Holy Family

Holy Family 31 December 2023

Some of you will know that in the Vicarage sitting room there is a pious picture of the Holy Family. It hangs over a very large sofa which originally belonged to my great grandmother Margaret Austin, always known as Daisy, from a house in Melbourne which no longer exists. I’d never lived in Melbourne before last year, but the sofa lived in Melbourne before I was born and has been in many other places around the world before returning here.

The pious picture above the sofa did not come from my resolutely anti-Catholic Austin forebears. I found it in what was a for me a place of pilgrimage – the Portobello Road in London. This pilgrimage was about my hero from childhood, Paddington Bear. Paddington is a few months older than I am, so I grew up with him. And my picture came from a significant location in Paddington’s life (apart from the Browns’ house round the corner at number 32 Windsor Gardens): as you may remember Paddington’s friend and mentor, Mr Gruber, who in retrospect was probably a Jewish refugee, ran his antique shop in the Portobello Road and shared elevenses, buns and cocoa, with Paddington most days on the horsehair sofa at the back of his shop. Much of what I thought I knew about London until I lived there was imbibed in childhood from this scripture.

There are several things about families in that last paragraph. We learn more about who we are by looking back at forebears we can identify; they may connect us to a place, even one where we’ve never lived; we may diverge from their prejudices and values and still be inescapably connected. My hero Paddington was welcomed as a refugee into a white middle-class family and then found a friend who was probably equally displaced. He was treated with kindness and respect and enriched the lives of those with whom he came to live. His Aunt Lucy’s message tied around his neck, ‘please look after this bear, thank you’ is a simple request for decency, acceptance and mutual care which could apply to all our chance encounters.

Now to the pious picture. As I said, it is one which Daisy Austin would have hated, so the juxtaposition with her sofa amuses me. It probably came from Roman Catholic presbytery and was produced in Brussels. It is a very precise and realistically-conceived picture in a nineteenth century gothic idiom, but of course its iconography is not realist in the world’s terms. Not only does it portray, horizontally, the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but there is also a vertical axis portraying the Holy Trinity. Hovering above the head of the young Jesus is the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, as at his baptism, and above that God the Father is to be seen, an orb of sovereignty in his left hand, and his right hand raised in blessing. The colours are vivid and beautiful, the figures well-realised and a sense of peace and calm pervades this image of what might be presented as the core of scripture concentrated in one snapshot. And of course, like many theological formulations, that is both true and potentially extremely misleading, because far too neat.

To be honest with you I’ve never been very keen on today’s feast. It seems to me redolent of the para-Christianity that oppresses and controls, obsesses about sex and ignores the serious injustices of life or the myriad possibilities of God-given creation in relationships with each other and with God. The gospel is about relationship, fundamentally so, but it is certainly not about the nuclear family; if you listen to the words of Jesus you will not find any encouragement for an idealised elevation of blood relationships. On the contrary he speaks about tearing them apart and reforming the very concept ‘family’, about how the Christian community is our family and blood relationships are to be left behind in the service of the Kingdom. And yet, and yet: Jesus can only describe those relationships in terms borrowed from the blood family and the love it can contain and nurture, its createdness. So perhaps we celebrate today the invitation to remake all our relationships with an eye on the inevitable dysfunctions of our own birth families; to remake them on the basis of non-judgemental acceptance and the seeking of others’ full potential.

We don’t know much about the actual family we are celebrating today. But given how little time Jesus seems to have had for birth families, it may be better to look to the larger trajectories of the Gospel and see how they relate to all human life and relationships. All families, traditional and otherwise, are undoubtedly best served by reflecting on those.

I see the trajectory of the Gospel narrative as essentially about Love, sacrifice and new life. That trajectory implies some organising principles for Christian life: invitation, generosity, the concern for others' flourishing, forgiveness, and joy. Among all those principles, forgiveness is probably the most necessary in human families, and Jesus models that to the death.

So we shouldn't honour Jesus, Mary and Joseph at this season as a perfect family template, much less beat ourselves up too much about any shortcomings we discover in our own familial context. No doubt the Holy Family had its moments: Jesus, Mary and Joseph certainly had their share of human fear and suffering, and this family had by any standards an unusual beginning.

In this season we celebrate not an idealized nuclear family but a true exceptionalism: the unique son of God, and a one-off family which we can only emulate by understanding that we are inescapably related to one another not by blood but in Christ. [Daisy Austin and Paddington Bear and my picture of Holy Family intersecting with the Holy Trinity are all part of who I am, but] you are my family and neither you nor I can escape that relationship, however much we annoy each other; we are genuinely stuck with each other. Because we are bound together by a sacramental bond which surpasses blood; one which we are charged to make so elastic that, paradoxically, even our birth families may be part of it.

So we’d better work out how to inhabit Invitation, generosity, the concern for others' flourishing, forgiveness, and joy. That is a family life worth living – and dying –  for.

Fr Michael Bowie