Today’s feast reinforces something we know already: that when God became one of us, human, “man”, he did it properly. It wasn’t in a greenhouse, or in a bubble or on paper. It wasn’t abstract; it was concrete. It happened in Bethlehem in Judaea in the time of the Emperor Augustus and the tetrarch Herod. And it got ever more real. We all know how a personal upset or worse can spoil Christmas. What must Mary and Joseph have felt when they heard the clatter of Herod’s horsemen and the cries of children, and had to move fast and at night and get over the border seeking asylum in Egypt?
Even apart from that brutal story, today’s feast illumines how real was the Word’s becoming flesh. If any of us were to write an autobiography, the story of our life, it’s unlikely we’d begin, ‘When I left school at 17’ or ‘when I got my first job at 21.’ Like it or lump it, happy or sad, we’d begin with our family. We’d with the parents we never chose but life and God gave us. Jesus, pardon the phrase, has humanly speaking been there too and got the T-shirt. He was a mother’s son. He had someone he called Dad. He had a family tree. He belonged to a people, to a tribe, to a clan. According to the Gospels, he had people called brothers and sisters, be they cousins or half-siblings (cf. Mk 6:3). There’s mention of an aunt (Jn 19:25). Tradition has given us the names of his maternal grandparents, Joachim and Anne, and the Gospels name Joseph’s father (Mt 1:16; Lk 3:23). As a boy and young man, he had a home eventually, in Nazareth, an address let’s say. He lived on a particular street, with a synagogue for school. Mathematically, Jesus spent 10 /11ths of his life en famille. It’s all real, like being born in a cattle-shed, fleeing to Egypt, being obedient, growing up, staying behind in the Temple, baffling his parents, learning a trade. These are the glimpses we’re given. Even on the Cross, he was taking care of his mother (Jn 19:25). All this belongs to his earthly life. And now “he is risen from the dead and he is Lord”, and in turn our lives and our families belong to him. His family was part of his story, and now our families are too. He takes our families on. They are his church in miniature. He is present in them – Wisdom incarnate. Through their baptism, he is joined to every member of a Christian family. Through the sacrament of matrimony, he is joined to husband and wife, inspiring, rescuing, purifying, enriching their love. However unseen or seen only by faith, he is present with Mary and Joseph in the beauties and battles of family life, in sickness and health, for better or worse, broken or healed, sad or happy. And our own family relationships, as children, parents, siblings or whatever, are part of our Christian discipleship, of our relationships with him.
Honour your father and mother. It’s the first commandment with a promise. Today’s 1st reading highlights it, even to old age. And I’d like to honour fathers and mothers too. I’d like to talk about parenting. What a nerve, but I will! What a glory, what a task parenting is! It is a share in the providing of God, a share in the divine wisdom that runs through every vein of the universe. This is so for a single parent, for parents not married in the eyes of the Church, for parents outside the Christian frame. Then, for those who enjoy the Sacrament of Matrimony, there is a further additive. If someone is ordained, they share, we say, in the threefold gift and task of Christ. A bishop, priest or deacon is called to serve by teaching, sanctifying and leading, according to his place in the hierarchy. Referencing the Sacrament of Matrimony, might not the same be said of mothers and fathers? In relation to their children, they are teachers, priests and pastors. I doubt there was ever a time it was easy. How find that elusive mean between throwing your weight around and never saying boo to the goose, between not discouraging one’s children, always doing them down, and letting them run wild. And today, in our part of the world, it’s not made easier. The classical family is drained of the support of culture and law, even of finance. Wokery rules. The great god is “choice”. I wonder, though: can this notion of a triple task provide a focus us: to be the first teacher, priest and shepherd of our children? It’s exhausting, it’s sacrificial, sometimes hilarious but it’s a share in the labour and love and delight of the Lord, and is never, never wasted. And it can have those blessed moments today’s Psalm evokes: the olive shoots around the table.
The Holy Spirit will help you to teach your children how to live, behave, relate, how to cope with life’s upsets, what values to prioritise. The Holy Spirit will teach you to teach your children the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Jesus and the motherhood of Mary.
The Holy Spirit has empowered you to bless, your priestly mission – think of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel; will keep you at prayer – think of St Monica – in your heart and in common. What an incomparable thing to be held in the prayers of one’s parents – not as a stick with which to beat them but like a secret oxygen that sustains them.
The Holy Spirit has made you shepherds, leading your children to wholesome pastures, pointing out the good paths, just being there so they know that whatever happens there is somewhere, someone to go back to who won’t reject them.
Living these graces will take you, surely, into the sorrows of Christ and into his joy as well, into a dying and on to a rising. It’s important for parents to remember that the ultimate family table is set in heaven, when all shall be well and all meet merrily. “On Israel, peace!”
In the monastery, it’s said: when you first join the community, you think all your brothers are angels. Then, experience thickens and you conclude they’re all devils. Then finally, as the years pass, you see they’re just human. Well, so the journey goes with our parents too. There can be fathers or mothers from hell, alas. But please God what prevails is just humanity, fallen and redeemed. And in and through that humanity, the Lord is at work. He has chosen to ride this horse, to get mixed up in our reality. And that is our hope. God is with us in it all.
St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 28 December 2025
