First Sunday of Christmas - The Holy Family
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Sermon
Holy Family December 27th 2009 – St Mary’s Aylesbury
1 Samuel 2.18-20, 26
Psalm 148 [148.7-end]
Colossians 3.12-17
Luke 2.41-end
I could fib to you all and tell you that I prepared this sermon in the wee small hours between Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but I didn’t. I prepared this meagre offering before the Big Day itself whilst snowed in, so what I am about to say is born largely of presumption and guesswork. Still, you have heard me preach before, so you will be well immunised to my particular style!
We have all survived another Christmas. We will be a pound or two heavier, maybe just a little fuzzy-headed, in possession of the finest array of gifts ever seen, satisfied that the food that we cooked didn’t burn and those who could have complained, didn’t. We may have offered warm Yuletide hospitality to those members of our family who fitted the traditional Rota of ‘who goes where and to whom this Christmas’, or we may have been the recipient of the hospitality of others. You may all be sitting there wondering if the three-month hype provided by the Retailers was worth it, with sentiments such as ‘well, that’s it for another year’ well seated in your festive hearts.
Christmas is billed as an occasion for families. This is true, and there are two perspectives to this. There is the aspect of Christmas that celebrates the joy of a gathered and re-united family who sat and shared food and gifts together after a year dispersed around the country. This is the image of Christmas that is pushed to the forefront of our imagination; the image of Dickensian homes, decked with holly, containing rosy-cheeked children sitting around a blazing fire, with a benevolent Father looking on, and a dutiful mother, in apron, looking on from her domestic operation. There will be a robin sitting in the snow that adorns the window ledge beneath and leaded-glass window. Beside this model family, there will be the plush Christmas tree, decked with baubles and hanging fruits and the whole room will be filled with a subdued golden light from the crackling fire. Lovely! And we love it; we don’t care that it may as far from the truth as is possible, we love what it stands for, and why not!
Then there is the other perspective of family in the Christmas setting; the less positive one. It is the Christmas image that does not make it to the front of Cards, and is certainly not the image of Christmas that DFS and Marks and Spencer would have us consume in such volume. The image of a heartbroken man or woman, too consumed with grief to worry about tinsel or turkey, sitting alone in the room they once shared so many Christmases with their departed loved one – is perhaps not as attractive to the marketing people! That person might be sat in their room alone simply because the Great Christmas Rota worked against them this year and the ‘kids are with their in-laws this year’. Work commitments might also play their part. My brother and I both worked on Christmas Day, so our Mother spent her Christmas on her own. Let us not forget the other variant on this theme. Take our first Christmas Card image, with the family around the fire, and add to it the argument born of the pressures to provide a fitting Christmas for all concerned. The argument born of a Christmas Dinner served late; the argument born of two siblings who generally don’t get on and it erupting in the confinement of the shared room. This is the other aspect of a family Christmas, and is a statistical major player these days.
So yes, Christmas is about family. For good or ill, Christmas is rooted in and mitigated by family, and this is absolutely how it should be. Christmas is the time when we celebrate the newest addition to the Holy Family, with the birth of the boy Jesus.
What do we know about the family of Jesus. We know a little, but not much, about Joseph. We know more, but not a lot more, about the girl Mary. We clearly know plenty about the eldest child, but considerably less about his eventual siblings (whom the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in their literature, have uncharitably referred to as Jesus’ half-brothers and sisters). The family of Jesus comprised the three already mentioned, together with James (known as the Less), Joses (or Joseph), Judas (not the betrayer), Simon (not as in Peter) and ‘some sisters’. Indeed, this was a large family not the modest threesome that we often think of first. It was large family in the style of family most common the days of the Roman occupation. As the father of the family (the paterfamilias) was a carpenter, Jesus’ family were middle class. In Jewish families of that time, Joseph would have been the spiritual and legal head of that group and he would have provided the home for the whole family, with eventual spouses. He would have held the ‘patria potestas’, the ‘power of a father’. He will have owned the wealth of the family, whoever has earned it.
