Homily for the Feast if the Holy Family, Year A
He was afraid to go back there. And because had been warned in a dream, he departed for the region of Galilee.
-Matt. 2:22
On today’s feast, continuing in the glorious starry wake of the great feast of the Lord’s birth in this Christmas octave, we pick up from last Sunday with the sleeping, dreaming St. Joseph and his close direction by the holy angels.
Notice that in the first dream, of which we heard last Sunday, the archangel says, “Fear not!” (as he did to Zachary and to Our Lady also in their apparitions), but in these three messages the angel does not command Joseph not to fear. Why not? Because there was something to be afraid of—in the strictest sense of the word.
Fear is the emotion we need to experience when we are confronted with a future (but usually relatively proximate) evil that can be avoided only with some difficulty. Now, in the case of the Incarnation, even if Joseph were struck with the holy fear we call wonder, his fear would not include the extreme, practically infinite difficulty for a created being of God becoming man, or of God’s taking to himself a human nature. This is a mystery so great that, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, it exceeds the limits of the perfection of human nature.
It is, as the sainted Cardinal Newman put it, “a higher gift than grace.”
So, for this mystery there is nothing we can contribute, not even by the cooperation of our powers, as would be in the case of “mere” grace. The difficulty was not Mary’s or Joseph’s or Zachary’s, and yet for God all things are possible: thus no fear! God has become man!
But in the Flight into Egypt and in the return to Israel, all the things to be feared would be things that Joseph could avoid by his human efforts, following the angel’s direction. Joseph was to use his real fear to watch out for and care for his family in the face of real dangers. Here was not a mystery beyond our comprehension, but rather the envy, malice, and fear of crooked rulers, and then the changing political scene. These are things that many human families may experience even today, and there is no mystery to it: families flee and return, avoiding dangers, losing work and homes and gaining them anew, in the midst of life’s trying changes.
This contrast between the free, utterly-beyond-us blessings of the Incarnation and divine maternity and the arduous struggle to persevere in a world full of evils and enemies has always been part of the Christian life, even for Christ and the Holy Family headed by St. Joseph. Believing in and being saved by Christ is never an assurance that we will be thus freed from trouble. In this vale of tears we will always have sadness, fear, discouragement, and anger of some kind or another. Unlike some other religious ideologies, our faith does not seek to free us from all passions and make us indifferent to them. Our passions are natural to us, and they help us to deal with difficult experiences.
Yet, sadness is not meant to be depression, fear is not meant to be cowardice, dejection is not meant to be hopelessness, anger is not meant to be blind rage. Our emotions need to be governed.
What can govern them? Joseph’s fear was guided by his love for his son and his son’s mother, and thus all of his judgments and decisions, even in dangers, were prudently led along by the love in his paternal heart. This is true for all of his other emotions, too, positive or negative. Love is the measureless measure that balances out and resolves everything, for him and for us.
This perhaps is what we might understand about the care of the angels for us. They do not have emotions as we do, but they have a love that is pure and intense and unconquerable, and so although they behold all our unruly emotions and our actions they keep on accompanying us, enlightening us, interceding for us without giving up.
May St. Joseph obtain for us, and especially for fathers and all who must guide families, an openness to the work of the holy angels like his, even if they have to catch our attention while we sleep!