nazareth, as today’s Gospel informs us.
Both Bethlehem and Nazareth are important in the Christmas story. But while Bethlehem proclaims the coming of God as man, Nazareth shows us what it looked like for God to live as one of us on planet Earth. And since everything Jesus 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, that is, 30 of His 33 years were lived in obscurity, in spending His days doing the usual and the ordinary? What message does Nazareth hold out to us in the Christmas story of God becoming human?
I think the message of Nazareth is that we are mistaken if we look for God and holiness only in the extraordinary and the miraculous. He is present and active in every single aspect of life no matter how insignificant or trivial it may seem. 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 so as much as I love the Bethlehem part of the Christmas story, with all of its miraculous marvels and wonders, I relate much more to Jesus in Nazareth where He lived like you and me.
Nazareth means that the Baby in the Bethlehem manger had to learn to walk and talk and navigate His way through life as we all must do. It means that He went to synagogue school and asked a lot of questions as He grew in age and wisdom. It means that as a young man He had to wake up every morning, pack up His tool bag and grab His lunch before taking off for work. Nazareth shows us that the Creator of the universe didn’t live by miracles with angels serving Him, but earned His living by the sweat of his brow and the hard work of His hands as a laborer in wood and stone. He had good days and bad days just as we all do. In other words, He was exactly like us in every way and in all things, except for sin.
And because He lived and worked as we all do, Jesus made it possible for our own ordinary everyday lives to become something beautiful for God like His. You see, since Christ was fully God as well as man, when He participated in our human experiences He sanctified them. This means that they have been blessed and graced by the touch of His divinity. By living as we all live and by doing what we all do, Jesus as God elevated the dignity of human activity, enabling our daily routine to become a pathway to holiness for us and not just be something that we have to do in order to to get by and exist. It’s kind of like a twist on the ancient Greek fable of King Midas and his Golden Touch which you might recall, except for Jesus that Touch was fact and not fiction. And He invites each one of us to benefit from this Divine Touch and sanctify our own daily activities by carrying them out in solidarity with Him.
And we can truly do this because of our existing relationship with Christ by Baptism. We are already spiritually united with Him so we can easily link everything we do in our day with what He did when He lived on earth. We can make this offering without words, but a great short prayer to use is the doxology from the Mass which goes, “Through Him, With Him and In Him”. It can be as simple as that to unite what we offer up to God with what Jesus offered up to Him and continues to offer to the Father in the Eucharist today. This spirituality of the daily offering enables us to give deeper meaning to all that we do and allows 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 Lord’s Nativity were truly spectacular and awesome and I look forward to celebrating Christmas every year! But Bethlehem was just the starting point. It was where God’s Christmas Gift of His only Son was first given. However, it was in Nazareth, where this Gift was unwrapped, so to speak, revealing to us what it meant, what it looked like, for God to become a man. For it’s in Nazareth that we truly discover a Messiah and Lord whose ordinary everyday life made Him truly what we proclaim Him to be at Christmas, that is, “Emmanuel” which means “God-with-us”.
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