The thing that we often over-look, apart from the scale of Jesus’ family, is the fragile start that it had. Putting our stained-glass and Christmas Carol imagery aside, we have a story of an un-married teenage mother, sharing the journey with her refugee boyfriend. They are homeless, and are forced to become like squatters. They were poor (at that stage), and the teenage mother in very serious peril of being stoned to death for adultery. Joseph, we are told, was understandably unhappy by the turn of events, but loved his bride-to-be enough to spare her the death that her society would have deemed appropriate for her. Even in enlightened sexually tolerant Britain, the small family to which we refer would have hardly thrived with a start like that. Add to that start the fact that this odd-couple went on to have more than seven children, and we might imagine the tensions that will have existed there, as they do for all families. I wonder if the toddler Jesus beat up the toddler James, or pulled his hair or stole his toys. Perhaps it is just my two then...
Our account in Luke’s gospel gives us a wonderfully insightful story. I don’t doubt for one moment that a child as prodigious as Jesus, as self-assured as he was, was a real pain in the neck. I can’t imagine the child-Jesus being the quiet kid. Luke’s narrative just about seals with view for me! Let us not forget the place that fathers held in their family, in the legal spiritual and economic life of their family. Now unfold this account in that context. Jesus, a twelve-year old, not a man by any means and no less of a worry when he goes missing, vanishes. He didn’t tell his mother and father where he was going, he just went. I am no doubt that his parents went potty with worry as any parent might. Not only did Jesus vanish, but did so in the capital city, in the vastness of a multi-cultural Jerusalem. Imagine losing your twelve-year old on Oxford Street in the week before Christmas, and you might gain a sense of the worry that would have wracked his parents. Any normal kid would have turned up in a toy-shop or in a games arcade, but not this wilful near-teenager. No, he went to the temple, and I can’t’ imagine for a minute that this was high on the list of ‘those places to look when our twelve year old know-it-all son go when they disappear’. Indeed, they travelled a whole day before being fully aware of his disappearance, so this is not a good situation. They found him after three more days, so can only guess what he did for food and shelter. Picture the re-union. Luke tells us that ‘they found him in the Temple’, but I am guessing that this is not the whole story. They will have been sick with worry; they will have been wracked with guilt for not noticing sooner; they will have been so relieved to discover Jesus’ eventual whereabouts and overjoyed to know that he was safe. ‘They found him in the Temple’ probably doesn’t fully cover all facets of the re-union. What was Jesus doing, this twelve year old? He was with the teachers and the preachers, and greets them with a typical twelve-year-old’s answer; ‘Mum and dad, what are you like; isn’t it obvious that I would be here?’
We could unpick this scene for hours. It is laden with the unspoken. We have the anthropological affects, which is to say, that Jesus in this one action supplants Joseph as spiritual head of his own family. In many ways, Jesus becomes the head of his own family in this exchange; he has taken the initiative in his own life and now acts according to his own will. He speaks of his ‘father’ and for the first time will not be referring to Joseph. He acts against the wishes of his parents, and he stands equal to the trained and experienced Temple staff. Jesus, in so many ways, moves to manhood in this one scene. We could also ask about his siblings; it is likely that at least one or two would be anonymous in this drama; how would the disappearance of big-brother have made them felt? Let us not forget too, the very specific risk that Jesus opens himself and his family to.
Like all family dramas, this one ended and we are told that life, broadly, carried on as it did before. We learn once again that a very reflective Mary, while not understanding what was going on, held on tight to the happenings of that day. They would never be forgotten. In Luke’s Gospel, we hear nothing further of Joseph. The ‘paterfamilias’ hereafter disappears, but what we do know is that Jesus continued to thrive to manhood.
Yes, Christmas is a time about families. We often reflect on the troubles that face family life in the present day, all the while picturing the idyllic Nativity scene family of Jesus as something of the ideal. We now know that Jesus’ family had all the dysfunctions that me normally associate with the contemporary equivalent; we know that Jesus could be a brat; we know that they made it through tough times, from a very shaky start to dome levels of affluence. It need only take us a moment, too, to lay that template over the life of this church family. No, we are not perfect. Yes, we have lived through tough times and good – but if we stick together, deal with the outbursts, the kids gone missing, the threat of poverty or mortality so close at hand, then we are only doing that thing that we have agreed to do, and that is to live according to the model of the most holy family, the most Holy, abnormal, normal family that there ever was.
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