Sermon Christmas 1/The Holy Family 2012

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1 Samuel 1:20-28

1 John 3:1-2, 21-end

Luke 2:41-end

Last year I went to the Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum. Among the artist’s works on display was a pair of sculptures called ‘Our Father’ and ‘Our Mother’. Made in cast iron, they depicted a man and a woman, leaning on sticks, each of them bent over beneath the weight of an enormous pile of baggage, loaded on to their backs and hanging off them all over.

The Father figure was laden with guns, grenades, tools, books, barbed wire and coffins. The Mother carried baskets of fruit and bread, water flasks, mixing bowls, religious icons, and a baby. Both of them, somewhere in their bundles, also carried a withered corpse - their own father and mother, who had themselves carried these burdens before.

Having lost my own parents some years ago I found that I was very moved by those sculptures. They seemed to me to be deeply compassionate; they told the truth, but without blame. None of us is born into a vacuum. We all inherit, in one way or another, the baggage that passes down the generations - the weight of expectations, hopes, success, failure, all the things that people can’t cope with or even name, all the limitations that come with our upbringing and that of our parents and grandparents. Now most families try to do their best with what has come down to them, but sadly we have to acknowledge, too, that families can also fail even to the extent of being wilfully cruel and abusive. 

But however good the human family is, however loving and caring, it can never be everything. It can never be quite the idyllic group dwelling in unity that is sometimes romantically imagined. Children, particularly, are always different - unique, unrepeatable individuals, never the same as their parents, always to an extent new, unknown and unknowable, surprising and strange. 

The process of discovering this can be painful and difficult, for both child and parents. Individuation is a necessary and healthy part of growing up, but it does mean discovering our separation, that we are not simply an extension of our parents. That our need for belonging, for completion, is one that our human family can never meet.

There is, as it were, a tragic dimension to the family, the dimension of inevitable separation and difference, of failure however hard we try, and the Bible pulls no punches in describing it. 

From Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, through the Patriarchs and the Kings, the Biblical family is something that always seems to be going wrong. Stories like that of Samuel, Hannah and Elkanah that we heard today, where things seem to go right, are exceptions requiring Divine intervention. There are more dysfunctional relationships in the Bible than in even a Christmas episode of ‘East Enders’! And I do wonder sometimes if those Christians who make a lot of noise about ‘traditional family values’ have actually read the Bible. Indeed, the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who certainly had read the Bible, once commented, “the idea of the family is of no interest at all for Christian theology”.

But then, in the fulness of time, God sent his Son. Born fully human, he shared our human life not in the abstract, but in all its particularity, in all its limitation. And so he was born, as he must be, into a human family. 

St Luke portrays that family with particular intimacy in his Gospel, and today, uniquely among the gospel writers, he gives us a glimpse, not of the baby Jesus, but of the adolescent. Jesus in today’s reading is twelve years of age, which was the age at which Jewish children assumed their own responsibilities under the law. We see Jesus at that symbolic point of individuation, his emergence from the shadow of his parents as his own proper person. That day, perhaps for the first time, Jesus seemed to his parents to be new, strange and unknown.

I expect many of us can remember a moment like that, in our teens. And if you haven’t got there yet, don’t worry - it’s alright! That time when we realise that we need to do and express our own thing, and the fussing and anxiety of parents or guardians seems to us to be focussed on a place, on a stage of life, that we are leaving behind. 

For many of us that might have marked the start of what are sometimes called the difficult years, of teenage rebellion in one form or another. This is really part of ordinary development, of emergence from childhood, as psychologists such as Carl Jung have described. But for Jesus, as soon as he appears as his own person, in his own right, his focus is not on himself, but on his Father. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”. And of course this Father is not his human foster father Joseph, but God. 

Luke, in his description of the Holy Family, does what he often does. He gives us a ‘great reversal’ - the turning round and reordering of the world as Jesus comes to proclaim the Kingdom of God. The putting right of all that has gone wrong. So the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph seems to be the ‘traditional’ human family turned on its head. The most important person in this family, the person at the centre, is the child - who traditionally would have had no rights or position at all. The next most important, the one with a speaking role, and who ponders these things in her heart, is his mother - not, as might have been expected in a patriarchal society, his father. And Joseph seems to be the least important. In the gospels, he doesn’t actually get to say anything at all.

With the coming of Jesus, everything that has gone wrong in human society from the beginning is being turned round, and transformed into the Kingdom of God. And that includes the family. With the coming of Jesus, the tragic history of humanity is broken open, and a new beginning is made. 

Beyond the limitations of the human family, Jesus points to a new relationship, a new way of belonging. Humanity, re-created in Christ, is complete at last. “Call no-one on earth your father”, says Jesus elsewhere in the gospels, “for you have one Father, in heaven”. No human family, no human ‘other’ can complete us. No family or network of relationships can fulfil the need for belonging and unity to which we aspire, but cannot reach by ourselves, but only by grace.

Now of course it is right to affirm the goodness of human relationships and the family. When families work well they are communities of love, nurture and protection whose members remain committed to one another through good times and bad. Human relationships can reflect the goodness of God in creation. But they also point beyond themselves to something greater, which is one reason why the Church traditionally has regarded marriage as a sacrament - a sign mediating grace.

Jesus points us to God as our Father. Only in God do we find the ground and source of our being, the one ‘Other’ who completes us and makes us whole. Only in God can we truly name as brothers and sisters all our fellow human beings, because we discover that they belong to us, and we to them, to the extent to which we also discover ourselves in Christ. 

If we allow Christ to make us anew, through his grace, then we will enter his kingdom, which is the true human family at last: redeemed, made new, whole and complete, finding itself in one another and in God. And that is good news for all of us, whatever our family background may be, whatever life has been, whatever relationships and communities we are part of. Jesus offers a new beginning, a new way of being human. Not in some idealised world remote from the reality of our lives, but here and now, coming to meet us, turning the world around right where we are.