Today’s readings: Ecclesiasticus 3, 2-6.12-14; Colossians 3, 12-21; Matthew 2, 13-15.19-23.
The Holy Family’s flight into Egypt foreshadows the humiliation Jesus would experience on the cross. It was a poor young family’s desperate escape from a tyrant king. They fled as refugees to Egypt – a place of shelter but one which carries ambiguous significance for the people of Israel.
It also speaks about the millions of displaced migrants in a world that at times can show itself to be so inhuman. The plight the Holy Family went through is the same plight we hear daily two thousand years later of displacement, homelessness, lack of sure shelter, disruption of family life and abusive treatment.
The Messiah’s task was to liberate humanity. The world aspires for liberation but fails to stick to the rules that lead to enduring freedom.
It is common on this first Sunday after Christmas to speak about the plight marriage and the family are enduring today. We’re drowning in social and psychological analysis and statistics to help us decipher what is the darker force that is making us lose our innocence about love and marriage. We even risk becoming cynical about one of our most cherished traditional values.
We live in a society which on one hand, supports marriage, or at least that is what it pledges to do in diverse ways and means, yet on the other has a postmodern penchant for self-expression and personal growth. Not that personal growth and self-expression should necessarily contradict a life-long commitment of love. But this is what is happening.
Considering the continuous news stories about sexual harassment, child abuse, and the alarming increase in domestic violence, everything appears to be conspiring to persuade us that there is a darker force. There is so much in the air and in our intimacy that is preventing relationships from flourishing. The fact that more and more couples go for psych therapy tells us less about the family and more about the nature of our culture.
Nowadays, whenever we speak of marriage and the family, the gut feeling is that we’re too estranged from the biblical setting and perspective to find inspiration and remedies in the Bible. This reflects deep changes in our values, beliefs and perspective on life in general.
We may be complacent with the dismantling of the so-called dated culture which is always presented as bigoted and discriminatory. But the reality is that it hurts to continuously face difficulties that instead of deepening the meaning of relationships turn dreams of love into nightmarish power struggles.
There is no love without anxiety. But society is failing miserably in dealing with love and with anxiety. Even the Church today finds it difficult to speak meaningfully on the family in general and about love and intimacy in particular.
Michael Vincent Miller, a clinical psychologist who lectures widely on issues about contemporary love and intimacy, aptly named one of his books: Intimate Terrorism. The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion.
Strictly speaking, it is not Christian marriage or the Christian family that should be our major concern, but marriage and the family inasmuch as they remain the sure point of reference for a healthier social fabric. There is, in fact, no single Christian model of the family valid for all times and places. The family is basically a human and social construct which reflects society but which should continue to provide society with reference points.
Today’s first and second readings give an unequivocal teaching that, on one hand, we believe should regulate truthful relationships in the family context, but which on the other, today’s culture may envisage as too dated and out of reach. But beyond all cultural stereotypes and conditionings, this teaching continues to provide the golden rule which makes us all aspire to a different order of relationships that make the family what it truly is, and that ultimately safeguards our mental and social sanity.