The Holy Family, Raphael 1483, Musée du Louvre. Paris, France. 

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“When the days were completed for their purification according to the law of Moses, They took him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord…”    Luke 2:22.

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Looking at Raphael’s portrait above of the Holy Family, it dawned on me for the first time that the Holy Family was probably no different from most other families. In the painting above, in addition to Jesus, Mary and Joseph (almost always depicted as an old man), is Elizabeth and her son John, eventually to be nicknamed “the Baptist”. Remember that Mary, when she accepted God’s will to become Jesus’ mother, was told by the angel Gabriel that her kinswoman or relative Elizabeth, thought to have been barren, was with child. Mary at once traveled to see her and help her. That means there was a family relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, with John the elder. Joseph, asked by God to accept Mary who was  pregnant with child conceived by the Holy Spirit, was also a man who listened to and believed in God and he accepted that unique and no doubt confusing situation. By tradition Mary’s parents were Joachim and Anna. Although Scripture is utterly silent about them, that has not stopped the faithful from filling in the blank totally. So now we have a real family, albeit rather small. But some take Mark 6:3 to be literally true, when the skeptical locals in Nazareth were supposed to have said about the Lord: “Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” (although Catholic tradition does not really hold this to be the case). But if all this is true, then we are dealing with a family of at least 13 people! It means Jesus was blest with siblings or at least others to play with, blest with grandparents and at least one aunt (I have always considered two of my aunts were two additional mothers along with my real Mum, a great position to be in). It is from such a powerhouse of love and support that Jesus entered upon his mission as the Messiah, the anointed of God, as promised down through the ages. I imagine that as he was completely human (as well as divine), his human nature really required such a solid foundation on which to build his life. All of that also applies to each of us, some with equal intensity, and some, unhappily, with less. But God is here as a solid foundation of love for every one of us, and many of us find it expressed first in the context of family.

Every schoolteacher knows that the student’s parents are the first teachers. It is the teacher’s hope that s/he will have a solid foundation on which to develop the skills that will take that young person through life. The most important of them all is the belief in a God who loves, cares and protects each one of us. Each one of us is gifted in some way by God. Hence the teacher’s vocation is to attempt to identify those talents and begin to mould them into skills. Jesus had Mary and Joseph. They clearly accepted God as source of love which moulded them into a family. They honored God, as seen in their journey, almost certainly on foot, to Jerusalem from Nazareth to present their son to God in the Temple. That’s about 90 miles, and would take about 30 hours, perhaps three days. That’s proof of devotion and love, and an example to each of us. It was the ethos in which the Lord grew up. It prepared him for his vocation, received at his baptism, to be the Messiah. It gave him the strength to endure everything that fate, or the devil, threw against him. And that is the feast we celebrate today, the Holy Family, the foundation on which the Lord lived his entire life.

The Holy Family, Holy Art.

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