Last week we completed the Christmas season. The Christmas narrative has many lessons, but one of the central themes is the family. Its prominence in the life of Jesus emphasizes that the family, based in the marriage of a man and a woman, is part of God’s plan and structure for the human race.

 

The Gospels recount the Annunciation when God even asked the consent of one of His creatures, Mary, to become the mother of Jesus. Joseph struggled with his understanding of his religious obligations when Mary was found with child. But the message of the angel of the Lord in a dream clarified for Joseph his mission as the husband of Mary and the foster father of Jesus.

 

Jesus’s birth was thus in fulfillment of the context of the family found in the Scriptures. The Book of Genesis recounts that from the very moment of creation it was God’s plan that, “a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife.” (Gn 2:24).

 

The family of Jesus is a model and encouragement for families in every age and culture. We can well imagine the love and laughter that was part of the daily routine of three holy people. Their life of prayer and liturgy is recorded as they take the child for circumcision and the offering of Him to God.

 

But that family also experienced its challenges and sufferings, some severe. The mother and father gathered up the baby and fled ahead of the army searching for Him under the king’s orders. Mary and Joseph, shoulder to shoulder, searched Jerusalem in anguish when the 12-year-old Jesus stayed behind in the temple. And later, the mother of Jesus would one day stand faithfully and sorrowfully at the foot of her son’s cross.

 

We should recognize that God’s use of the family in the Incarnation is an example of His bringing about our salvation through of the use of the distorted means employed by Satan to draw the human race away from God. Genesis records that the forbidden fruit was passed within the family, one to another. Trust was then broken between the man and his wife when Adam blamed Eve and so too when Cain killed his brother Abel.

 

All of this shows why our contemporary struggle to live and defend the family as God established it is so important. The family is predicated on the underlying gift to each of us of our gender, male or female. We should treasure that gift as part of our human reality.

 

Marriage, at the heart of the family, is the blending of the complementarity of that gift. By God’s design, man and woman complete each other, physically, emotionally and spiritually. And most important, marriage is the context that leads to collaboration with God and the transmission of human life, destined for eternity in heaven.

 

In our day, many efforts are being made to redefine the family and God’s plan that surrounds it. The sexual revolution has broken down the self-discipline and respect for self and others that must be part of sexuality. Cohabitation without marriage undermines the commitment and exclusivity that is essential to the family relationship of man and woman. 

 

Even unions that a recent Vatican document has termed “Couples in Irregular Situations and of Couples of the Same Sex” are being promoted in some elements of western society as modern and acceptable evolutions of the divine plan for the family. But such unions lack the essential elements that are necessary for marriage and for the moral life that conforms to God’s salvific will. 

 

The prominent family context of the Christmas season reminds us that God has written into our hearts and our nature the roadmap of His plan for us. When we join our will to God’s, including His will for the family, we live in grace. The modern challenges to the family, however well-intended, lead us away from God which is the very nature of sin.

 

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The Holy Family. The model family. This is one of the great joys, encouragements and reminders for us during the Christmas season and beyond.