When we celebrated the Feast of the Holy Family of Mary, Joseph and the child Jesus, we marked the fundamental fact that when the Son of God became man, when the Word became flesh, He became flesh as a little child within a family. That was a divine choice, for Jesus did not have to come into our world in that way. He could have come as a 33-year-old adult and begun to preach. He could have come as a teenager or as an 80-year-old. But He was conceived and began His existence as a one-celled human zygote in Mary's womb, progressed to a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus until finally He was born as a baby in a family. Why did He do this? He didn't tell us the reason, but you don't need to be a great theologian to see why it made sense: He wanted to redeem all of human life, which meant redeeming the family.
All of existence is meant to be familial. Pope John Paul II used to call the Blessed Trinity a family, because it is a structured communion of persons in love, with a Father, a Son and the love between them. The human person was made in the image and likeness of God, "male and female He made them" (Gn 1:27-28), and hence the image of God is familial: a husband and a wife can love each so much that, like the Trinity, their love can generate a third person. They can literally "make love" and then name, raise and live in joyful communion with the love they've made.
But man, woman and children didn't live up to their being in the image of God. Right from the beginning, sin invaded the family. It began with Adam and Eve and the first sin. It quickly passed to their children. Cain killed his brother Abel. There was envy between Abraham's sons Isaac and Ishmael, enmity between Isaac's sons Jacob and Esau, envy between Jacob's 12 sons, ten of whom ganged up to try to kill their brother Joseph. There was deadly envy in David's family. The list goes on and on. Simply put, the family had become a mess. As the human family "increased and multiplied," so did sin. Jesus was born of a family to come to redeem the family, which has such a crucial role in the world God created.
Jesus chose to be conceived and born of a woman. But that wasn't all. Even though He had a Father in heaven, He willed to be raised by a foster-father here on earth. He didn't have to. Even thought it would have been extremely difficult for Mary to have raised Hhim on her own, all things — as the Archangel Gabriel told her at Jesus' conception — are possible for God. But God the Father didn't send Jesus another woman, a second mom, to help Mary raise Jesus. He sent an adoptive dad, because according to His human nature Jesus needed a dad. We should not overlook the importance of what God's choices teach us.
Each family needs to see whether they're centering their lives on Christ. So many families today are centered on the television, or on sports, or lessons of one sort or another, or on work schedules. But Christ needs to be the center of a family's activities. It's not enough for the members of the family to pray individually. They need to pray together. I experienced the powerful impact of family prayer when I was growing up. My earliest memories are of praying the rosary together with my parents, my two brothers and my sister. We were never more united than when we were praying and God united us as we together lifted up our hearts to Him.
The members of a family need to do the will of God and encourage each other to do the will of God. Many families do this. They inspire each other to become holy and encourage each other to pray. Some of the most beautiful conversions I've seen in the priesthood have occurred during marriage preparation, when the faith of the future bride or groom is so contagious that it inspires the other to start to take the faith much more seriously. The members of the family, by what they say, do and fail to do, will either help the others become holy or help them to sin on the basis of whether they try to do the will of God and encourage the others to do the same.
Lastly, the family is always under threat. At the beginning of time, with Adam and Eve, the devil attacked the family, separated husband from wife through sin, and got brother to kill brother. When Jesus came to redeem the family, the attacks didn't stop. The devil filled Herod's heart and the maniacal monarch sent his henchmen to try to kill the Christ child. But God acted. He sent His angel to wake Joseph up from his sleep and tell him to take Mary and Jesus and flee into Egypt. The devil continues to try to divide families through sin. We see it in countless broken families, the fifty percent divorce rate, in the unhappiness of many homes even when the family stays intact.
But there's a new threat today that has never really been encountered in human history, not even in some of the worst eras and places. There is a conceptual attack on the family that has never come in any culture before. There have always been problems with the family, but everyone recognized still what a family was. Even if a woman needed to raise her children as a single mom, even when she did a good job, no one ever pretended that was the best thing for her or for her children, and if given the opportunity to have a loving husband and father, she would have jumped at the chance.
Now we're living in a situation in which our kids our being taught that a family without a father or without a mother is not missing something. Our kids are being taught that a family with two mommies or two daddies is just as good as a family with a mother and a father. They're being taught that marriages can be husband-less or wife-less institutions, that families can be father-less or mother-less. In legal documents, the terms "husband" and "wife" are being replaced by "Party A" and "Party B." The terms "mom" and "dad" substituted by "progenitor A" and "progenitor B." This is an attack like we have never seen before.
When the Holy Family was under attack, God sent His messenger to St. Joseph to wake him up and warn him about the threat. Joseph immediately got up and acted to protect the Holy Family. God is sending you a message. Wake up! The family is under attack. He wants us to get up like St. Joseph and act. We ask Mary to intercede for us and our families, to help them become truly holy. We also ask St. Joseph to intercede so that we might be as courageous in defending the institution of the family as he was in protecting the Holy Family.
