Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family (B)

December 26, 2020

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.26.20_Landry_ConCon.m4a

 

The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Family.

* On Friday we celebrated Christmas, which is first and fundamentally the celebration of how God so loved the world and every human being that he took on human nature himself so that he might fully restore us to the divine image and likeness. The priority of Christmas is always on God’s coming into our world and our following the Shepherds, the Wisemen, the angels and the animals to adore him. We make a spiritual pilgrimage to Bethlehem and, filled with awe, praise and thank God for the greatest of all gifts. This year, in the midst of the pandemic and all of its collateral hardships and losses, we recognize our need for God even more and we are filled with gratitude that God-with-us, Emmanuel, has not left us alone, but has entered our reality in order to fill our darkness with his light and even death with life.

* To celebrate the feast of Christmas well, however, we also need to look at how we receive the gift of God. That’s why the Church always has us celebrate the Solemnity of the Holy Family on the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas, because we see in the Holy Family of Joseph and Mary how to respond to the gift of God, not just as individuals but in the communion of our own family, of the family of the Church, and, even more broadly, in the human family.

* It’s highly significant that when the Son of God became man, when the Word became flesh, he chose to be conceived and born within a family of an already committed husband and wife. He didn’t choose to come as a 30-year-old adult, or a teenager, or an 80 year old. He didn’t choose to be born of a single mom, or raised by two men or two women, or some other arrangement. He chose to be born within a family … precisely in order to redeem the family. The family is always in need of redemption. We see with the first family of Adam and Eve how the devil succeeded in separating husband and wife from God and from each other, and we see the immediate consequences of the devil’s work in the next generation when Cain slew his brother Abel. Because the family is meant to be the world’s greatest image of God as a communion of persons in love, the devil never ceases to go after the family. We see it in how Herod sent his henchmen to try to assassinate the baby Jesus, terrorizing not only the Holy Family but all the families of ancient Bethlehem.

* Surveys across the globe have shown that the devil has been rather effective in his attack on the family. During the pandemic, while some families have had the beautiful opportunity to spend far more time together, not just with each other but in prayer to God, many others have been attacked by the evil one, leading to much higher rates of divorce, domestic violence and other problems.

* We can spend many homilies focusing on the problems confronting the family today, but it’s more important to consider how God wants to strengthen the family. The feast of the Holy Family allows us to reflect together on the purpose of the family, what it means to be a husband and father, a wife and mother, a child and brother or sister. The family has a purpose in God’s plan; it’s meant to be a school of love, a domestic Church, a gift of God to help all of the members of the family grow into the realization of who God created each of them to...